He caught at her hand, but she drew it away again. ‘I don’t want you to stay and be kind to me. I hope I shall be dead a long time before people are kind to me.’ She shivered – not, he thought, at death.

‘You’re lonely?’

Her eyes took him in, very tiny, and round him the room and the world with its tiny people drawn by their hundreds of tides. She nodded and her thought passed ahead. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘I, who am what is called “an attractive person”, am going to be lonelier than other people, the beautiful or the devoted. I shan’t be able to crowd myself round for consolation and company with hundreds of little photographs of loving or having been loved.’

‘A large number of people seem to have loved you,’ said Ronald. Though shaken, he spoke definitely, very dispassionately. It seemed important, so important that his mouth went dry, that his mother should not be allowed to go on looking through him and thinking beyond him with that peculiar expression. ‘A large number …’ he repeated.

‘No, no one, I think,’ said Mrs Kerr, after a pause in which she tried to remember. While she spoke she began glancing through the letters abstractedly and with an air of indifference. Then she smiled. ‘At any rate,’ she went on, having extracted an envelope that had already been opened, ‘I don’t begin to be lonely just yet – here’s such a charming letter, an invitation, from those Emmerys in Paris.’

‘Oh, Margot Emmery …?’

‘Yes, Margot. I am so fond of her. So you, my dear, can run away to Sicily.’ She tugged gently at a fold of her tea-gown on which he happened to be sitting and swept him away from her with a gesture, as though he were a little boy again and she were sending him off to bed.

‘Well, at any rate,’ said Ronald, nodding, sitting tight on the tea-gown and leaning forward to show her he had scored a point, ‘Sydney is fond of you.’

‘I suppose she is,’ said Mrs Kerr reflectively.

‘Then why …’ began Ronald. ‘Why on earth …?’ He stopped again and blinked his eyes, as though he had suddenly seen everything as so complicated that he could only believe in some defect in his vision. Mrs Kerr gently stirred on the sofa, the loud ticking of the travelling-clock at her elbow became suddenly audible. Ronald looking round the room caught sight of his own photograph – ‘Ronald’ – and thought how odd it was that Mrs Kerr sitting on the sofa beside him should have a son and how much odder it was that Ronald should have a mother. He found himself arguing very loudly, wisely and dogmatically and was reminded of the only two occasions when he had been drunk. ‘You’re not fair to yourself,’ he kept repeating. ‘You’re not, mother, you’re not really, you ought to be fair …’