On an afternoon in spring, Eden Standish came to this conclusion. On the same afternoon, about dusk, when it was time to draw the curtains, her mother opened her eyes and said:

I think I am going to die, Julia.

Into the room came the scattering sound of curtain rings.

What a thing to say! Julia said, her voice shocked, because there were things you didn’t joke about.

There was no answering Julia. You knew already that Julia had rejected what she wasn’t willing to accept. As if by her rejection she would remove any possibility.

Let me shake up your pillow, Julia said.

But Mrs Standish knew now. It was more than an intuition. It was what she had suspected, dreaded most, this warning of what must follow the period of passive peace of mind. Out of an increasing pain flickered the engraving from the bookcase, the snakes she could remember, and the mouth prised open by an endless agony. She could feel the hair moist at her forehead. At night the darkness screamed a protest.

Elyot, she said. We must – I think I ought to have a doctor.

They shared for a moment what was too uncomfortable a state of intimacy. She did not look. She could sense. Somebody coming to a conclusion. Illness had peeled away the outer skin. She could watch things beating through a final membrane.

You ought to have said, he began weakly.

Yes, but I didn’t. And Elyot, dear, don’t let us talk, I am too tired. All my life I have done the things I oughtn’t to. If I have done it once again, even if it’s once too often, it’s only logical. You must forgive me, dear.

He watched something immense, final, and at the same time too simple to be grasped, happening in his mother’s face. Without the repetition of what she had said to Julia, he knew now, accepted the fact that she would die. It was, as she suggested, inevitable, logical. At least, this was what you had to cultivate, a belief in inevitability.

Elyot rang up the doctor, a Dr Leigh, who had appeared for years when necessary, a tall, stooping man, with dry, papery hands. It suddenly occurred to him now, waiting on the telephone, that Dr Leigh might have an existence of his own outside the periodical visits, was being dragged away perhaps from a boiled-muttony phase of that existence in his dark, mahogany dining-room. Dr Leigh would come, he said. You returned the receiver to its bracket, cut off a smell of caper sauce. You clung too willingly to a whiff, to an image, to a word, anything that the imagination offered in place of. Elyot Standish began to wait. The private existence of Dr Leigh flickered, was extinguished. Through a door you listened to a long sigh that was either pain or weariness.

Later you listened to the dry, papery rubbing of hands, to a voice searching for requisite words.

It was best to be prepared, said Dr Leigh, tossing a platitude, you felt, as a cushion on which to let fall the harder statement, to deaden the sound of this.