Elyot listened to a diagnosis. All this was happening to someone in the room above. It was his mother. A lamp, a book open on a table, made a corner of unreality in the drawing-room. The voice was slowly intensifying this, talking about disease, one of those cases, it said, of some standing, in which the pain was confined to the last few weeks. There would be a second opinion, of course, the voice concluded doubtfully. He was being told that his mother had a cancer. He was being told what he knew already, that his mother was going to die. But the corner of unreality persisted, the still life of a book, a lamp, the Louis XV bergère. The chair gave it a more personal tone that he wanted to avoid.

All one can do, I’m afraid, is to make her comfortable. I shall send a nurse, the doctor said.

A phrase that had been dealt out before, many times, to many people, depersonalized, anaesthetized. Mrs Standish become the patient. Seeing a doctor to the door, Elyot was suddenly horrified. It was not so much the prospect of death, the end of physical existence, it was this sudden draining of the personality which events, people, conspired to bring about. You couldn’t allow it. Then you were standing on the darkened doorstep, listening to the steps of Dr Leigh return to another phase of his own personal existence, the mutton, the mahogany, out of the zone he had just depersonalized.

Elyot went upstairs.

He was left with death in the house. It was something that happened to other people, that you couldn’t associate, except at moments of acutest intuition, with yourself or people round you. The idea of death, of his mother’s death, was something he still had to carry round in his mind, constantly referring to it, before he could convince himself that this was more than idea, an actual and pressing fact. In and out of the process of persuasion wove the incidents, the images, all those moments with which she was connected, and it seemed now there were few with which she was not. She had taken possession in the way the dying possess the living.

He went and sat for a little in her room.

The doctor’s sending a nurse, he said.

A nurse, she said, is always either too aggressive or else too apologetic. It’s always a case of extremes.

But this was offered to no particular ear, the voice a little stiff, you would have said waiting for something to happen. I am waiting to die, Mrs Standish seemed to say, we are not sure what this is, but soon we shall know, as much as we are allowed to know, there is very little we have seen except dimly.

A nurse came to the house. She was known as Sister Chad-wick. She had cold, mottled, adept hands. She had come, said Julia, who found a comfort in narrative, she had come from nursing a theatrical manager, there had been champagne for supper, and a bracelet. There was a friend of Miss Chadwick’s, Julia said, had a minx coat from a patient, and a suite at the Savoy. Remembering, beyond her narrative, Julia plodded past the door in sagging satin slippers, the slippers that Mrs Standish had never dared to speak about. Without its envelope of narrative, Julia’s mind got panicky. She sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea. She drank the strong, bitter tea, and resented the arrival of the white Miss Chadwick to sterilize a needle.