Of all the mute voices in the deserted house, his mother’s was the most persistent, he felt, going into the drawing-room. Perhaps because she had made it, an interior shaped and reshaped, the way a room can receive the imprint of its owner’s life, even the first warning of death. The house, and particularly this room, had become almost the sole visible purpose of Mrs Standish’s existence. And it continued to live in the inconclusive way of the houses of the dead, defying any of his own personal conclusions that he had brought in with him from the station, from the accident in the street. Already he was drifting in a half-resentful, half-reassured lethargy, with the many themes that the house offered; these had lapsed only on his first opening the door. So much bric-à-brac, he tried to say, to pacify a latent inclination for the functional. But it was also his mother, the pretty and mostly useless objects that she brought home with the passion of a bower bird. Mrs Standish making her room. Mrs Standish sitting in the Louis XV bergère she had picked up cheap in the King’s Road, cutting a French novel that she probably wouldn’t read. It was the sort of thing that Eden had deplored, a concentration on upholstery, but Eden slamming the door in fury, running upstairs with white lips, had never deterred Mrs Standish from putting one more coat of gilt between herself and the humdrum side of living. She went and bought the peacock’s feathers, she bought the goblet with the silver penny, she bought the little jewelled box that still stood on a corner table, accumulating verdigris where amethysts had been.

I exasperate my children, said Mrs Standish, expectant as a martyr. The exasperation remained, and helplessness, even after her death, not lessened by loss. Critical, you despised yourself, while adopting the consolation that affection allows criticism, that criticism only exists in an interested relationship. Irritation renewed itself, even now, at sight of her photographs in her own room. There was the picture of the girl in the little sealskin cap and tippet, the hands hidden in a muff to match, a bright, button-eyed face, almost too eager for its frame. And there was the later and more sophisticated version, melancholy in draped chiffon. Defending these photographs with irony in her lifetime, Mrs Standish had secretly enjoyed the spectacle of herself. Dying, the irony had died with her. But the satisfaction remained, overflowing with their subjects from the frames.

It was bourgeois to put photographs in rooms, Eden had said, about the age one said that kind of thing. He remembered it, oddly, the occasion, they were sitting at lunch, they were eating hot corned beef and dumplings, he remembered also his mother’s reply: No doubt it’s bourgeois to eat corned beef and dumplings, they smell, but I like them, I think I even like the smell. It was the kind of remark that threw him for the moment into alliance with his mother, in an age of alliances, how long before the train door closed and he watched the waving of a black glove. This is my sister, he had once said of a child in a white dress at a country party. Then he looked at her sideways. He resented her, as a small but fierce searchlight on many moments that he wanted hidden. As a relationship, it was like that. It was full of sullen, unshared, misunderstood passions. Looking at the picture of Eden on the drawing-room wall, she became the surprised child of a period earlier than the party dress. He remembered coming into the room, seeing her reading a book, seeing her turn, close up the book, and blush. Nothing was said. There was seldom very much said. You continued on different paths in the same wood. In time she was the sulky flapper, who also stared, in the bourgeois convention, out of the drawing-room wall. In the evening she closed her door on a typewriter and cigarettes.