More tangible than mental defences was the letter from his mother, round about Christmas, that came in resinous with Tannenbaum, that penetrated oilily, the warm, confiding oilness of melting candles. Dearest Elyot, wrote Mrs Standish, I have heard from Uncle Stephen that your grandmother is dead. Grandmothers, even mothers, especially dead grandmothers, intruded oddly into the relationless existence he now led. It is very sad, wrote Mrs Standish, naïvely, through some pricking of the conscience, that did not begin to deceive. He smiled. At a distance his mother made him smile. He thought about Grandmother Standish, seen occasionally in holidays under the guidance of Uncle Stephen, the cold, boring, or the hot and equally boring, tennisy weekends in Norfolk. Touching Grandmother Standish’s hands you were touching rings, her face beneath an official kiss was a stratum of firm bone. So that there was little death could do, you felt, there was no action sufficiently corrosive, nothing that Grandmother Standish could not withstand. However, she lay in a coffin, she was dead. In the street they were singing a hymn, a tenuous German Christmas hymn, that he tried to receive suitably, to call to his aid in reacting dutifully to Grandmother Standish’s death. But his eyes were as dry as hers above the tea things on the lawn.

Ashamed for his own materialism, he felt he was at least one degree more sincere than his mother, recalling her very sad. Or perhaps there was sincerity in this, there was some ultimate well from which she drew. Sitting by the fire with the evening paper, her eyes grew moist for accidents to strangers. How appalling, Elyot, she said. But, resumed Mrs Standish, with a jerk, coming down to brass tacks, all news is not bad news, your Uncle Stephen tells me that your grandmother has remembered you, he says it will amount perhaps to £400 a year, from the age of twenty-one. Unashamedly, he calculated quickly in his head. This will be a great help, Elyot, dear, wrote Mrs Standish, you don’t realize what a scrape it’s been, your father’s extravagance, and the rates, and the and and and. He sat contemplating £400. Because it has been a scrape, she said, more than you’d suppose, because I won’t be sordid, I must have a few beautiful things. His jealousy dissolved before the gold dress. Aubrey’s taking me to dinner, she said, it feels so beautiful, Elyot, darling, because I can’t afford it for a moment, there’s some chicken if you’re hungry, and do be careful of your eyes. He folded the letter. He was somehow, inextricably, an accomplice of his mother’s. After all these months, she stood there in the gold dress that time had tarnished, but that left its mark still upon the stairs, ebbing molten as she mounted.

Elyot, was machst du? called Hildegard. Wir warten.

At least she did not come beyond the door.

She was going to sing a Weihnachtslied, she said.

He put the letter in a drawer. In the passage the scent of pine boughs, above the pervading stuffiness of stoves. Voices rose in the living-room, ventured out on the Weihnachtslied, that he must face, go in, to the clear, expressionless soprano of Hildegard, to the undertonal drone and crackle of Frau Fiesel, Frau Behrens, and Fräulein Nusz. But he preferred the silence of pines. There was a freedom in the brush, the scent of pines non-existent in the living-room. But he went in to where the tree stood in the alcove, in the unctuous atmosphere of melting wax that had almost drowned the freshness of the pine. He stood there feeling he must look foxy and suspect, in the midst of this gaggle of old geese, that he could not help despising, he had to, he wanted to sing out above the cackle of old voices, because he was free, he was free, he said, more remote in this than the climbing, self-contained soprano voice of Hildegard.