Gladys Vucetich’s books belonged to an era of her childhood at the turn of the century known as the ‘Liberty’ period and the artists had illustrated the fairy tales extremely seriously, using Liberty-style figures. Their hands had been guided by the same delicate excitement evident, for example, in the creation of the scenery for The Tempest, the same deliberate, meticulous black-and-white designs dedicated to the novel Demetrio Pianelli or to The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. The result was an adorably gloomy jumble of girls who looked like Anna Pavlova. They wore gauze wings and star-studded crowns as if attending a Spanish-style tea party at a Hapsburg court in 1880. It was a mildly lugubrious atmosphere, in which wasp-waisted princesses, likely to be wearing corsets and wigs, dwelled in enormous sombre-grey palaces, filled with potted palms, balconies, curtains with heavy silk tassels and thick bannisters. Those fateful places and people, I discovered at the time, with a shiver, were really no different from the disturbing, yellowed cabinet card photographs of my young grandmother and other dead relatives. My mother always carried these around with her in green leather cases whenever she travelled. Those photographs of terribly distant smiles always made me so anxious, because behind the lady standing there, brittle under her mass of hair, beyond the open curtains, beyond the haze and foliage, there was the constant oppressive threat of a thunderstorm.

Instead of a feathered toque, the princess in the book once owned by Gladys Vucetich wore a crown on her head, but that threat behind her fragile shoulders also culminated in stupendous and sorrowful secrets. From the ornate double-arched window, she could vertiginously whizz into the room with a large black-and-white swallow in her arms, a tiny King of the Elves riding on the bird’s back. And from under the raised curtains, slowly, tragically, in creeped nothing less than the Monster, that desolate and amorous nightmare, the nocturnal visitor who exposed the slim and pale Belinda (representing, for me, my grandmother’s childhood) to the horror. And the Monster, as those sombre and virtuous artists had depicted him, was nothing other than a Monster – a pathetic and unmentionable chimaera, half-griffin, half-serpent, drawn with maniacal precision, scale by scale, coil by coil. And because of this mad loyalty to his name, it tormented me to no end to see huge tears flowing from his eyes as he lay on the floor, poor Monster, wearing his crown – and Belinda sitting at the table at that ceremonial hour, the dinner and music hour, alone, unmoving, dauntless.