She flushed when she saw my face, but it was with annoyance.

‘It means good luck,’ she said. ‘There should always be something flowering, even for a winter wedding.’

I thought Lili was amazing. She had sown seeds of superstition in my mother and made them grow. It was a feat far more remarkable than my mother’s cultivation of her cactus. I was sure that it had been Lili who had given my mother this idea. My mother’s only previous obeisances to fortune had been touching wood and throwing spilled salt over her left shoulder to blind the devil. There was something crafted about this flowering myth, something touchingly, repellently obvious—like the gift which the honey-curled innocent is deputed to hand to the rich and evil-tempered old relation. What, I asked myself, was Lili up to? I felt that now I had been betrayed. It seemed as though she had been trying to help my mother sweeten the occasion—garland it with pretty conceits, as people pile wreaths on corruption.

‘Who said so?’ I asked without subtlety.

‘Nobody said so,’ squawked my mother. ‘I don’t believe it, but it’s a pretty thought. Isn’t it?’ she added angrily as I still stood gazing at her.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’ll go down myself later,’ said my mother, ‘but I’m busy with the stuffing for the duck. Go and get some fresh air.’

The air was more than fresh. It was freezing in the garden. It was nearly as cold in the summerhouse. There was a bud on the cactus but it looked unpromising. There was a small bottled gas-heater in the corner and I wondered if my mother had instructed the jobbing gardener to warm the place up further to encourage the thing to flower. There was a pile of my books where I had left them half-read. And there were some torn scraps of red crêpe paper on the floor. The moorish arches of the summerhouse windows framed a vista of dead grass and deciduous trees beyond the broken hedge of evergreens through which Syl entered my mother’s garden when he came to call. Some black birds flew by with a stunned weariness like the survivors of a disaster. Winter must seem like a disaster to birds, and rain was on its way. I didn’t care. I picked up a bit of red paper and twisted it in my fingers. It was the colour of the doubtless poisonous berries which gleamed here and there in the hedge and it stained my hands. The summerhouse was always untidy because my mother stored things in it besides using it as a haven for her cactus. Garden chairs and umbrellas were stacked in a corner with some flower pots. The cushions along the ledge smelled damp, and when I sat on them they felt chilly even through my tweed skirt. The paraffin heater which was left on constantly may have been sufficient to support life in the cactus, but it wasn’t enough to comfort me. I sat under a travelling rug and looked at my fingernails.