‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she said, ‘thank goodness! Then forget about that thing with the cat, Arthur. It doesn’t matter. They do smell terrible. You’re absolutely right. I’ll go and put the potatoes on to boil.’

And she skipped out of the room, smiling vacantly, while making small, defensive hand gestures in the air, as if she were swatting at invisible flies.

She didn’t dare think what would have happened if there had been typos in the paper too.

The Mother

‘Rubbish!’ she said, ‘Trivialities! Don’t waste your time. The handkerchiefs are here; the shirts are in the drawer to the right. That’s everything. Pay attention to what’s important.’

She loved straight lines, smooth surfaces, flush doors. She hated coffered ceilings and drifting conversation. In the mornings she was up before everyone else. She walked through the rooms with her clacking wooden heels, removing flowers that were taking too long to wilt.

They lay in their narrow, coffin-like beds listening to her footsteps. She never woke them. She didn’t involve herself in their lives. But they had to interrupt her. At certain intervals they had to ask about the handkerchiefs and the shirts. They had to hear her say the same short, imposing phrases again and again. Rubbish! Trivialities! They stared, helplessly fascinated by her sharp, hawkish nose, her bulldog jaw, and her clear, sunken eyes which constantly narrowed and cut to the heart of the matter. They followed her from the curved alcoves in which they had hidden themselves, as she thumbed through bills, calculated, balanced the budget, or called the butcher to order large, thick slabs of meat to fry or boil. She sat erect at the table, eating quickly and impatiently, for no particular reason, and everyone hurried to finish at the same time as her.

In the evening she retired to her room to tear up old letters and red silk ribbons, and in the morning the waste basket was filled to the top. When he entered her room, she was smoothing out her sheet. She couldn’t sleep with the least wrinkle underneath her. He said: ‘Maybe we ought to – I mean, life is short, and sometimes I dream your name is Leonora.’

She squeezed her eyes shut and offered him her dry, wrinkle-free cheek. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is part of it. That is perfectly all right.’

She didn’t get involved. But they knew everything would fall apart if she left for a single day, for even an hour. Then they would get totally lost among these long, dark hallways, these floor-to-ceiling mirrors, these useless stucco angels, these piles of dying flowers and flapping silk ribbons, stolen by little boys from the cemetery’s stiff wreaths – these soft, powder-blue beds with decorative pictures adhered to the headboards, these loving, seaweed-covered arms, reaching out for them everywhere, this sweet, suffocating smell of decomposition and incense.