There was another cove within much the same distance from Roses, but we were forbidden to go to it. To get there, one had to pass through a village called St Keul, where, so the children’s grandmother said, there was always fever. At first, this prohibition was merely a mercy to me, and St Keul a place where I need not be paraded in my widow’s dress, or repeat the story of the car accident in which my husband had been fatally injured and I scarcely injured at all, to listeners whose code of manners spared me no questions and whose loyalty to the old family inscribed very clearly on their severe countenances a loyally unspoken opinion that the wrong one had survived. Their sympathy, naturally enough, went to my husband’s mother, who would oversee these conversations almost as a mother oversees her child’s performance at the dancing-class, sternly attentive that I should not omit a single pirouette in the elaborate ritual 25of courtesy between high and low. As time went on, and I became better trained in these formalities, and saw her skilled and scrupulous observance of them, I found that I could not reconcile the ban on St Keul with the reason she gave for it. Any outbreak of sickness, any sickbed, childbed, deathbed, among our poor neighbours became her affair—not, I think, that she liked doing good but simply because she could not conceive herself not doing it. No danger or loathsomeness could turn her aside from a purpose. The Daimler swayed and sidled down chaseways and field tracks to carry her and her chest of homoeopathic medicines anywhere and everywhere—except to St Keul. Whatever the reason for her ban, it could not be fever—unless (the surmise darted upon me and darkened into belief) it was from St Keul that the infection had reached out to Guy and Everard, the twin sons who had died, one at midnight, the other before day, as though they had died in a ballad. No doubt I could have known the truth for the asking, but I could not bring myself to ask. There was something so hysterically ludicrous in the story of this doomed nursery that I dreaded to hear it consecutively told. Such narratives are more tolerable in the city, where, indeed, they can be a social asset, and people dine out on them: ‘Max, Max, tell us that appalling story, that Seven Little N—— story of the family at Roses!’ But at Roses one was a long way from any city.