My husband, the last of my mother-in-law’s children, and born at a long interval after the others, was the only one who lived to grow up, his childhood intimidated by 26the absence, which was also a presence, of Madeleine, Guy, Everard, Lucas, Alice and Noel. He grew up an only child, in the middle of this shadowy band of brothers and sisters whom his father and the servants assured him were angels in heaven, whom his mother told him were dead. Unable to reconcile a discrepancy, he yet felt himself confronted with a choice between becoming another angel or another dead child at the feet of the white marble angel that showed up so embarrassingly among the wooden and small iron crosses in the village graveyard. Meanwhile, he lived among their vestiges—riding Guy’s bicycle, filling the blank pages in Lucas’s scrapbook, or giving tea parties under the weeping ash to the dolls of Madeleine, Alice and Noel. Twice a year, he stood to be measured against the nursery door, where their heights were recorded in his mother’s handwriting, creeping up among and through them like a shoot of this year making its way through last year’s thicket, until at last he surmounted them all and still remained alive. Their initials and his—a C for Charles—were still legible when I came to Roses with his four fatherless children and the measuring began again, the children’s grandmother writing the new initials and the dates of the twentieth century in the same calm, cursive hand. Age for age, the new measurements all fell below the old. She never remarked on it, but I supposed that to herself she commented on the stocky inelegant stature inherited from a mother born of the sturdy middle class. She never remarked on my children’s sturdy middle-class health, either. Beyond a few prohibitions— St Keul, venturing into the current that drowned 27Madeleine, eating chocolates after teeth had been brushed for bedtime—she had no trace of grandmotherly fuss or grandmotherly fondness.