While he was still congratulating us, she quitted him to unlock the wine cellar, bringing out bottle after bottle of 31burgundy, rum and sauterne. Standing in the kitchen like some descended Juno, she brewed a vast bowl of punch, from which we must all drink to celebrate Caroline’s recovery, and the kitchenmaid was sent pelting off to summon the outlying people of the estate: the bailiff, the shepherds, the furze cutters. It was a cold evening, for though the month was August, a sea fog was coming in. Fetched out of the chilly dusk into the blazing kitchen and given mugfuls of punch, the celebrants became very drunk. It was alarming to see the familiar and sombre faces of everyday acquaintance smeared with looks of vinous beatitude, and though the congratulations they gave me were sincere, I felt as though I were hemmed in by a throng of sheepish satyrs. Perhaps I was a little drunk myself, though I had managed to spill out half my tumblerful. As soon as I could, I got my tipsy children away. I went to sit by Caroline’s bed, hearing the shouts and songs of the retiring guests and the hubbub of the household folk still at it in the kitchen. Till this evening, I had never seen the children’s grandmother anything but abstemious. Now I had watched her drinking glass after glass, drinking enough to put any man under the table. I was worried about her, concerned for her credit, and for her health. The noise died out at last, but still she did not come to bed. I had nerved myself to go in search of her, when I heard her foot on the stair, the firm, unhurried tread exactly as usual. She paused at the door, and I thought she would enter. Seized by an unaccountable sense of danger, I stood myself in front of the child’s bed, as if to protect her. But the door did not open, and presently I 32heard a calm, fragile sound: concluding some train of satisfied thought, the old lady had clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth; and then the footsteps went evenly on.

Apparently my children had inherited her knack for hard drinking. On the morrow, they were none the worse for having gone drunk to bed, and clamoured for another occasion for punch. On her eightieth birthday, she said, and with Wolf Grandmother dexterity boxed back their endeavours to ascertain the happy date. The possibility that she might die before then occurred to none of us. She proceeded through old age as infallibly, as vitally, as my children grew from childhood to youth.

In our small world, where she and they moved through time like mowers through a field, scything down the years and leaving them prone behind them, I alone seemed unable to grow older. My middle-aged body showed few changes; my circumstances even enforced on me a sort of retrogression into girlishness. I had my four children, and the wedding-ring on my finger, yet when the young chauffeur who came after Job’s death persisted in calling me ‘Miss’, the error was felt to be natural, and even fitting; a newcomer, he rightly discerned and proclaimed the accomplishment of a process that the others had for a long while been inattentively forwarding. Interpolated as a daughter-in-law, I was now a daughter of the house, the faithful, negligible daughter who has never left home.