Chapter I

There is an island. At the heart of the island there is a valley. In the valley, among blue mountains, a man kneels before a piece of wood. He paints on it—some­times with a fibre brush, sometimes with his finger. The man himself is painted: bright dyes—red, yellow, black—on brown shin. He wears pearshell, green beetles in his hair, and a bunch of tangket leaves. The year is 1900: in England Victoria is queen. The man is remote from England in distance by half the cir­cumference of the world: in understanding, by five thousand years.

Belbroughton Road. Linton Road. Bardwell Road. The houses there are quite normal. They are ordinary sizes and have ordinary chimneys and roofs and gardens with laburnum and flowering cherry. Park Town. As you go south they are growing. Getting higher and odder. By the time you get to Norham Gardens they have tottered over the edge into madness: these are not houses but flights of fancy. They are three stories high and disguise themselves as churches. They have ecclesiastical porches instead of front doors and round norman windows or pointed gothic ones, neatly grouped in threes with flaring brick to set them off. They reek of hymns and the Empire, Mafeking and the Khyber Pass, Mr Gladstone and Our Dear Queen. They have nineteen rooms and half a dozen chimneys and iron fire escapes. A bomb couldn’t blow them up, and the privet in their gardens has survived two World Wars.

People live in these houses. Clare Mayfield, aged fourteen, raised by aunts in North Oxford.

Clare came round the corner out of Banbury Road and the history books and maths things and Jane Eyre in her bicycle basket lurched over to one side with the string bag of shopping, and unbalanced her. She got off and straightened them and then pedalled fast, standing up, past the ranks of parked cars and the flurry of students coming out of the language school on the corner. She swung into the half-moon of weedy gravel that was the front drive of number forty Norham Gardens, and put the bike into the shed at the side of the house. Wind, cold January wind, funnelled up the chasm between number forty and the house next door, clutching her bare legs and rattling the dustbin lid. Clare stuffed the books on top of the shopping in the string bag and went up the front steps, quickly.

The front door was not locked. Old ladies lose front door keys. Clare went across the hall and through the green baize swing door into the kitchen. The house was silent. Silence reached away up to the top of the house, up the well of the staircase past the first floor and up to the attic rooms, spiced only by the ticking of clocks: the kitchen one, loudly insensitive, the grandfather clock on the stairs, discreetly chiming since before the Boer War, Maureen’s Smith Alarm-o-matic, marking time by itself up there under the roof. Maureen would not be back for another hour or so. And the aunts —the aunts would be in the library, dozing quietly beside a fire that they would have forgotten to keep stoked. They were always in the library at half-past four. They migrated slowly through the house during the day: from their bedrooms to the breakfast-room to the study to the dining-room. I am the only person I know, Clare thought, who has a special room for having breakfast in. And a pantry and a flower-room and a silver cupboard and a scullery and three lavatories. She put the kettle on and had a conversation in her head with a person from outer space who was ignorant of these things. A flower-room, she said severely, is for arranging flowers in. A long time ago ladies who hadn’t got anything much to do did that in the mornings. My great-grandmother, for instance. My aunts, on the other hand, never arranged flowers. They were a different kind of person. They always had things to do. They wrote articles and translated Anglo-Saxon and sat on committees. They are not ordinary aunts.

The kettle began to mutter to itself. Clare unpacked the string bag and saw that there was a note from Mrs Hedges. ‘I put a steak and kidney in the oven for your supper, and I want it eaten, mind. See your Aunt Anne remembers her pills. The coal came and I paid him but it’s gone up again. We owe the milkman one fifty.’

Three cups on a tray. Crown Derby. Very valuable. One cracked, one with an odd saucer. Would the milkman like one cracked Crown Derby cup instead of one pound fifty pence. Probably not. A situation when milkmen and coal men and electricity men are asking you for more money than you have got to give them is called a financial problem, in posh language. In simpler terms it is a gap on a piece of paper between what you have got and what people want you to pay them. Most people of fourteen are not bothered about that kind of thing. If, however, you live with your aunts and your aunts are around eighty years old and not very good at working things out or knowing how much things cost, though very good indeed in all sorts of other ways, then you have to be bothered. You have to fill the gap somehow.

The gap, in this instance, had been filled with Maureen.

‘A lodger! ’ Mrs Hedges had said. ‘They’d never hear of a lodger! ’ That had been a month ago now, when she and Mrs Hedges had sat one each side of the kitchen table and considered things. The Outgoings and the Assets, and the cracked guttering that must be repaired and the leaking kitchen sink that would have to be replaced.

‘I’d mention it to them, ’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘But you don’t want to fuss them, at their age, and they’ve not really got the hang of decimals, have they? ’

And so it had all been laid on the table, as it were.

‘Mmm, ’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Sure there’s nothing else? Just their pensions and your little bit from when your mum and dad—from this legacy? ’

‘Nothing else.’

‘No Securities? They’d have Securities, people like your aunts. Shares and that.’

‘No. Not now. There were some, but the Bank Manager wrote last year and said he was sorry but they’d got smaller and smaller until they’d kind of disappeared. There was three pounds fifty pence left.’

‘Shame, ’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Were they upset—the old ladies? ’ ‘No. They’ve never been particularly interested in money.’ ‘They’ve not had to be. And they’re a bit vague, now they’re getting on, so it’s up to us, not that I’d want anyone to be thinking me sticking my nose into what’s not my business.’

‘Anyone isn’t thinking anything like that, ’ said Clare.

‘Right, then, ’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Let’s look at these Outgoings and see what we can cut down on.’

‘Food. I could keep a cow in the garden. Grow vegetables.’ Mrs Hedges glared. ‘I’m not laughing. You don’t eat properly, as it is, any of you. All those tins.’

‘They don’t notice what they eat.’

‘But you’re a growing girl. Food’s got to stay as it is. Clothes? ’ ‘Jumble sales.’

‘Another year or two and you’re going to want stuff like the other girls have, from boutiques and that. Fashionable stuff.’ ‘There’s trunks of their old things upstairs, ’ said Clare. ‘Long velvet skirts and floppy hats. Dead smart nowadays. I’ll be terribly grand.’

‘Get away with you. Holidays? ’

‘My cousins in Norfolk. That’s free.’

‘I’m an outgoing, ’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘But you can’t keep this place clean on your own, that’s for sure.’

‘So we can’t cut down on you. Good.’

‘Rates. That we can’t do anything about. It’s a mercy there’s no rent to think of. They do own this house, don’t they? ’

‘It’s something called a Lease.’

‘Ah, ’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Them. How long’s it got to go? ’ ‘Fifteen years, then it isn’t their house any more.’

‘Well, we won’t worry beyond that.’

‘Why not? ’ said Clare coldly. Aunt Anne is seventy-eight and Aunt Susan is eighty. She had looked away from Mrs Hedges and out of the steamy window to the coalshed and the dank brick wall and the cat prowling in the privet and the kitchen clock had ticked, loud and stupid. And Mrs Hedges had got all busy totting up the figures again and talking about Assets.

‘Assets? ’

‘What have you got? '

‘A house with nineteen rooms.’

The house squatted around them, vast, empty, unnecessary and indestructible. You had to be a fat busy Victorian family to expand enough to fill up basements and passages and conservatories and attics. You had to have an army of bootboys and nurses and parlour­maids. You had to have a complicated, greedy system of living that used up plenty of space and people just in the daily business of eating and sleeping and keeping clean. You had to multiply your requirements and your possessions, activate that panel of bells in the kitchen—Drawing-Room and Master Bedroom and Library—keep going a spiral of needs and people to satisfy the needs. If you did not, if you contracted into three people without such needs, then a house like this became a dinosaur, occupying too much air and ground and demanding to be fed new sinks and drainpipes and a sea of electricity. Such a house became a fossil, stranded among neighbours long since chopped up into flats and bed-sitting-rooms, or sleek modern houses that had a suitable number of rooms for correct living in the late twentieth century. It, and its kind, stood awkwardly on the fringes of a city renowned for old and beautiful buildings: they were old, and unbeautiful.

Perhaps, Clare thought, you should knock down places like this when they are no longer useful. Reduce them to the brick and dust from which they came?

Or should you, just because they are old, not beautiful, but old, keep them? Houses like this have stood and watched the processes of change. People swept by the current, go with it: they grow, learn, forget, laugh and cry, replace their skin every seven years, lose teeth, form opinions, become bald, love, hate, argue and reflect. Bricks, roofs, windows and doors are immutable. Before them have passed carriages, and the carriages have given way to bicycles and the bicycles to the cars that line up now, bumper to shining bumper, along the pavement. In front of them have paraded ankle-length dresses and boaters and frock coats and plus-fours and duffle coats and mini skirts. Through their doors have passed heads, shingled, bobbed, permed and unkempt. Within their walls language has changed, and assumptions, and the furniture of people’s minds. Possibly, just possibly, you must keep the shells inside which such things happen, in case you forget about the things themselves.

‘That’s twelve rooms more than you need, ’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘One way and another.’

And at that point had flowered in Clare’s mind the notion that if you had more rooms than you in fact needed there were, by the same token, and according to the convenient arrangement of supply and demand, people who needed rooms.

‘They’d never hear of a lodger! ’ Mrs Hedges had declared. ‘Not in a month of Sundays.’ And she had been entirely wrong. She had not reckoned with the aunts’ ability to review a situation. They, unlike the house, had not set hard in 1890. They had evolved with the century, taking on the protective colouring of different years, but without sacrificing personalities more forceful than the ebb and flow of opinion. All their lives they had examined the times, decided what was sound, and discarded what was not. Fashion they ig­nored: the fascination of change sustained them. And it was per­fectly sound, they at once declared, that there should be a lodger at Norham Gardens if circumstances required it.

And from that decision, to the arrival of Maureen with two tartan suitcases and some brown paper parcels, had been a short route by way of a postcard in the window of the shop in North Parade.

Clare added digestive biscuits to the Crown Derby cups on the tray, the teapot, bread and peanut butter for herself, and Aunt Anne’s pills. Then she went through into the hall, bumping back­wards through the swing door and balancing the tray against her arm while she opened the library door.

It was twilight in the library, partly because the January after­noon light had almost all leaked away by now, and partly because it was always half dark in there. The windows were curtained floor to ceiling in toffee-brown velvet: beyond them the garden stretched away bleakly to the wall at the end, the long grass flattened and ribbed with snow that had melted and then frozen again. Clare drew the curtains and turned on the light. Now it was almost cosy. There were books instead of walls—in bookcases as long as the bookcases lasted and then overflowing into piles and toppling columns. There were stacks of box-files, too, labelled long ago with dusty labels on which the ink had faded into obscurity, like invisible writing that refuses to be reanimated. And there were great moun­tains of paper, yellowing articles with titles like ‘Kinship Structure among the Baganda’. And spears. Clare, putting the tray down on the table by the sofa, thought: I am also the only person I know who has spears on their walls instead of pictures. Arranged in a nice pattern.

A further thought struck her. ‘Can I borrow some of the spears for Macbeth? ’

The aunts were sitting on either side of the fire, in the leather arm-chairs that leaked tufts of some strange stuffing on to the carpet. They had been dozing, probably, and sat up now with a start, as though guilty.

Aunt Susan said, ‘By all means. But they would not be at all authentic, you know. They come from Basutoland, not Scotland.’

‘We’re not that fussy. Thanks.’

Aunt Anne said, ‘I hope they are not the ones with poisoned tips.’ They studied the fan of spears for a moment, anxiously.

‘No, ’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Those went to the Pitt Rivers in 1939. I remember now.’

Clare picked up the shovel and put some more coal on the fire. She poked it and sparks showered away into the dark chimney. She kissed Aunt Susan and then Aunt Anne. Their faces felt soft and papery, like tissues. Their hair, seen in close-up, was thin and fine like a young child’s, Aunt Susan’s white and wavy, Aunt Anne’s brown peppered with grey, pulled back into a knot behind her head. They had on their brown tweed suits, made by the tailor in Walton Street before the last war, and fur-lined boots. It was never really warm in the library, just a localised warmth around the fire.

‘Had a good day, dear? ’

‘It was all right. We’ve got to decide about О levels. German, or Physics and Chem.’

The aunts looked at each other, and then at Clare, their faces puckered with incomprehension.

‘Exams, ’ said Clare. ‘I think I’ll do Physics and Chem.’

The aunts brightened. They knew all about exams.

‘Very sensible, ’ said Aunt Susan. ‘A good grounding in the Sciences is right for a girl. Nowadays. Tea, dear? ’

Aunt Susan’s hand was oddly small now. It shook a little; the cup jigged in the saucer. They had shrunk, the aunts. People do that when they get old. In photographs of fifteen, twenty years ago they were taller by nine inches or a foot.

‘But Clare will be on the arts side, ’ said Aunt Anne. ‘Surely. History or English.’

‘Nevertheless. For the mental discipline.’

‘You may be right. But I see her as History. Or the Social Sciences.’

They looked at Clare with love and pride. Much was expected. ‘Somerville, I think. Or Lady Margaret Hall.’

‘The new Universities are well thought of now, I understand.’ Clare said, ‘I don’t expect they’ll want me.’ She put three lumps of sugar in her tea, and spread the peanut butter thick. You need sustaining, in January in the South Midlands when you’ve biked back from school with the wind against you and cars spraying slush up your bare legs.

The aunts smiled, disbelievingly.

‘Or I might leave school at fifteen and work in a boutique.’

‘A boutique? ’

‘A kind of shop with pop songs coming out of the walls. Don’t worry. Joke.’

‘She is teasing us, ’ said Aunt Susan.

‘Taking advantage of our infirmities.’

They beamed.

‘That’s right, ’ said Clare. ‘Seriously, though, I think I’ll be a pop star. Then I can buy us all fur coats.’

‘She means, ’ said Aunt Anne, ‘a popular singer.’

Aunt Susan said, ‘I am well aware of that. No doubt she would be surprised to learn that we’ve heard of pop art, too. Pictures of film actresses, repeated many times.’

‘And tins of soup, perfectly reproduced.’

You never knew with the aunts. ‘B double plus, ’ said Clare. ‘Good, conscientious work. A maxi coat? ’

‘A garment to the ankles. That could be deduced semantically.’ ‘B plus. A discotheque? ’

‘An establishment selling gramophone records? ’

‘B minus. Write out corrections three times. A milk-bar? ’

‘A brand of confectionary.’

‘C minus. See me in break.’

‘Our turn, ’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Who succeeded Lloyd George as Prime Minister? ’

‘I’ve forgotten just at the moment.’

‘Gamma plus. The terms of the Munich Agreement? ’

‘I think I’ll clear the tea and get on with my French homework, ’ said Clare. ‘Match drawn.’

‘Grimbly Hughes sent the wrong digestives, ’ said Aunt Anne. ‘I’ll pop down there tomorrow and have a word with Mr Fisher.’ Clare said, ‘No, you won’t. I’ll do it. The roads are all icy.’ Old ladies can slip on icy roads, and fall down. Anyway, it isn’t Grimbly Hughes, it’s the supermarket in Summertown. Grimbly Hughes hasn’t existed for fifteen years, Mrs Hedges says.

‘We put too much on her, ’ said Aunt Susan. ‘She’s too young to be bothered about grocers.’

They were concerned now: concerned, and cross with them­selves.

‘One is so incompetent, at our age.’

‘Such a nuisance. Useless. I could take my stick, Clare, and go very slowly.’

‘No, ’ said Clare. ‘Anyway, think what good practice it is. For when I get married. If I get married. I’ll know all about buying biscuits and ordering coal and having gutters mended. There is one thing, though. Could you help me with my Latin translation later, Aunt Anne? ’

Aunt Anne glowed, useful again.

If I get married. P’raps I won’t. P’raps I’ll be busy instead, like the aunts. Except I’m not as bright as the aunts were. Are.

The aunts had not married. They had gone to university in the days when girls stayed at home to help their mothers or made a suitable match. There were pictures of them upstairs in the drawing­room, pretty and plump and determined in long black skirts and tight waists and leg-of-mutton sleeves and black caps and gowns. They’d got degrees and then more degrees and then they’d settled down in Norham Gardens and taught undergraduates from their old college and sallied forth to London every now and then to sit on Committees or take part in Enquiries. They wrote indignant letters to The Times and joined in protest marches and when the war came they fire-watched and took in evacuees. There had never been time for marriage.

Clare left the aunts in the library. They would sit there till suppertime now, reading and dozing, according to the pattern of their day. Now that they were old their lives had contracted. The house, which had always been their base, had become also their shell. It held everything they needed and they seldom went beyond it. The outside world came to them through newspapers and the windows and Clare and Mrs Hedges and they received it with interest but no longer tried to influence it. ‘We have been useful in our time, ’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Now it’s our turn to sit and watch.’

In the kitchen, Clare put the tea-things away and got her books out. It was slightly warmer than usual because the oven was on with Mrs Hedges’ pie in it, so she pulled a chair up and sat with her feet against the oven door, learning French verbs. The kitchen clock ticked and the pipes made the asthmatic wheezes and gurgles they always made, and water dripped from the crack in the sink into the bucket you had to remember to keep standing underneath. Outside, the evening thickened and darkened and became night. Down in the middle of Oxford bells rang. Cars came and went in Crick Road and Norham Gardens and their headlights sent yellow patches up the kitchen wall and across the ceiling and down the other wall.

The front door clicked open and slammed shut again. Then Maureen’s head came round the baize door.

‘Hello. It’s perishing out, let me tell you. By the way, I could do with another blanket.’

Clare said, ‘I’ll get one. There’s some in the chest in the junk- room, I think.’

They went upstairs together, Maureen talking loudly of her day. She worked in an estate-agent’s office. Clare knew all about the life of the office, Maureen’s views of the boss and the junior partner and the new young fellow who’d come last week and the girls all thought he was dishy but Maureen didn’t fancy him, personally. Maureen was twenty-eight. She trailed an atmosphere of vague dissatisfaction, of undefined emotions which sometimes homed on such personal failures as her hair, which she thought too wavy, and her weight, which was apparently seven pounds above what was correct for her age and height. She was extremely kind.

‘Which is the junk-room, then? ’ said Maureen. ‘Honestly, it’s a proper rabbit warren, this place.’

‘It’s the attic room next to yours, ’ said Clare. They climbed the last flight. ‘Third floor, Ladies Outfitting and Restaurant, ’ said Maureen. ‘One thing, I’ll lose a pound or two going up and down here every day.’

Before Maureen’s inspection visit, Mrs Hedges and Clare had been worried about her possible reaction to Norham Gardens. As Mrs Hedges said, things were not exactly up-to-date. They need not have bothered. She had tried everything out in a methodical way, bouncing on the bed and poking the pillow and sitting down in the arm-chair. She pulled a face at the gas-fire, which had been there since about 1940 and was that kind with crumbling columns of stuff like grey icing-sugar. The gas-ring wasn’t much better, but the electric kettle was newish.

‘Bathroom? ’

‘It’s on the floor underneath, ’ Clare had said. ‘But there’s a lavatory next door.’

They inspected the lavatory. Maureen giggled. Then she said, ‘Sorry, dear, but it is a bit of a museum-piece, isn’t it? ’

Some of us prefer our lavatories in brown mahogany with the bowl encircled in purple flowers and a cistern called ‘The Great Niagara’.

But the lavatory had not proved a serious obstacle. After looking round the room once more Maureen had said delicately, ‘Are there any other—guests? ’

‘No. You’d be the only one.’

‘Three fifty, you said? ’

‘Yes.’

‘Front door key? ’

‘Yes. If I can find one.’

‘I’ll take it. I don’t mind telling you, I thought there’d be a snag. I said to myself, if it’s only three fifty then that means the toilet’s outside or there’s foreign girl students two to a room in the rest of the house and wirelesses blaring till all hours. I’ve seen some funny places, I can tell you, room-hunting.’

And Clare had said, ‘Oh, have you? ’ relieved.

They went into the junk-room together, Clare groping for the light. These rooms on the top floor were the ones with the most ecclesiastical windows of all, bunched together in triplicate like those high above the central aisle of a church. The ones at the front squinted right over to the University Parks and the Clarendon Laboratory and University Museum. Maureen thought the outlook distinguished: it made you think, she said, looking at all that and knowing there’s all those characters inside there getting on with whatever it is they get on with.

Clare found the light and the room came to life, trunks piled on top of one another, the shape of chairs looming under tattered dust- sheets, the ancient sewing-machine with its wheels and treadles looking like a blueprint for the industrial revolution, the huge tulip- mouth of the gramophone’s loudspeaker, flowered china jugs and matching basins, a dressmaker’s dummy, trouser presses, hat boxes...

‘Good grief! ’ said Maureen. ‘They don’t believe in throwing things away, the old ladies, do they? ’

‘If you keep things you can go on being sure about what’s hap­pened to you.’

Maureen said doubtfully, ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’

Clare began opening trunks. Most of them were full of old clothes. Great-grandmother’s for the most part, elaborate constructions of silk, lace and whalebone. Maureen stared in amazement. ‘Well! I wouldn’t have thought they’d have been that dressy, your aunts.’

‘These aren’t their things—they belonged to great-grandmother. Their mother.’

‘They’re your great-aunts really, then? ’

‘Yes.’

‘Stands to reason, of course. I hadn’t been thinking.’

Clare heaved the top trunk down and tried the next. Maureen, fiddling with the handle of the gramophone, said, ‘Have you always lived with them? ’

‘Since I was eight.’

There was a pause. Wrong trunk, again: this one was full of hats. Maureen said, ‘What happened to, er...? ’

‘There was this accident. They had to go in aeroplanes a lot, because of my father’s job.’

‘I see, ’ said Maureen, looking hard at the loudspeaker. Then she added, ‘Shame.’

‘I think the blankets are in this one. Could you help me lift off the one on top? ’

It was a vast leather-buckled trunk with tattered labels on it that said ‘P & О Line. Not Wanted on Voyage’. Across the lid of the trunk was scrawled, in white chalk ‘Sydney to London’. They took one end each, to lift it down, and the hinges promptly burst off, bringing the lid with them. In no other house, thought Clare, in absolutely no other house, could you open an old trunk and be confronted with a large bundle of bows and arrows. And what looked like a set of very moth-eaten feather dusters and a lot of old coconut matting and a weird-looking slab of wood with some kind of a picture on it. ‘Good grief! ’ said Maureen again.

Clare shook out one of the feather dusters and it became a head­dress, the colours all faded. A bit smelly. She picked one of the bows up, twanged it, and aimed an arrow towards the window.

‘Do you think I could get the next-door cat, if I aimed very care­fully? ’

‘Put it down, for goodness’ sake, ’ said Maureen. ‘You don’t know where it’s been. What are they, anyway? ’

‘They’ll be something to do with my great-grandfather, ’ said Clare. ‘He was an anthropologist. He went to queer places and brought things back.’

Maureen peered into the trunk with distaste. ‘You can say that again.’

‘He gave tons of things to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Have you ever been there? I expect these things were meant for there and got forgotten.’

‘Well, fancy... You mean they’d wear those things on their heads, the natives? ’

‘Mmn. There’s photos somewhere, that he took. In the drawing-­room desk.’

‘And what would they have on otherwise? ’

‘Just paint. In stripes.’

‘Well! ’ said Maureen. ‘Rather you than me! Here, put the lid back on, I should think there’d be no end of germs and things in with that lot.’

Clare said, ‘Hang on a moment...’ She picked up the slab of wood, and stared at it. It was about three feet long, and roughly oval, but wider at the top than the bottom. And painted; black, red and yellow, but the colours were dimmed now with dirt, and faded. One had the feeling that once they had been sharp and bright. It had a head, this thing, and a body, but so stylised that perhaps it was just a pattern, a pattern of swooping lines and jagged decoration like fish-hooks or zig-zag edging, loops and swirls. But on the other hand perhaps it was not a pattern, and if it was not then the head had eyes, huge and blank, and a gaping mouth.

‘That gives me the creeps, ’ said Maureen. ‘It’s nasty. Put it back, do.’

‘Just a minute.’ It was a painting, but it was also a carving, because the lines had been gouged into the wood before they were painted. It seemed to say something: if you understood its language, if this kind of thing, this picture, this pattern, was a language, then it must have been a shout, once, to someone. Now, up here in the attic, to them, it was a whisper, a whisper you couldn’t even understand.

They closed the trunk up again, and found the blankets in the one underneath, and Clare left the slab of wood, the shield or whatever it was, standing upright against the old sewing-machine because for some obscure reason it seemed wrong to bury it in the trunk again. And it stood there staring with those round owl-eyes out into the night where sleet was spearing down from a purple sky, glinting in the flares of light from the street lamps.

Maureen went to her room to make cocoa on the gas-ring and write to her mother in Weybridge. Clare sat with the aunts in the library, where Aunt Susan read The Times and Aunt Anne wrote letters, to an old friend, to the cousins in Norfolk, and to someone she taught, once, a long time ago. Clare stared at the fire for a bit, enjoying the red caverns and grottoes, and then got tired of that and looked round for a book. That was something you could never run short of in this house. Mrs Hedges must have been doing some tidying—some stray columns of books had been re-arranged on to a window shelf, revealing a small bookcase Clare couldn’t remember having seen before. It was presumably great-grand­father’s, for the books were old, with that distinctive, by no means unpleasant smell peculiar to books published before about 1930. They had titles like Travels in Uzbekistan, Headhunters of Brazil, and The Watutsi of the Sudan: A Study. She picked out one called New Guinea: the Unknown Island, partly because it had some pictures, and took it over to the fire to read.

Outside, snow fell on North Oxford: on the Parks and the river and the old, dark laurel in the gardens and the brick and iron of the big houses. It drove people off the streets, and later a wind got up and rattled the bare trees. A cat yowled among the dustbins in Bradmore Road.