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alive. If anyone had wanted to steal them they might easily have done so, she and the night nurse were alone in that big house and couldn’t have stopped them. Now she was dead they were becoming a worry to me. They seemed both enormously valuable and enormously vulnerable. I began to wish I had stayed in Willow Road to keep an eye on things. I wondered if I should sleep.
    Then, made uncharacteristically nervous, I became convinced I had left the light on in the room on the mezzanine floor. I had left the light on and not locked the door after me. I went down and found, of course, that the door was locked. I had to open it to check that the light was off. Padanaram, the doll’s house, sat there, looking handsome, owning the room, testifying to long-gone skills and old-fashioned arrogance.
    Someday, I would have to find someone to give it to. As I walked back up the stairs I wondered if the little girl who was Ken’s great-granddaughter and Gordon’s niece would like to have it.
    The journalist called back next day. I told her no extracts from the diaries had been suppressed. I had no plans for their future and suggested she give me a call next year. With that she had to be content, though I don’t suppose she was.
    By lunchtime there had been two more calls, one from a magazine specializing in domestic interiors, who wanted to do a feature on the house in Willow Road, and another from the editor of a Sunday supplement suggesting I might be interviewed for their series on people with famous grandparents. They easily found my phone number. The nature of my work requires that I advertise my services in The Author.
    I said no to both and departed for the newspaper library, to continue with my research of Kensington in 1890 for a client who wrote a series of historical detective stories. Of course I left the machine on. I have to. I need the business—or do I? I asked myself that, coming back on the bus. Did I need it any more, now I had Swanny’s house and Swanny’s money?
    However, for that day at any rate, such reflections came too late. The Hampstead and Highgate Express had left a message and so had Cary Oliver.
    ‘It’s Cary, Cary Oliver. Don’t hang up on me, don’t switch the thing off. I know I’ve got an awful cheek but please please can we let bygones be bygones? I’ll explain what I want—yes, of course I want something—I’ll phone you. It’s about the diaries, but you’ve guessed that. I’ll get my nerve together and phone you. But in case, in the highly unlikely event of you feeling like phoning me, I’ll give you my number.’
    She gave it, she gave it twice, but I didn’t write it down.

3
    MY MOTHER GAVE ME the doll’s house when I was seven. It was a birthday present and yet it was not. The doll’s house had always been there, occupying a spare bedroom in our house almost to the exclusion of everything else. I was accustomed to it, allowed to look at it but not to play with it. That was reserved for my attainment of the age of reason.
    I knew I’d get the doll’s house on my birthday and with it unlimited licence to use it as I wished. Still, if it had been the only present from my mother I think I’d have been disappointed. The ice-skates were what I had longed for and exulted in. Hope deferred may make the heart sick at first; later it leads only to boredom. By the time the doll’s house was mine I was fed up with waiting for it.
    Pleasure came later. Inquiring about its provenance came much later. Then I knew only that the doll’s house had been made by my grandfather, a man said by those who had known him to have been capable of making or constructing anything. It was a facsimile of his own house, or, rather, the best and biggest of his houses, and the one they lived in longest. Padanaram was its name and this was also what we called the doll’s house. Indeed, we always called the doll’s house Padanaram, whereas I suppose the original was sometimes referred to as ‘our