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smoking and complaining, at once haughty, coquettish and put-upon. Aunt Corky had an intimately dramatic relationship with the world at large; no phenomenon of history or happenstance was so momentous or so trivial that she would not see it as an effect directed solely at her. In her version of it the most recent world war had been an act of spite got up to destroy her life, while she would look out at a rainy day with a martyr’s sorrowing gaze and shake her head as ifto say,
Now look what they have sent to try me!
But a moment later she would shrug and gamely tip her chin (each whisker sprouting on it dusted with a grain or two of face powder) and flash that equine smile that never failed to make me think of the talking mule in those films from my childhood, and be her usual, chirpy self again. Always she bobbed up, pert and bright and full of jauntiness, a plucky swimmer dauntlessly breasting a sea of troubles.
    But none of this was as I had expected it would be. After all, they had summoned me to what I had assumed would be a deathbed scene, with my aunt, a serene and quietly breathing pre-corpse, arranged neatly among the usual appurtenances (crisp linen, tweed-suited doctor, and in the background the wordless nurse with glinting kidney-dish), instead of which here she was, as talkative and fantastical as ever. She was frail, certainly, and looked hollow, as old people do, but far from being on her last legs she seemed to me to have taken on a redoubled energy and vigour. The Aunt Corky of my memories of her had by now dwindled so far into the past that I could hardly make her out any more, so vivid was this new, wizened yet still spry version before me. The room too seemed to diminish in size as she grew larger in it, and the glare of sea-light abated in the window, dimmed by the smoke of her cigarettes.
    ‘Of course, these are forbidden,’ she said, tapping the barrel of her fag with a scarlet fingernail, and added darkly, ‘They are telling me all the time to stop, but I say, what concern is it of theirs?’
    The bed, the chair, the little table, the lino on the floor, how sad it all seemed suddenly, I don’t know why, I mean why at just that moment. I rose and walked to the window and looked down over the tilted lawn to the sea far below. A freshening wind was smacking the smoke-blue water, leaving great slow-moving prints, like the whorls of a burnisher’s rag on metal. Behind me Aunt Corky was talkingof the summer coming on and how much she was looking forward to getting out and about. I had not the heart to remind her that it was September.
    ‘They are all so kind here,’ she said, ‘so good. And Mr Haddon – you have met him, I hope? – he is a saint, yes, a saint! Of course, he is trained for it, you know, he has diplomas. I knew the moment I saw him that he was an educated man. I said to him, I said,
I recognise a person of culture when I meet him
. And do you know what he did? He bowed, and kissed my hand – yes, kissed my hand!
And I
, he said, in that very quiet voice he has,
I, dear madam, I too recognise breeding when I see it
. I only smiled and closed the conversation; it does not do to be too much familiar. He sees to everything himself, everything. Do you know—’ she twisted about to peer at me wide-eyed where I stood by the window ‘—do you know, he even makes out the menus? This is true. I complimented him one day on a particularly good ragout – I think it was a ragout – and he became so embarrassed! Of course, he reddens easily, with that fair colouring.
Ah, Miss Corky
, he says – that is what he calls me –
ah, I can have no secrets from you!
’ She paused for a moment thoughtfully, working at her cigarette with one eye shut and her mouth pursed and swivelled to one side. ‘I hope I do not go too far,’ she murmured. ‘Sometimes these people … But—’ with an airy toss of the head that made the gilded curls of her wig bounce ‘—what can I do? After all, since I