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am here I must—’
    The door opened with a bang and Sharon the child-nurse stuck in her carroty head and said, ‘Do you want the pot?’ Aunt Corky was scrabbling to stub out her cigarette. She shook her head furiously with lips shut tight. ‘Right-o,’ Sharon said and withdrew, then popped back again and nodded at the bristling ashtray and said cheerfully, ‘I’m telling you, them things will be the death of you.’
    When she had gone I returned to the chair beside the bedand sat down. Aunt Corky, mortified, avoided my eye, breathing heavily through flared nostrils and casting about her indignantly with birdlike movements of her head. In the embarrassment of the moment I was holding my breath again; I felt like the volunteer in a levitation act, suspended horizontally on empty air and not daring to move a muscle. Aunt Corky with quivering hands lit another cigarette and blew a defiant trumpet of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Of course,’ she said bitterly,
‘she
is nothing like
him
. She has I think no training, and certainly no feeling for things, no –
no finesse
. Where he got her no one can say.’ I said vaguely, ‘Well, she’s young, after all …’ Aunt Corky stared at me. ‘Young?’ she cried, a high, soft shriek, ‘young – that one?’ and began to cough. ‘No, no,’ she said impatiently, waving a hand and weaving a figure eight of smoke, ‘not the nurse, I mean
her –
the wife.’ A poisonous grimace. ‘Mrs Haddon.’ Whom, if I have the energy for the task, we shall be meeting presently. Aunt Corky got out her cartridge of lipstick again and with broad strokes moodily retouched the stylised pair of lips smeared over the ruined hollow where her mouth used to be, sighing and frowning; with the lipstick revivified she looked as if a tropical insect had settled on her face.
    Was it on that visit or later, I wonder, that I told her about Morden and his pictures? Had I even gone to see him at that stage? See how you have loosened my grasp on chronology. I get as mixed up as a dotard. Things from long ago seem as if they had happened yesterday while yesterday itself grows ancient before today has waned. Once I used to date events from before and after the moment when you first confronted me on the corner of Ormond Street; then the day of your going became the pivot on which the eras turned; now all is flux. I feel as the disciples must have felt in the days of desolation between Calvary and the rolling aside of the sepulchre stone. (Dear God, where did that come from? Am I getting religion? Next thing I’ll be seeing visions.) Anyway,anyway, whatever day it was, that first or another, when I told her about my new venture, Aunt Corky went into raptures. ‘Art!’ she breathed, clapping a hand to her breastbone and putting on a Rouault face. ‘Art is prayer!’ At once I was sorry I had mentioned the subject at all and sat and looked gloomily at my hands while she launched into one of her rhapsodies, at the end of which she reached out a shaky claw again and grasped my wrist and said in a fervent whisper, ‘What a chance for you, to make of yourself something new!’ I sat back and stared at her but she continued to gaze at me undaunted, still holding on to my wrist and nodding her head slowly, solemnly. ‘Because, you know,’ she said, with a sort of reproachful twinkle, ‘you have been very naughty; yes, yes, very naughty.’ I would not have been surprised if she had reached up and tweaked my ear; I may even have blushed. Somehow I had imagined she would know no more of my doings in the years since I had seen her than I knew of hers. Infamy, however, is a thing that gets about. Aunt Corky let go of my wrist and patted me on the hand and lit yet another cigarette. ‘Death is nothing,’ she said with vague inconsequence, and frowned; ‘nothing at all.’ She gave a fluttery sigh and sat for a moment looking about her blankly and then slowly subsided against the dented pillows at her back and