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fingers by sucking the affected finger and then going on with their work. If even one of the women had wiped her finger afterwards in token fashion on her apron, I might have been able to tell myself later that that particular woman had happened to prepare the portion of salad that I was struggling to swallow, but I never saw any of the women wiping her finger thus.
    At least once during the Sunday afternoon, the women made a pot of tea and then sat around the table to drink it. My aunt would put on the table a plate of cakes for the women to eat with their tea. In those years, a woman such as my aunt would have been ashamed to serve to guests any cakes or biscuits bought from shops. Such a woman devoted at least one half-day each week to baking, as she called it. My aunt would put in front of the other women patty-cakes: simple iced cakes in patty-pans of pleated paper. If she had had more time than usual for baking, she might serve lamingtons or butterfly-cakes: patty-cakes with two semicircular slices cut from the top of each cake, with whipped cream spread over the newly exposed surface, and with the two semicircles pressed into the cream so as to suggest the raised wings of a butterfly.
    I saw it only once during the many Sunday afternoons when I would walk often slowly through my aunt’s kitchen, hoping to overhear the deliberations of some of the most powerful persons I knew. I saw it only once, but I assumed that it happened often. I assumed that my aunt, soon after having taken a large bite from one or another cake, would often remove one or another mass of pulped food from behind her inmost teeth by poking an index-finger far into her mouth and then, seemingly, by first scraping the finger along the teeth, then wiping the finger against the tongue, and finally swallowing the food.
    At every Sunday tea, after the main course of cold meat and salad, we were served a sweet called a trifle. I never saw a trifle being prepared—the ingredients would always have been placed in a large bowl early in the day and put aside to soak. Children such as myself were served only small portions of trifle, because one of the ingredients was sherry. I might have identified the other ingredients merely by looking at what was on my spoon while I ate, but I always ate my trifle by gulping at it and I always kept my eyes averted from the stuff in my plate or on my spoon. The main ingredient was some kind of cake, but after it had been soaked all day its texture often suggested to me that I had in my mouth such a pulp or mush as my aunt would have removed from her rear teeth whenever she scraped them with a finger.
    The aunt mentioned hereabouts could well have afforded to visit a hairdresser whenever she so wished and to have come away with a different hairstyle after each visit. I cannot recall that I ever took note of her hairstyle, but whenever an image of my aunt has appeared in my mind for many years past, that image has been of a certain face beneath what I call an upswept hairstyle: exactly the sort of hairstyle worn by the image of Aunt Bee in my mind whenever I recall my having read Brat Farrar .
    In the image that I see of my aunt’s face I can find no detail to explain the sternness and disapproval that seem to emanate from the image. However, I have for long recognised that time has no existence in the image-world. I am therefore able to suppose that my image-aunt, during her wanderings among my image-landscapes, has come upon certain image-evidence from the years during the early 1950s when I masturbated often. That image-evidence would have included image-details of her image-nephew spying on his image-cousins, her image-daughters, during certain image-picnics on image-beaches during the early image-1950s, whenever one or another of the image-cousins leaned so far forward in order to reach for an image-tomato-sandwich or an image-patty-cake that the upper parts of her image-breasts were exposed or whenever she reached down