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an odd, intrusive silhouette on the brow of the hill and Alice follows the movement of this creeping two-dimensional caravan with irritation. It continues to plot its resolute course on the hill track, a course which will inevitably bring it to the cottage.
    Sure enough, it curves away from the brow of the hill and progresses along their own track. Already the countryside is beginning to lose its colour. Alice’s children have also seen the horse and cart and stand quietly watching as it by-passes the home farm and moves inexorably towards the cottage. The man driving the cart tips his hat at the boys as he passes them in the field but they return his greeting with scowls. The cart passes through the open five-bar gate and turns into the yard. Ada stands up, half in fear, half in excitement and the doll-baby drops unheeded to the ground.
    Alice knows a threat when she sees one. She can feel herself being pulled back, and tries to resist, screwing up her eyes and concentrating on returning to the silence when – the child under the kitchen table (whom we’d forgotten about) chooses this moment to hit his finger with the wooden hammer (yes, it is indeed a boy) and lets out a bloodcurdling yell that would bring the dead inquisitively out of their graves let alone a mother back from an out-of-body experience.
    His brothers rush whooping into the house to see if there is any blood, the dog in the yard wakes up and starts barking in a demented way and the child in a cradle in the corner of the kitchen that we hadn’t even noticed, wakes up with a start and adds its screams to the chaos.
    Poor, hypomanic Alice finds herself being sucked back into her life, through the bluebird-blue sky and the molten-gold marigolds, until she’s thrown back against the kitchen doorpost. Slam! The invisible baby Nell kicks in sympathy with the howling child under the table who, when Alice picks him up to try and comfort him, tangles his fingers in her hair and pulls three pink glass buttons from her blouse.
    Finally, as the culmination of this cacophony, the horse and cart arrive in the yard of the cottage rendering the dog hysterical. A lanky, foreign-looking man with a hooked nose and a whiff of Edgar Allan Poe about him – the old-fashioned frock-coat, the melancholy hands – dismounts and approaches the open door. With a theatrical sweep he removes his hat and makes a low bow. ‘Madame,’ he announces, straightening himself, ‘Jean-Paul Armand at your service.’
    He was a magician, of course, the mysterious shapes in his cart were his strange props – the collapsible Mediterranean back-cloth, the ornate brass plant-pot holding a palm with stiffened-cotton leaves, the velvet drapes, the extraordinary camera – only the chaise-longue wasn’t provided by him, but was dragged by Ada and Lawrence out into the back yard. ‘The light’s better there,’ he explained.
    ‘Nothing to pay until I return with the photographs’ was how he ensnared Alice who, in an uncharacteristic burst of optimism, believed she would indeed somehow acquire the money in the intervening period. So the children were scrubbed and brushed and generally transformed. Albert’s tears (the child under the table) were assuaged by a barley-sugar twist from Mr Armand – he always had a pocketful with him to persuade his small, recalcitrant sitters. He took photographs of Alice’s children in different permutations – Ada with Albert on her knee; Albert, Tom, and Lawrence together; Ada holding the real baby Lillian (the neglected child in the crib) instead of her doll, and so on. Lillian hasn’t celebrated her first birthday yet and just succeeds in slipping it in before her mother disappears from her life for ever.
    Alice has crammed her overblown figure into her best dress for Mr Armand and brushed and pinned up her hair in plaits. The weather is far too hot for the dress and she has to stand for a long time in the heat while he messes around under the black