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sparkling response. “All your life, Roxie Malloy, you’ve done for others. Putting your own needs and feelings aside, trying to bring a little sunshine and light into other people’s misery. Giving and giving with never a thought of return. ‘Where would I be,’ I asked Fiddler, ‘if the prettiest girl in the whole of Pankhurst Elementary School hadn’t been my own guardian angel when the other kids went around calling me Spotty Face?’”
    “Oh, well, if you’re going to put it like that.” Mrs. Malloy was clearly mollified. “Horrible how children can be! It makes you ashamed to admit having been one. But you mustn’t put me on a pedestal, Gwen, just because I don’t have an unkind bone in me body.” She gave one of her pious sighs. “Mrs. H. is always harping on about me being too soft.”
    “Every day,” I agreed.
    “We’re as God makes us and that’s that.” Mrs. Malloy didn’t add: “With a little help for some of us from the plastic surgeons.” If Gwen was aware of the eyes feeling their way up into her hairline and behind her ears she gave no sign. She was looking at a portrait on the wall. The shadowed figure of an old woman in a rocking chair.
    “That’s Fiddler’s mother,” she said. “It was done after she died.”
    “Well, I guess that’s one way the artist could get her to sit still,” Mrs. Malloy mused.
    “It was painted from a photograph.”
    “Very nice,” I said.
    “And this is Fiddler’s first wife, Mildred.” Gwen had moved down the hall to point out an even larger portrait. It was of a middle-aged female who looked as though she had sat for years on a bad case of piles waiting for the Grim Reaper to beckon from the shadows. “A wonderful likeness, as you could tell from the resemblance, if you were to see her son and two daughters.”
    “The way her eyes pop ...” Mrs. Malloy was clearly beginning to see herself as a serious art critic. “Would that be a symptom of the illness that took her?”
    “No, it’s just that she wasn’t wearing her glasses.” Gwen’s smile slipped the merest fraction. “Poor Mildred. She was constantly losing them. Fiddler was always after her, in the kindest possible way, for being absentminded.”
    “She looks as though she could be sitting on them and getting a poke up the bum.”
    “Probably she was having one of her twinges. Agonizing they could be. The doctor was of the opinion”—this said with a certain emphasis—“that it was amazing how she didn’t die sooner given the terrible state of her heart. There was never a question of her living more than a few years after I came to take care of the kiddies. And I like to think I helped make Mildred’s last days as comfortable as possible.”
    “While taking ever such nice care of Mr. Fiddler.” Mrs. Malloy nodded approvingly. “And the kiddies, too, of course.”
    This was all very pleasant, I thought, but I really should leave the two women to enjoy catching up on the years since they had last seen each other. I offered to take the suitcases upstairs. The exercise would have done me good after sitting for hours in the car just pushing the occasional pedal, but Gwen wouldn’t hear of it. She said Fiddler would take care of the luggage when he came home for lunch shortly. There was a nice steak-and-kidney pudding in the steamer and an egg custard baking in the oven, but if I wouldn’t stay to eat I must at least have a cup of tea to warm me on my way. Before I could decline she had skimmed ahead of us on her black scissor legs, the shocking-pink ribbon fluttering above her platinum topknot, into what she modestly called the front room. And after seeing Mrs. Malloy and me settled on a pair of extremely uncomfortable chairs that looked as though they might have come out of a monastery, she left us with the promise of returning in two ticks.
    “Done all right for herself, has Gwen.” Mrs. M.’s gaze rested on a towering china cabinet displaying a mammoth collection