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he had come for money, and hadn’t gone away empty-handed, but he did at least make himself pleasant, affectionate and cheerful while he was there.
    The married sister, eldest of the three, lived in Hertfordshire with an insurance-agent husband and two children. She hadn’t visited. There was a record of telephone enquiries from her, beginning with an agitated lament on the first evening, before Maggie was up from the theatre, expressing endless devotion and the fixed intention of leaving everything and rushing to her bedside; but the tone had cooled off after it became clear that the bed was not going to be a death-bed. Mrs. Chalmers still called in with loving messages but she didn’t suggest coming. These details Francis also gleaned from Rice, who had them from the ward sister, through whom all those earlier phone calls had been channelled.
    It began to seem as if all those who professed affection for her also harboured in secret a corrosive resentment. Yet everything went to show that she had remained loyal and generous to her family and early associates. Maybe that was her really unforgivable virtue. If she had shaken them off and gone her own way unimpeded, they could at least have felt that she was down on their human level, and taken pleasure in her flaws for their own comfort. People who have everything stir in ordinary mortals a venomous ambition to take everything from them, or if that’s impossible, at least to spoil what is spoilable. No, Maggie had never caused any of her tribe to lament at her shoulder in the night. They were much more likely, given the chance, to ruin and despoil her.
    Then there were the others, colleagues, fellow-singers, accompanists, conductors, admirers. Would-be lovers, most of them, whether they knew it or not, though a few had the integrity and detachment to be disinterested friends to her into the bargain. God knew she had need of those, they seemed to have been few and far between in her life. The music teacher at her local school, perhaps, who had first realised what a glorious instrument she possessed, and done his best to help her develop its possibilities. And afterwards, Paul Fredericks, that eccentric and wealthy old genius who had spent the last years of his life squandering the profits of his own musical career on the musicians of the future. But how many more?
    Plenty of would-be lovers, though, from the modest admirers of her girlhood, through the teeming procession of her fellow-students, to the celebrities who surrounded her now. And wasn’t there, somewhere in the sweet chorus of their devotion, a slightly sour note, too? The courting male knows his worth, and expects to make an impression, but Maggie Tressider had always stayed unattainable. They still praise and they still pursue, when the object of the pursuit is such a valuable cult image and status symbol; but after a while a slight acidity sets in, the heart goes out of the charade, and something alien comes to birth in its place. Spite?
    He didn’t realise, until he tapped at the door of her room for the second time, and saw her propped on her pillows with delicately made-up face and burnished hair to receive him, exactly what it was about her that disturbed him most. He entered with his memory marking off like spent beads the names of her adorers, who were legion; and there in the white bed in the white room, tense and still, sat this one slender, solitary creature, the cobalt mirrors of her eyes waiting for a human image to reflect, so that she could be peopled. He had never known anyone round whom such numbers of worshippers revolved; and he had never known anyone so intensely and disastrously alone.
     
    She was a good client, patient and humble. She was ready to pick up her autobiography where she had left it two days before, and even paid him the compliment of following his recipe for relaxation while she recollected, as if he had indeed been one more doctor with authority over her, if only a temporary