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talk to her. We had absolutely nothing in common. She preferred to spend most of her days in silence. When she occasionally chose to speak some short sentence, I hardly ever answered.
    I nodded politely.
    â€œPeople might say that you are much too quiet, that you are much too retiring,” she continued. “But I hope they will never persuade you to lose those qualities. I was always very quiet as a girl. I have never been a person who has seen the point of a lot of chatter. I am very glad that you know how to keep yourself to yourself. You get that from me.”
    Just occasionally one of her mournful little soliloquies would really succeed in shocking me. I think she had no idea how much she chilled me when she tried to reassure me that she was certain I would turn out to be exactly like her.
    â€œI have decided that I am going to leave you my bed,” she told me one day. “I was planning to leave it to your father—but now that the poor man has been killed in action, I have decided that the correct thing is for me to leave it to you.”
    â€œThank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.” I didn’t know what one was meant to say to something like this. “That’s really very kind of you,” I repeated. “Thank you very much indeed.”
    â€œAs you know, it is a four-poster,” she said. “And I have to warn you that one of the ornamental pineapples on one of its posts is a little loose and it tends to fall off if the bed is shaken. Once I have passed away it worries me that the moving men may be careless when they move it into storage. I would therefore like you to be there when all my possessions are disposed of. I want you to realise that there are no reliable furniture removal firms any more. Now-a-days they send just anybody. All you get is a couple of rough young men with no breeding at all, no sense of the way one is meant to handle beautiful possessions. I therefore want someone responsible to be there to supervise the movers when they come to take my things from my house.”
    I sat there nodding.
    â€œIf you could be ultra-careful to see they don’t somehow manage to loosen the pineapple and lose it. I am asking you for your own sake just as much as my own, because I warn you—if that carved pineapple gets lost, the bed will lose most of its period value. You will discover these hand-carved things are totally irreplaceable.”
    I just nodded again with my teeth tightly clenched, determined not actually to promise her aloud that I would come down to Hove after her death personally to supervise the removal of her furniture.
    As I sat there quietly, keeping myself to myself, in the very way that she admired, in my mind I was already making frantic plans as to how I could sell her bed. With or without the pineapple, I felt obsessed by a longing to dispose of it. Surely there had to be furniture salesrooms in Hove. The idea of ever owning, let alone of sleeping in, her huge four-poster, with its dingy purple hangings which you could draw until the bed turned into a square fusty tent sealed off from all light and air, appalled me.
    For me, her dreaded bed could only always smell of her decay and decrepitude and loneliness. It was a bed that would seem forever haunted by the terrible insomniac nights that I knew this old woman had passed in it.
    â€œI am very glad to have brought this matter up with you,” she said. “It’s been on my mind for a long time.”
    I nodded again. I was thinking that I was lucky that apparently she hadn’t decided to leave me her chair.
    It was Richards who was going to inherit her chair. There may have been some element of one-upmanship in the choice of the high-backed object she finally bequeathed to this cripple, as if from the grave she wished to rebuke and remind the bent Richards that faultless posture was a sign of good breeding, that it was a virtue worth cultivating at all cost, if in