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old age one was to reap the dignity of its rewards.
    But it was going to be fifteen years before I inherited her undesirable bed, before Richards received her useless chair. I never imagined this when Great Granny Webster came to Brighton station to say goodbye to me when my two months of breathing sea air with her were finally over. Never had I seen her look so frighteningly ravaged and fragile as when she stood there exposed in the harsh light of the station. For the first time I understood why she liked to keep her curtains drawn.
    â€œSurely she can’t last long,” I thought, and just for a moment I felt a little bit sorry for her. She seemed to have a pathos, standing on the platform in her widow’s weeds with her spine as straight as the back of the chair on which she continually trained it. Younger people were slouching past her, dragging suitcases and pushing her aside. She glared at them with her usual fierce and anguished disapproval; but in the busy bustle of the station neither her disapproval nor the superiority of her impeccable posture seemed to intimidate anyone. Outside the setting of her house her very strengths seemed to turn into frailties, and there appeared to be only futility in her obstinate determination to preserve an old-world lady-like stance when it had no current usefulness.
    â€œI miss your father,” she said.
    I found it strange that she mentioned him only at the last moment. I wondered why she had never spoken more about him before.
    â€œHe was so kind to me,” she said. “Before he was killed he was really very kind to me. Whenever he got leave from the army he never forgot me. The trains were really quite dreadful in the war, but he would always come struggling down to Hove in the black-out—just to see a dull old woman. He always came in his khaki uniform. It shocked me to see him as a soldier—I never thought it suited him. Then it shocked me to hear he had been shot. It seemed a waste. He was still only a child. What a very good brain he had. He did so well at Oxford. I was sorry to hear he had been lost.”
    â€œGoodbye,” I said.
    The train whistle was blowing. For a moment I felt a twinge of panic that I had to leave her. After eight weeks I had become so accustomed to living in her static and unchallenging old-person’s world that it frightened me to realise that now I had to return to a life where more would be asked of me than that I simply “keep myself to myself.”
    â€œGoodbye,” she said. “I do hope you remembered to tip Richards. Tips mean so much to servants.”

2
    S EVERAL years later I asked my Aunt Lavinia why she thought her brother had been so attached to Great Granny Webster. I was baffled trying to understand why a soldier in his early thirties, a man who had apparently liked talking and drinking and wild London parties, had chosen to spend the precious days of his army leave trailing down to Hove in the black-out to sip water and listen to the unenlivening conversation of Great Granny Webster.
    Aunt Lavinia was then thirty-two and she was always described as a “ jolie laide .” A play-girl in the style of the ’twenties, she was famous for her beautiful legs and for the fact that she had been married briefly to three millionaires while taking at the same time a large selection of lovers, who were not only friends of her husbands’ but almost as wellendowed financially. Her attitude to life appeared so resolutely frivolous that perversely she could seem to have the seriousness of someone with a sense of driving inner purpose. She believed in having “fun” as if it was a state of grace. Taking nothing seriously except amusement, she caused very little rancour, and although she was considered untrustworthy and wild and was reputed once to have gate-crashed a fashionable London party totally naked except for a sanitary towel, she managed to slip in and out of her many