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the bathroom black dark and in the bathroom is a mirror as tall as I am; and one day, Father, I shall leave the towel off.
       But all that will come later, the moving about among strangers, the touchings without fear. Now I must live alone, and think; I must read and read of the world and its works, yes, and of madmen like you, Father, and what twists them so terribly; Dr Rothstein insists that you were not the only one, that you were so rare, really, only because you were so rich.
       Evelyn...
       Evelyn never knew her father was mad. Evelyn never saw the pictures of the poisoned flesh. I lived in a world different from this one, but her world was just as different, the world Father and I made for her, to keep her pure...
       I wonder, I wonder how it happened that you had the decency to blow your rotten brains out...
       The picture of her father, dead, calmed her strangely. She rose and looked back into the woods, looked carefully around the meadowy shadow by shadow, tree by tree. “All right, Evelyn, I will, I will...”
       She took a deep breath and held it. She shut her eyes so tight there was red in the blackness of it. Her hands flickered over the buttons on her dress. It fell away. She slid out of underwear and stockings with a single movement. The air stirred and its touch on her body was indescribable; it seemed to blow through her. She stepped forward into the sun and with tears of terror pressing through her closed lids, she danced naked, for Evelyn, and begged and begged her dead father’s pardon.
    When Janie was four she hurled a paperweight at a Lieutenant because of an unanalysed but accurate feeling that he had no business around the house while her father was overseas. The Lieutenant’s skull was fractured and, as is often the case in concussion, he was for ever unable to recall the fact that Janie stood ten feet away from the object when she threw it. Janie’s mother whaled the tar out of her for it, an episode which Janie accepted with her usual composure. She added it, however, to the proofs given her by similar occasions that power without control has its demerits.
       “She gives me the creeps,” her mother told her other Lieutenant later. “I can’t stand her. You think there’s something wrong with me for talking like that, don’t you?”
       “No I don’t,” said the other Lieutenant, who did. So she invited him in for the following afternoon, quite sure that once he had seen the child, he would understand.
       He saw her and he did understand. Not the child, nobody understood her; it was the mother’s feelings he understood. Janie stood straight up, with her shoulders back and her face lifted, legs apart as if they wore jackboots, and she swung a doll by one of its feet as if it were a swagger-stick. There was a tightness about the child which, in a child, was wrong. She was, if anything, a little smaller than average. She was sharp-featured and narrow-eyed; her eyebrows were heavy. Her proportions were not quite those of most four-year-olds, who can bend forward from the waist and touch their foreheads to the floor. Janie’s torso was a little too short or her legs a little too long for that. She spoke with a sweet clarity and a devastating lack of tact. When the other Lieutenant squatted clumsily and said, “ Hel -lo, Janie. Are we going to be friends?” she said, “No. You smell like Major Grenfell.” Major Grenfell had immediately preceded the injured Lieutenant.
       “Janie!” her mother shouted, too late. More quietly, she said, “You know perfectly well the Major was only in for cocktails.” Janie accepted this without comment, which left an appalling gap in the dialogue. The other Lieutenant seemed to realize all in a rush that it was foolish to squat there on the parquet and sprang to his feet so abruptly he knocked over the coffee table. Janie achieved a wolfish smile and