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up. Somehow it was an anti-climax, for the younger members of the household anyway, as it was after the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day. What do any of us do now, Emma wondered. Sam came forward from the window seat and knelt beside the ancient Folly, who from the only comfortable chair in the room, apart from Mad’s, was endeavoring to scratch a lump of canker out of her left ear.
    “It’s all right, Fol-Fol,” he said, “nobody’s going to shoot you. If any soldier as much as tries Andy will get him first.”
    “Quite right,” said Mad, and her lips began to frame her soundless whistle. Oh no, thought Emma, don’t say she’s going to start that line with the boys, because if she does we’ll all be in trouble, God knows what will happen. She raised her eyebrows at Dottie, who began to marshal the little boys out of the room.
    “Can I go to the farm and tell them about Spry?” asked Terry.
    Mad threw him a look. A look Emma mistrusted. It spelled duplicity between her grandmother and the earliest of Mad’s adopted brood.
    “Not yet,” she said. “Wait till I give the word.”
    Emma wondered how long it would be before the telephone would work again, before the world returned to normal, or approximately normal, because the first thing to do then would be to ring up Pa in London and ask what was happening. He would know, he was in touch with so many high-up people, not just bankers but Cabinet Ministers, the Lot, and then he could be firm with Mad and warn her not to do anything outrageous. Because the frightful thing was that where her grandmother was concerned you never knew.
    The infant Jesus, his hand firmly clasping that of his small black brother, paused an instant before he left the room.
    “What I want to know is this,” he said. “Are the American soldiers baddies or goodies?” His question was directed at Mad.
    She did not answer immediately. She began to whistle under her breath. Then she threw Colin a smile. Not the familiar picture postcard smile that her fans remembered, but the slow, craftier one of the Roman legionary.
    “That, my boy,” she told him, “is what I intend to find out.”

3
    The day wore on, but it followed no sort of routine pattern. Chores were done half-heartedly or unwillingly, everyone was on edge. Mad had gone back upstairs to her bedroom window, but she was in an uncommunicative mood and just sat there, humped, the field glasses on her knee. The warship was still at anchor.
    “What do you suppose is happening?” asked Emma at length.
    “Darling, if I knew, I’d say,” replied her grandmother. “Don’t ask silly questions. Get something to do.”
    Emma didn’t know how Mad could sit there, with the terrible spattered remains of Spry still lying in the middle of the plowed field. Every time she put up the field glasses to watch the ship she must see them.
    “Old people and young children,” thought Emma, “they don’t feel things as we do. One begins to feel at eight or nine, like Sam, and everything goes on hurting until one’s about fifty, when it eases off, the person goes numb.”
    But this meant that Mad had been numb for nearly thirty years, which couldn’t really be true. And Pa, who would be fifty in a year’s time, was on the brink. It must depend upon the individual, she decided. Numbness is inherited, perhaps, like going gray at thirty and getting cancer, like her mother, whom she could barely remember because she was always in and out of nursing homes, wearing a pink bed jacket.
    “If she had lived,” Emma used to ask Mad, “would I have been different?”
    “No,” said her grandmother. “Why should you be?”
    “Well,” replied Emma, “that thing of a mother’s influence, a mother’s love.”
    “You’ve had that from me.”
    “Yes, I know, but still…” That poor woman in her pink bed jacket who surely must have been fond of her husband and child and was dragged panting out of life like Emily Brontë…
    “You’ve never