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wounds that still distressed him greatly.
    A few months later, Mrs Ayres decided to have a party and the octagonal chinoiserie room was opened for the occasion. I was talking to the Baker-Hughes when Caroline whispered to me that Roddie was refusing to come down. I found him in a complete funk and concluded he was already inebriated, so I returned to the party to discover that the Ayres’s dog, Gyp, had bitten off the cheek of a young girl.
    ‘What makes it so bad is that the girl is upper-class,’ Caroline said. ‘A prole could cope with disfigurement so much better.’ Weobliquely debated the decline of the old social values for several pages, before I persuaded her to let me put Gyp down.
    Roddie continued to be delusional, claiming the house was possessed by a poltergeist, and Caroline did alert me to several scorch marks and strange happenings, yet I rather closed off any curiosity about the supernatural that the reader might have had with my dogged rationalism. ‘He is haunted by his wartime experiences and his inability to cope with a Labour government,’ I ventured, as his room erupted in a mysterious fire. ‘I shall send him to a posh mental asylum.’
    I began to notice that Caroline was not altogether plain and entertained hopes that she might favour me. We went to a ball one night and on the way home, I pressed my hand against her breast. ‘Not now,’ she cried, kicking me in the chest.
    ‘Perhaps, then, you will agree to be my wife?’ ‘OK.’
    ‘I had hoped Caroline would do rather better than you, you ghastly little arriviste,’ Mrs Ayres said, ‘but we all have to compromise these days. In truth, I have never really got over my darling Susan’s death. Her name keeps appearing on the walls as if by magic.’
    Two weeks later, Mrs Ayres hanged herself in her room. ‘The poltergeist has won again,’ Caroline said. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I replied. ‘She was haunted by her inability ... blah, blah. And look, now the old bat’s dead, why don’t we get married in six weeks’ time?’ ‘OK,’ she nodded absently.
    The wedding preparations were proceeding, with me doing everything, including buying the dress, and Caroline doing absolutely nothing. ‘I can’t go through with it,’ she declared one night. ‘I do not love you.’ My embarrassment was excruciating but luckily the poltergeist pushed her over the banisters and killed her.
    ‘The ghost has won,’ Betty gasped. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘Shewas just haunted by her inability to ... blah, blah.’ Though I couldn’t also help wondering if she hadn’t been a lesbian all along.
    Digested read, digested: Everyone gives up the ghost.
The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments

by Vladimir Nabokov (2009)
    One: Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce when he caught her riffling though his papers. Actually she was searching for a silly business letter – and not trying to decipher his mysterious manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction, it was a mad neurologist’s testament, but the thing was, of course, an absolute secret. If she mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk. And because the Nabokov estate was too greedy not to pass off the barely intelligible marginalia of a dying writer, long past his best, as an unpublished masterpiece.
    Unsure of to which particular he the opening referred, Flora demanded to lie down, as this enabled her to surrender to one of her many lovers and for her nymphean form – her cup-sized breasts and pale squinty nipples seemed a dozen years younger than this impatient beauty’s – to be described with erotic longing, while Paul de G ogled some boys. ‘Have you finished?’ she inquired. He nodded in flaccidity. ‘Not even a quickie? Tant pis! Then I must go home to my morbidly obese husband and our mulatto charwoman.’
    Two: Her grandfather had emigrated from Moscow with his son Adam in 1920. Adam had married the ballerina Lanskaya,