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so why shouldn’t I write anything I damn’-well choose?
    To continue, then. After the double funeral Uncle Paul took me down to his house at Kew and presented me to Julia. Of course, as his wife she was my aunt by marriage, but I never called her aunt, because she said the first evening she would rather that I didn’t. She said that when I was grown up there wouldn’t really be much difference in our ages and that she felt much too young to be an aunt to anybody; so she would much prefer that I thought of her as a big sister.
    I found that a bit surprising, as she seemed very grown-up to me; but it made things rather cosy, and she was quite the loveliest person I had ever seen. When she tucked me up in bed that night she kissed me, and having no female relatives I was not accustomed to that sort of thing.
    Father used to go abroad a great deal on business trips and even when he was at home I didn’t see much of him. I was still too young for him to have me downstairs when he was entertaining and on most days when he got back from the city he just dashed upstairs to my nursery for a few minutes, then changed and went out; so my world practically consisted of dear old Nanny Trotter and other nannies and their children that we met in the park.
    Of course there was Miss Stiggins too, a dry old spinster who came to give me lessons every morning, but she never kissed me and I don’t suppose that it would have registered if she had; whereas the first kiss from Julia remained an unforgettable landmark in my young life. Her lips were as soft as swansdown against my cheek and she smelled of some delicious perfume; from that moment I absolutely worshipped her.
    Julia was then twenty and had been married nearly a year. Uncle Paul met her in Rome, and although she was an Italian she already spoke English so well that she did not seem like a foreigner, and her faint accent made her speech only more fascinating to listen to. She was medium tall and very slim.Her eyes were black with long lashes and she had the warm, rich colouring of the south. Her face was a long oval, her lips full and very red. She wore her dark hair parted in the middle and it fell smoothly to her shoulders, curling at the ends.
    That first night, I remember, she was wearing a dress of oyster satin with a long, full skirt that swayed gently as she walked; as did also her pendant diamond earrings, which were the only jewels she had on. All her movements were smooth and graceful, and when she laughed it was lazily, her red lips opening to show two rows of strong little white teeth. I was still as innocent as a new-born babe and to me she seemed like an angel—a dark angel—come to life out of a story-book.
    But I must get back to the matter of my ‘burglar’. I had been living with Uncle Paul and Julia for about two months when the affair occurred. Their house at Kew seemed very strange to me at first, because it was so different from those in which I had been brought up; but Julia had a flair for decoration and I found her bright, modern rooms exciting after the much bigger but rather sombre ones to which I was accustomed.
    The Willows was a suburban villa of the type that was built by the thousand during Queen Victoria’s reign; a square three-storied building standing in its own small garden and one of a row of similar middle-class homes. Its front door opened on to a narrow hall with two rooms on each side of it, then continued on the left as a passage to the kitchen and on the right as a staircase leading straight up to the floors above. From the hall you could see the little half-landing where the stairs made a hairpin bend, then disappeared from sight. On the first floor there were four bedrooms and a bathroom, and another flight of stairs immediately above the lower ones led up to the servants’ rooms and box-room at the top of the house.
    Two months is a long time when one is only eight, so to me the tragedy that had deprived me of my father and