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at the news of Douglas’s death, had wept hysterically and threatened to kill herself. When I saw her she was crying. I was no longer staying at Garth Manor even part of the time, for by then I was twenty and away at college. If you are at university in Regent’s Park, you will scarcely live in Golders Green if you can help it. But I rushed to Cosette as soon as I heard Douglas was dead, yet once there hardly knew how to comfort this woman who had nothing to say and who cried without ceasing. I come from a family that makes almost a fetish of not showing emotion and although I would have liked to be able to show it myself, I didn’t know how. A friend that I envied—it was that same friend who had benefited from admiring Cosette’s jewelry, a girl whose name was Elsa and whom naturally we called Lioness—used to tell me that throughout her childhood her parents shouted and raved at each other, all barriers down, all claws bared, but at least they showed their feelings. From this she believed she had derived the ability to show her own.
    So I watched Cosette warily as the tears streamed down her cheeks, without an idea of what to say or do. And a week later her face was still red and her eyes still swollen. Standing there under her elder brother’s umbrella, wreaths and crosses of dripping flowers at her feet, she looked as if she had been crying until the moment she entered the crematorium chapel, to stop abruptly only when Douglas’s coffin disappeared and was consigned to the fire. She was in deepest black. Her suit was not one of those timeless tailor-mades, but dated from the period of the New Look, postwar, contemporaneous with my own birth, a long flared skirt which I suspect she could only have got into with the zip undone, a jacket with a peplum. I think she must have bought it for the funeral of her own mother, who had died about that time. It smelt of mothballs. Cosette, who was a rich woman, who had inherited from Douglas something in the region of a million, a huge sum in 1967, had not thought to buy a new suit for her husband’s funeral. She disliked black, Perpetua told me later, and refused to waste money on something she would never wear again.
    This was the first thing about Cosette that ever surprised me. It was the forerunner of many surprises.
    There was speculation as to what she would do now. I have since learned that relatives and neighbors are invariably ready with advice for a woman in her situation, while never suggesting the kind of things they would want to do themselves. The courses they propose always seem designed to keep the subject out of mischief.
    No one less likely to get into mischief than Cosette could be imagined. She was forty-nine, but she looked older. Her hair was iron gray. Her face was drawn and haggard, but she had put on weight, being a woman who ate for comfort. It was Easter and I went to stay with her. Once there, I made up my mind I would follow the example she had set me and be a good listener. I would listen and let her talk about Douglas and her life with him, for some intuition told me she would want to do this, that it would be a catharsis. My intuition was wrong. Bemused, looking slovenly and distracted, breaking off pieces of chocolate and putting them absently into her mouth, she asked me in a vague way what I had been doing, what my plans were.
    “I want to know about you,” I said.
    She responded with that mysterious smile, slightly shaking her head. It was as if to say her affairs were not important. I read into her look and her gentle insistence on my talking and her listening an abnegation of a future, as plain as an utterance that her life was over, all that remained was a slow decline to old age and death. And this attitude seemed supported by the visitors who came in a constant stream, relatives and friends, the usual widow’s advisers with their glib counsel to move to “a little place by the sea,” a country cottage, a “nice flat” in a