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suburb.
    “Not too big,” Dawn Castle said. “Something compact for just you on your own. You won’t want to wear yourself out keeping the place clean.”
    Perpetua was even at that moment using the vacuum cleaner out in the hall, which made me think Mrs. Castle must be deaf or else (more likely) one who never gave a second’s thought to the sense of what she said. Cosette’s brother Leonard suggested she move nearer him and his wife. They lived in Sevenoaks. A small house or bungalow near Sevenoaks, preferably a bungalow, said his wife, because as Cosette grew older she wouldn’t want to climb stairs. She might not be able to climb stairs, this woman hinted darkly, watching Cosette helping herself from a biscuit tin. The other brother lived in one of those huge barracklike blocks of flats in St. John’s Wood, an enormous place with four bedrooms he always called an apartment.
    “There’s a compact little one-bedroom apartment just come on the market in Roderick Court.” He added persuasively, “It’s on the ground floor, so you wouldn’t even have to use the lift,” as if Cosette would soon be too decrepit to step across a hallway and press a button.
    She listened and said she would think about it. I never once heard her protest when they treated her as if she were on the threshold of senility. Of course women were older then than they are now, even twenty years ago they were. Middle age then began at forty, but today at nearer fifty. The women’s movement has had something to do with this change by altering the significance of beauty. It is no longer vested in youthful bloom, it is no longer even an essential part of attractiveness, and attractiveness itself no more the essence of female existence. Cosette had never worked for her living, she had never even worked in the home, her life had been very near that of the concubine, and for twenty-eight years she had been the comfort and support of Douglas, his to be loved or left, to await his homecoming, and listen while he talked. They would have been shocked, those callers with their advice, if they had heard this put into words, but they all knew it in their hearts. With Douglas’s death Cosette’s usefulness was over, just as the harem woman’s is over when her lord dies.
    She made no promises. Cosette hardly ever rejected any suggestion categorically, but she had her own kind of stubbornness. A refusal to study orders to view, to telephone estate agents, to be shepherded around show houses, is just as much a refusal when indicated by a smiling shake of the head as by an outright no. She was listening more and speaking less then than at any time I could remember. Grief had stricken her dumb, I thought, but later I came to understand she was silent because she had so much on her mind. She had so much to think about, and it was not her past with Douglas. She was making up her mind how to manage what she had set her heart on.
    Men call to visit widows in the hope of getting into bed with them. Widows are ready, widows are grateful. Men who have been married for twenty years to the widow’s best friend, apparently faithful husbands who have scarcely up till then ever called the widow by her Christian name, turn up sheepishly and make a pass at her in the kitchen while she is putting the tea bags in the pot. Or so I have heard.
    If this happened to Cosette, it wasn’t while I was staying there. Perhaps my presence put them off. The only possibilities anyway were Dawn Castle’s husband, Roger, and the president of the Wellgarth Society. I have a photograph of Cosette taken in the garden that summer, and it looks like the kind of thing women’s magazines use of some reader who wants advice on her appearance. On the opposite page is the same woman after the depilator and hairdresser and makeup artist, and plastic surgeon maybe also, have been at work. I can produce that photograph of Cosette too.
    But reclining on the swinging seat, under the floral canopy,