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she looks blowsy, with her features taking on a blurred look and her hair hanging in disordered loops, lipstick apparently applied in a dark, mirrorless room, sunglasses hanging around her neck on what looks like a piece of elastic. She wears a dress like a cotton tent. At least she had abandoned the tailored suits, perhaps she could no longer get into them, the only change she seemed to have made in her appearance or way of living. For she still sat on her board of governors, went to meetings of the society, had the neighbors to dine and went to dine with them, they making a point of inviting her as if conferring on her enormous favors. No one, however, she later told me, went so far as to produce an unattached man for her. She was fifty, her birthday was that August, and we were living through a period of the cult of youth.
    The notion of Cosette having a man friend, a lover, to me was grotesque. For that you had to be young. You might not have to be exactly good-looking, but you had to be attractive in some indefinable way or somehow charming, young, and not fat. I had no idea I might be insulting Cosette in having these thoughts about her; I would never have had them at all, I would have supposed attracting a man as alien to her wishes as adopting a child or beginning a career might be, had Dawn Castle not said to me, “The only thing for poor Cosette would be to marry again.”
    Like a Victorian, I was shocked. “Douglas has only been dead six months.”
    “Oh, my dear, it’s a well-known fact that if people are going to marry again, they do it within two years.”
    “Cosette would never want to marry again.”
    “That’s what you think, but you’re young. Someone who’s been married that length of time, of course she wants to be married.”
    That conversation I remembered when a year later or less Cosette, alone with me, said in a burst of frankness, “You’re always hearing of men being womanizers. I’d like to be a manizer. Do you know what I’d like, Elizabeth? I’d like to be thirty again and steal everybody’s husbands,” and she laughed a soft, hopeless, bitter laugh.
    But there was no hint of this on the fiftieth birthday she quietly celebrated with a dinner in a restaurant to which she invited my father and me, her brother Oliver and his wife, Adele. The Sevenoaks brother was away on holiday. In the taxi back to North End I was alone with her; she cried for Douglas and I put my arms round her, thinking of what Dawn had said, the absurdity of it.
    In this house where I live in Hammersmith, in Macduff Street, are things which Cosette gave me. There are probably more things Cosette gave me than came from any other single source, certainly more than any other person ever gave me. For a long time they reminded me of her so sharply, with such pain, that I put them all away so as never to see them, but things changed, as things do—“It changes,” said Cosette—and I got them out again and spread them about, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the room where I work. This is a little house, mid-Victorian, in a terrace. There is a garden which I am thankful to say is small, a box enclosed by walls like all the other gardens in this street and the next street, so that looking down on them from a helicopter would be like looking into a grocer’s box when all the tins have been taken out. The two cats come and go over the walls, never venturing out into the front where the Great West Road threatens, not even knowing it is there or that it is possible for cats to go near it.
    The three eggs Cosette gave me, one of chrysolite, one of agate, one of amethyst quartz, sit together in a round glass bowl on the living room windowsill. I had once had an idea of collecting gemstone eggs, but never collected more than these three. On the bookcase is Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid in Royal Copenhagen porcelain, a copy of the one in Copenhagen, which Cosette gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday. The