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measured out with family photos and smoky-looking oil paintings of horses and dogs. To her left, the passage had a surprising number of doors. Her bedroom was that way; she could not remember now which door it was. Going in the other direction, following the other passage around a corner, she came to the dining room; a room toonarrow for its table, its chairs with legs like solid calves. Here, all the furniture had been painted black. The floor-length curtains were brown: impossible to remember that the sea was out there, beyond that dune.
    â€˜We used to have all our meals here,’ said Patrick, behind her, ‘when Audrey’s parents were alive.’
    Surprise prompted a cartoonish gesture. Turning to face him, she had her hand across her mouth.
    His smile was washed-out, a courtesy. ‘Treen said you were looking around the house.’ Barefoot, his hair immaculate, he had pulled a stained moss-coloured cashmere jumper over his striped cotton pyjamas.
    He ran the tips of his fingers over the sideboard. ‘They painted all this furniture black when Prince Albert died.’ He leant towards her confidingly. ‘It’s haunted, you know.’ He nodded twice, smiling, eyebrows raised. ‘I’ll show you.’
    He padded ahead of Kit down the hall. ‘Eighteen sixty-nine,’ he called back. ‘Man called Winters built it. Not a nice man. Got a girl pregnant. She came and told him. He got his men to beat her.’
    Near the front door he stopped. ‘Your mother used to see her waiting there, by the coat stand.’ He pointed. His gesture flashed in the hall mirror. He bent to peer into Kit’s face, his fogged pupils swivelling in their lids. ‘Used to frighten her,’ he said. Looking right at Kit, he laughed—a single quick laugh. At once he sucked his teeth back in.
    She touched her cheek; she had felt the laugh almost as a blow. The quiet of the house, now, was against her. There under the coathooks she felt a gathered antagonism, an intensity of air. She was unnaturally aware of her grandfather, the satisfaction he took in her fear, which built something exaggerated into it, as if she were acting it in a play. At the same time what she did feel, which was inward, was an expectation of later, of dark in her room: sleeplessness putting its taproot down.
    â€˜What does she do?’
    â€˜Waiting. Just waiting. No, you don’t want to be frightened of that poor girl. She wouldn’t harm you. Alice, her name was.’ He straightened. With instinctive fastidiousness he lifted away from any excess of feeling. ‘You have your mother’s nerves. She was always very silly about it. Wouldn’t sleep and so on.’ He ran his palms slowly one over the other; he washed his hands in air.
    â€˜But…you know the ghost’s name ?’
    â€˜Oh! We looked it all up. Court papers. Winters got off, obliged to leave the district of course. Frightened for his life, he was.’
    â€˜That was Audrey’s dad?’
    â€˜No, no!’ he cried coquettishly. ‘We’re not responsible for him ! No, the ghost came with the house. Admiral Kelty bought it for the family. Your grandmother’s grandfather. Now, to you that makes him…’ He broke off: he stared glassily at her with one finger raised in air. Possibly this was the same story he had told her last night. Kit remembered nothing he had said then, only how he had looked talking, head tilted sideways, his mouth opening and closing as he followed the trail of his thought. After a moment, he resumed: ‘Got a good deal too, I should think. Bought it for his sister on condition she leave it to his son. Edith was a spinster, you know, very down-to-earthwoman. I see a lot of your aunt in her.’ With one finger, he tapped on the glass of a photograph in the hall. ‘Here she is.’
    Kit saw a long jaw, thin lips pressed together: an expression that suited the brown tones