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halfpenny.’
    ‘OK. I won’t be able to have tea with you, though, because I want to get my catfish home.’ The catfish was in a jam jar and the man had made a handle of string. ‘Isn’t he lovely? Look at his little lovely whiskers.’
    ‘Lovely.’ Polly didn’t like them much, but knew that it took all sorts to make a world.
    She went back to her shop and gave the man ninepence and he wrapped up the plate and the candlesticks very badly in old limp newspapers. ‘Oh, Polly! You’re always buying china. What are you going to do with it all?’
    ‘For my house when I’m grown up. I haven’t got nearly enough. I can buy tons more. The candlesticks are Delft,’ she added.
    ‘Gosh! Do you mean like Van Meer? Let’s see. They’ll look better when they’re washed.’
    ‘I know.’ She could hardly wait to get home and wash them.
    They parted. ‘See you tomorrow.’
    ‘Hope your catfish is OK.’
    ‘And when are you off to Sussex?’
    Villy, who had told her mother at least three times, answered a little too patiently, ‘On Friday.’
    ‘But that is the day after tomorrow!’
    ‘Yes, Mummy, I did tell you.’
    Making no attempt to conceal her disbelief Lady Rydal said, ‘I must have forgotten.’ She sighed, moved slightly in her craggy armchair and bit her lips from the pain. This was to show Villy that she was in pain, and to show that she suffered in silence, which was also, Villy felt, meant to open up vistas of what else she might be suffering in silence. She was a beautiful and rather dramatic old woman: due to a combination of arthritis and a kind of Victorian indolence (at the first twinge, she had taken to her chair, moving only up – and downstairs once a day, and to the dining room for luncheon and dinner accompanied by a stalwart, rubber-tipped stick), she had become not only shapeless, but chronically bored. Only her face retained its autocratic and arresting appearance: the noble brow, the huge eyes faded from their original forget-me-not, the little swags of porcelain complexion festooned and suspended by myriad tiny lines, the exquisitely chiselled Burne-Jones mouth, all proclaimed her to have once been a beauty. Her hair was now silver white, and she always wore heavy drop earrings – pearls and sapphires – that dragged on the lobes of her ears. Day after day she sat, cast upon her huge chair like a beautiful shipwreck, scorning the frail and petty efforts at salvage that her children attempted with visits of the kind that Villy was now making. She could do nothing, but knew how everything was to be done; her taste in the management of her house, her food, her flowers was both original and good, but she considered that there were no occasions left worthy of her rising to them, and the extravagance and gaiety that Villy could remember was now stagnant, mildewed with self-pity. She considered her life to have been a tragedy; her alliance to a musician was marrying beneath her, but when it occurred her widowhood was not to be trifled with – black garments and blinds were still half drawn in the drawing room although he had been dead two years. She considered that neither of her daughters had married well, and she did not approve of her son’s wife. She was too awe-inspiring for friendship, and even her two loyal servants were called by their surnames. Villy thought that they stayed only out of respect and affection for their dead master, but inertia was contagious and the house was full of it: clocks ticked wearily; bluebottles at the sash windows buzzed and sank into stupor. If she didn’t say or do something, Villy felt that she would drop off.
    ‘Tell me your news.’ This was one of Lady Rydal’s familiar gambits – difficult to answer since it carried with it studied broad-mindedness together with a complete lack of curiosity. Either Villy (or whoever was the target) would provide answers that palpably bored her mother, or they would come up with something that contained one of