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awfully dim. I remember she once asked me what sealing-wax was, and I told her it was a very special sort of wax for putting on ceilings. I made her stand on a pair of ladders and try some out on the ceiling of Daddy’s study. And it made a horrible mess, and the poor girl got into dreadful trouble.’
    She shook her head, embarrassed, but laughing again. Then she caught my eye; and my expression must have been chilly. She tried to stifle her smiles.
    ‘I’m sorry, Dr Faraday. I can see you don’t approve. Quite right, too. Rod and I were frightful children; but we’re much nicer now. You’re thinking of poor little Betty, I expect.’
    I took a sip of my tea. ‘Not at all. As it happens, I was thinking of my mother.’
    ‘Your mother?’ she repeated, a trace of laughter still in her voice.
    And in the silence that followed, Mrs Ayres said, ‘Of course. Your mother was nursery maid here once, wasn’t she? I remember hearing that. When was she here? Slightly before my time, I think.’
    She spoke so smoothly and so nicely, I was almost ashamed; for my own tone had been pointed. I said, less emphatically, ‘My mother was here until about nineteen seven. She met my father here; a grocer’s boy. A back-door romance, I suppose you’d call it.’
    Caroline said uncertainly, ‘What fun.’
    ‘Yes, isn’t it?’
    Roderick tapped more ash from his cigarette, saying nothing. Mrs Ayres, however, had begun to look thoughtful.
    ‘Do you know,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘I do believe—Now, am I right?’
    She went across to a table, on which a number of framed family pictures were set out. She drew one from the arrangement, held it at arm’s length, peered at it, then shook her head.
    ‘Without my spectacles,’ she said, bringing it to me, ‘I can’t be sure. But I
think
, Dr Faraday, that your mother might be here.’
    The picture was a small Edwardian photograph in a tortoiseshell frame. It showed, in crisp sepia detail, what I realised after a moment must be the south face of the Hall, for I could see the long French window of the room we were sitting in, thrown open to the afternoon sunlight just as it was today. Gathered on the lawn before the house was the family of the time, surrounded by a sizeable staff of servants—housekeeper, butler, footman, kitchen-girls, gardeners—they made an informal, almost reluctant group, as if the idea of the picture had occurred belatedly to the photographer, and someone had gone rounding them all up, drawing them away from other tasks. The family itself looked most at ease, the mistress of the house—old Mrs Beatrice Ayres, Caroline and Roderick’s grandmother—seated in a deck chair, her husband standing at her side, one hand on her shoulder, the other tucked loosely into the pocket of his creased white trousers. Lounging with a touch of gaucheness at their feet was the slender fifteen-year-old youth who had grown up and become the Colonel; he looked very like Roderick did now. Seated beside him on a tartan tug were his younger sisters and brothers.
    I looked more closely at this group. Most of them were older children, but the smallest, still an infant, was held in the arms of a fair-haired nursemaid. The child had been in the process of wriggling free when the camera shutter had snapped, so that the nursemaid had tilted back her head in fear of flailing elbows. Her gaze, as a consequence, was drawn from the camera, and her features were blurred.
    Caroline had left her place on the sofa to come and examine the photograph with me. Standing at my side, bending forward, looping up a lock of dry brown hair, she said quietly, ‘Is that your mother, Dr Faraday?’
    I said, ‘I think it might be. Then again—’ Just behind the awkward-looking girl, I noticed now, was another servant, also fair-haired, and in an identical gown and cap. I laughed, embarrassed. ‘It might be this one. I’m not sure.’
    ‘Is your mother still alive? Could you show her the picture,