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the carpet. It drips off the chimneypiece and the vast, dangling light-bulb. The room is empty. No one, nothing there. Except, yes, in the centre of it, yes, the pushchair. Smashed, crushed. It might have been run over by a lorry or a train .
    He woke, sat up in the bed, and then scrabbled out of it, frenziedly pushing away the bedclothes as though they too were soaked in blood. That man, with his dark, stern, narrow face, must have killed them both. Must have. He did. Why did I never realise? Why? Why ?
    Over breakfast he mused on the dream, as he sipped at an acrid cup of instant coffee made, as always, with two teaspoons, not one, from the jar. Yesterday, on his visit to Safeway, he had forgotten to buy any bread and so he had had to toast a stale crust originally intended for the birds. He now constantly dreamed, so that his sleeping life had long since become far more filled with incident than his waking one. He was convinced that through those confused, often terrible night-time visions a voice – perhaps the voice of the person that he once was, perhaps the voice of the person that he was still to become, perhaps even the voice of some guardian angel or even devil – was trying to make itself intelligible to him. Yes, that brute must have killed them both . He nodded to himself, cup to lips, with a lurching, giddying sensation of mingled horror and grief.
    Later, in a crescendo of dread, he once again mounted the stairs to the attic. He half expected to find it as in his dream – splashed with blood, empty but for the pushchair, the pushchair smashed. But it was all as it always was: dimly lit by a single forty-watt bulb, dusty, crowded with the debris of times long gone.
    He was breathless from the ascent and his legs were trembling. He sank down on to an old cabin trunk, so heavy that it had ceased to be used when porters had ceased to exist, and gasped for air. He put out a hand to the handle of the pushchair and let it rest there. Then, slowly, he began to push it back and forth, back and forth, as he used to do when he and the child were waiting for Lidia’s return. It squeaked and it creaked, the two sounds alternating at regular intervals. It was that regularity that eventually brought him first consolation and then an overwhelming sense of both fatigue and repose. His eyes closed. The hand ceased to push and pull. The pushchair was stationary and silent.

The Interrogations
    H e had been lively on the first day. He had asked me to prop him up on the pillows – ‘No, no! She can do it’ he irritably told the black nurse, who had just taken his temperature and blood pressure and was about to start on the pillows. ‘Let my daughter do it. She’s strong. She’s got plenty of time and you’ve made it clear that you’ve far too much on your hands already.’
    With a sigh and a frown, the nurse left the room.
    â€˜She’s always in a hurry, that one. All the nurses here are in a hurry. All of them seem to be either black or Australians. I prefer the Australians. I hate it when that woman touches me. I can smell her when she’s close. Why do they all have that peculiar smell?’
    I was appalled. But, as others so often reminded me and as I so often reminded myself, one had to make allowances for a man of eighty-four. He belonged to a different era, almost to a different species, at once more jovial and more brutal than ours. He had also worked for most of his life as jute-merchant in Bombay, with large domestic and office staffs of Indians, whom he had treated as serfs. Once again I told myself that I mustn’t ‘lose my rag’ – as he would often put it when I lost my temper with him. So all I said, as though making a joke of it, was: ‘Oh, father, please! You must get over these prehistoric attitudes of yours.’
    â€˜You know by now that I have no use for this political correctness. I say what I think. I’ve always done so.