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might easily have done, she was over seventy then.
    But for the diaries all these people wouldn’t have been there. Swanny Kjær (always mispronounced by the media) would have lived and died in obscurity. Who would have been at that woman’s funeral, the woman she might have been? I, certainly, John or Charles but not both, Mr Webber her solicitor and one or two Willow Road neighbours. Harry Duke’s daughter and perhaps her daughter. That’s all. As it is, we had the media and the press. Yes, there is a difference. The media’s representatives would call themselves her friends and perhaps they were, those publishers’ editors and publishers’ publicity people, a crowd from the BBC, a producer and a head of features from the independent television company that made the series. The press were there with recording devices and cameras to put it all in the papers.
    How would it have been if they could have seen her in her last days? What a story within a story that would have been. If they could have seen her divided into two by some strange illness of the mind, less and less herself as the other one took over. As it was, some of the young ones had tended to confuse her with her mother. 1905 was as far in the distant past to them as 1880 was. To them she was more the author than the editor of the diaries.
    Their pale unmarked faces glazed with boredom as we processed across the damp grass to the grave someone had hygienically lined with astroturf. After the coffin was lowered one of the Danish cousins, come here all the way from Roskilde, threw in a handful of earth. I identified the woman who followed suit as Margaret Hammond’s daughter, but who the rest were, soiling their sleek gloves with damp London clay, I had no idea. A good many of the women were dressed more for a wedding than a funeral. Their high heels sank into the mushy turf. As we left the graveside it began to rain on their hats.
    I took Mr Webber back to Willow Road in my car and the rest followed—those that were invited, that is. I’d asked her agent and her publisher and the producer but I couldn’t face giving wine and sandwiches to that mob of publicity girls and secretaries, all of them longing to see the inside of the house where Swanny Kjær had lived.
    It’s a nice house, I’d always liked it, but I’d never seen anything remarkable about it until Torben told me it was looked on as one of the best examples of thirties architecture in London. They moved into it when it was new, a few years before I was born. Now, as I unlocked the front door and stepped over the threshold, I caught Mr Webber’s eye. Or, rather, as I tried to catch his, he avoided mine. His face seemed more than usually impassive. I thought, do solicitors really read wills after funerals or is that something that happens only in detective stories?
    Mrs Elkins had prepared food and Sandra who had been Swanny’s secretary had appeared from somewhere and was organizing the drinks. Smoked salmon, white wine and sparkling water—it is always the same wherever you go. I spotted the two nurses, Carol and Clare, and then the relative whose name I couldn’t remember was at my side, telling me he remembered seeing Swanny at his own grandfather’s funeral and how impressed he’d been by the look of her, her height and her beauty.
    ‘I couldn’t believe that was a great-aunt. I was only twelve but I could see how elegant she was and how much better-dressed than the other women.’
    ‘She was different from the rest of the family.’
    ‘In more ways than one,’ he said.
    I knew then that he didn’t know. His father hadn’t told him because his father hadn’t told him. Ken, I remembered, had never believed a word of it. He said suddenly, surprising me, ‘You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that Asta and Rasmus having all those children, they’d have a great many descendants by now, but there’s only us. There’s only me to carry the name on. Aunt Swanny didn’t have any