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children, Charles hasn’t—and you haven’t, have you?’
    ‘I’ve never been married,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, sorry.’ He blushed a fine rose red.
    That reminded me of how young he must be, that and saying he was only twelve when Ken died. He looked young, of course he did, but his clothes weren’t a young man’s. Until now I’d never seen anyone under fifty in a stranglehold stiff collar and a dark overcoat with a waist. His hair was neatly parted and cut short at back and sides. The blush mantled his face for a good half-minute and by the time it faded Mr Webber was back by my side. He seemed to have constituted himself my protector.
    He stayed until everyone else had gone. I didn’t really notice until they had gone and he was still there. A woman in a big black hat on her way to the door had asked me if there were any more diaries to come and would I be editing them, and another in a grey fur hat, less well-informed, wanted to know (flatteringly, I suppose) if I was Swanny’s granddaughter.
    Mr Webber and I were left alone among Swanny’s things. He said, with great and unexpected sensitivity, articulate as ever, ‘When someone famous dies people tend to forget that those left behind may well feel the same degree of sorrow as, in a like situation, do the nearest and dearest of some obscure person.’
    I said he put it very well.
    ‘They suppose,’ he said, ‘that the well-springs of grief have been desiccated by the fierce light that beats upon the high shore of the world.’
    I smiled uncertainly at him, for that wasn’t at all the way I had thought of Swanny, though many may have. Then we sat down and he took some papers out of his briefcase and told me she had left me everything she had.
    Though the will had yet to be proved, I could have stayed there. Who was there to object? Instead, I went home. To have remained after the news I had had would have overwhelmed me, I should have entered I think one of those strange nervous crises in which it is impossible to keep still, one must wander from room to room, twisting one’s hands, pacing, needing someone to tell it all to but not knowing who that someone might be.
    At home was better. I sat down quietly. I asked myself why I had never thought of this but had supposed I should get a small legacy and the rest would go to the Roskilde relatives. There had been a message from Swanny for me in the will. Mr Webber had read it: ‘… my niece Ann Eastbrook because she is Asta Westerby’s granddaughter in the female line and the only living woman descended from her’. He hadn’t commented on this and neither had I. All it said for me then was that Swanny had loved her mother, which I knew already, and that John and his children were excluded because their descent was through Uncle Ken.
    I should be rich. An authors’ researcher, which is what I was, leads an interesting life but doesn’t make much money. I could, if I wished, go and live in Willow Road. I could give up work if I chose, though I didn’t think I would so choose. I would have money and stock to the extent of about half a million. There would be royalties for years to come. I would possess the four-poster that perhaps, or perhaps not, had belonged to Pauline Bonaparte, the black oak table carved with oak leaves, the Head of a Girl , the ormolu clock, the Bing and Grøndahl Christmas wall-plates, each one different and each one dated, from 1899 to 1986, though excluding the most valuable, the first one of 1898.
    Indeed, I possessed them already. They had been mine since Swanny’s death. Already I owned the limited edition of three differently shaped vases, all white and embossed with crowns and the Royal Arms of Denmark, created for the coronation of Christian X and presented to Torben’s parents on their marriage. The Flora Danica dinner service was mine now and so was the Carl Larsson that hung in Swanny’s drawing room, of the parents and children having tea under the birch trees.
    The