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with another weight added to her burden of sorrows, and whenever there was talk of England or things English she would flinch and touch a hand to her cheek in a gesture at once tragic andresigned, as if she were Dido and someone had mentioned the war at Troy. I was not unfond of her. From those early days I remembered her curious, stumping walk and parroty laugh; I could even recall her smell, a powerful brew of cheap scent, mothballs and a dusty reek the source of which I was never able to identify but which was reminiscent of the smell of cretonne curtains. And cigarette smoke, of course; she certainly had the true continental’s dedication to strong tobacco, and wherever she went she trailed an ash-blue cloud behind her, so that when I thought of her from those days I saw a startlingly solid apparition constantly stepping forth from its own aura. She wore sticky, peach-coloured make-up, and rouge, and painted her large mouth, always slightly askew, with purplish lipstick; also she used to dye her hair a brassy shade of yellow and have it curled and set every Saturday morning.
    How pleasant it is, quietly turning over these faded album leaves.
    I don’t know why I allowed myself to go and to see her after all those years. I shy from the sickroom, as who does not, and so much had happened to me and to my life since those by now archaic days that I was not sure I would still speak a language comprehensible to this fading relic of a lost age. I had assumed that she was already dead; after all, everyone else was, both of my parents, and my … and others, all gone into the ground, so how should she, who seemed ancient when they were young, be surviving still? Perhaps it was merely out of curiosity then that I—
    Ah, what a giveaway it is, I’ve noticed it before, the orotund quality that sets in when I begin consciously to dissemble:
and so much had happened to me and to my life since those by now archaic days –
dear, oh dear! Whenever I employ locutions such as that you will know I am inventing. But then, when do I not use such locutions? (And I said that Aunt Corky was a liar!)
    She was living, if that is the way to put it, in a nursing home outside the city called The Cypresses, a big pink and white gazebo of a place set in a semi-circle of those eponymous, blue-black, pointy trees on the side of a hill with a sweeping and slightly vertiginous view of the sea right across to the other side of the bay. There was a tall, creosote-smelling wooden gate with one of those automatic locks with a microphone that squawked at me in no language that I recognised, though I was let in anyway. Tarmac drive, shrubs, a sloping lawn, then suddenly, like an arrow flying straight out of the past, the sharp, prickly smell of something I knew but could not name, some tree or other, eucalyptus, perhaps, yes, I shall say eucalyptus: beautiful word, with that goitrous upbeat in the middle of it like a gulp of grief. I almost stumbled, assailed by the sweetness of forgotten sorrows. Then I saw the house and wanted to laugh, so delicate, spindly and gay was it, so incongruous, with its pillared arches and filigree ironwork and glassed-in verandah throwing off a great reflected sheet of afternoon sunlight. Trust Aunt Corky to end up here! As I followed the curve of the drive the sea was below me, far-off, blue, unmoving, like something imagined, a sea of the mind.
    The verandah door was open and I stepped inside. A few desiccated old bodies were sunning themselves in deckchairs among the potted palms. Rheumed yellowish eyes swivelled and fixed on me. A door with glass panels gave on to an interior umber dimness. I tapped cautiously and waited, lightly breathing. ‘You’ll have to give that a good belt,’ one of the old-timers behind me said quaveringly, and coughed, making a squelching sound like that of a Wellington boot being pulled out of mud. There was a pervasive mild smell of urine and boiled dinners. I knocked again, more forcefully,