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shapely strength of her body beneath her coat, of which her body now was a sad, prostrated parody.
    The windows were open behind the curtains and, as her wing of the hospital overlooked a park, there floated in the smell of cut grass, the occasional ricochet of playful voices and the gentle
pok-pok
of a tennis game in progress. It was as though she had expressly arranged the circumstances of her death so that they might seem the least fearsome, the least inimical to life.
    She had already displayed, even as her days became numbered, her contempt for the fear of death and her disdain for those who fell prey to it—who lived their lives,as she put it, as if they deserved “a special pass.” It was an impressive and impressively timed demonstration. Never before had I heard her enlarge so much on her family, my forebears, about whom, so it would seem, a mixture of shame and scorn had hitherto kept her quiet. It was as if, now the end was near, she was driven reluctantly back to the other extremity of her life, to her origins and ancestry.
    She had scoffed at Sam’s recent researches in this area, his absurd pedigree-hunting, but also humoured him, as she always humoured Sam, as you might indulge a child. But then Sam, for all his businessman’s bravado and native robustness, had a different attitude to death from my mother, as both she and I knew well from times gone by. If I had wanted to confirm it (and gain a little more cheap revenge), I need only have stepped out of that hospital room and along the corridor, as indeed I did later, to where Sam was waiting (I was first, he was next), an expression on his face, despite the mellow warmth of that evening, as if he were sitting in a room made of ice.
    I’m glad death took him quickly and unannounced and, as it were,
in flagrante
.
    For all her vocal powers, for all her capacity to chatter, squeal and, sometimes, shriek, my mother was never an eager
raconteuse
. I think she regarded reminiscence and tale-telling as a kind of weakness, an avoidance of the central issue of life, which was to wring the most out of the present. I never received from her, any more than I did from my father—perhaps this is why I became such a bookworm—my due dose of bedtime stories. Yet at the very end I was suddenly treated to a final and, so it seemed, irrepressible bedtime story—me, this time, at the bedside—of her remembered sires. And though the story had its moral, though she seemed to summon these ghostsonly to arraign them for their folly (rather than to say she would soon be joining them), I wish she hadn’t left it so late. I never knew they were such a colourful bunch.
    There was, first of all, my grandfather on my mother’s side, George Rawlinson, who died before I was born and of whom I knew only that he had been a medical man and, guessing from my mother’s silence, that some misfortune best not talked about had befallen him. He was in fact a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, before whom had once lain a brilliant career in the then still-infant neurological branch of his profession. A pioneer brain surgeon, no less.
    Who has heard of George Rawlinson? Who has heard of the Rawlinson Forceps, to which George, vainly wooing posterity, gave his name and on whose subcranial purpose I would rather not dwell (though my mother did not shrink from describing it). My grandfather’s path to eminence had seemed altogether assured until one day in 1923, when either his sound judgement or his sure fingers failed him just once. In came a sick but restorable young man; out came a permanent vegetable—who just happened to be the darling son of a Lord. Result, by stages: scandal, divorce, penury.
    Then there was George’s older brother, my great-uncle, Rupert Rawlinson: Major, formerly Colonel Rawlinson; “Ratty” Rawlinson, as he was apparently known to his intimates—“Uncle Ratty” as he was known to my mother. It was in some lesser-known campaign of the Great War—Macedonia?