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that she existed only as a threat to the life-thread to which Great Granny Webster clung so tenaciously. My grandmother was obviously seen as a repugnant topic, and only as such could she still ripple across the consciousness of her ancient mother. Great Granny Webster had arranged her whole life so that she would very rarely be confronted by topics she found undesirable. I never once dared to bring up the subject of my grandmother. As a guest of Great Granny Webster I found that I soon became dominated by the sheer determination of her wishes. I steered clear of any subjects that might displease her, fearing, just as she did, that distasteful topics might actually endanger her. She never referred to it, but all the time I was with her she managed to convey a silent warning that if one was to say anything incorrect and tactless it might be perilously bad for her heart.
    It seemed to be her heart that Great Granny Webster really lived for. Her own heart was all she cared about. She had produced three generations of descendants and lived to know that none of them could have the slightest importance to her, any more than all the leaves that have flown yearly from its branches can have much importance to an aged oak.
    Her heart was all she valued. She was like a miser in the way she kept perpetual guard over it, counting every step she took, saving herself from physical exercise in the same way that she rationed food. For her own heart she was prepared to suffer. If she was excruciatingly bored by all the hours she forced herself to remain inactive in her chair she felt compensated by her own thrifty feeling that all the while she was hoarding the energy of her heart like someone hoarding fuel.
    If she hated living in Hove that hardly mattered to someone whose primary interest was the pampering of the invisible organ that lay behind the bones of her thin flat chest. There was very little noise in Hove. Hove was a very quiet place indeed. Hove had very good sea air. Hove was as good a place as any for someone who only asked to be allowed to watch over the welfare of her own heart as if she had been entrusted with some kind of sacred mission.
    When I first arrived to stay with Great Granny Webster she had told me that the only human being she had spoken to for months was Richards. I knew that when I left her house she would revert to the dispiriting sole company of Richards without hardly registering that I had been there and had gone.
    If Great Granny Webster had been lonely in the past and would be just as lonely in the future, I had little doubt that she would manage to bear it bravely. She would remind herself that she had been skilful at avoiding all the pressures that could be imposed on her by human company—pressures that could only be obnoxious to her because of the strain they might put on her aged and egotistical heart.
    Sometimes, sitting in Great Granny Webster’s deadening presence, I would think about my grandmother, and the eccentricities of that unknown, faceless woman would begin to be much more intelligible to me. If one had been doomed to be born and raised under the teak-like auspices of Great Granny Webster’s affections, it might be quite easy to develop a predilection for talking to the trees.
    â€œI am a fighter,” Great Granny Webster told me. “I have no respect for people who don’t put up a good fight in life.”
    It was true that in a sense she was a fighter, but I couldn’t respect her for it. All that had kept her so long on this earth appeared to be her inhuman immobility. She often seemed to be trying to use her hard chair as camouflage, as if she hoped that Death might enter her drawing-room and leave again, tricked by her tactics—that he would think he had already taken her, she showed so much less sign of life than her wooden chair.
    â€œYou are very quiet for a young person,” she suddenly remarked one day.
    Indeed I had long ago given up trying to