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decision alone.
    All that should matter to her now was to assess how far Heather’s relationship with Edmund had gone and how far it was likely to go. She couldn’t let the man marry Heather, perhaps not even let him become engaged to Heather, without telling him. But her heart quailed at the thought of coming out with it, all of it inits bare awfulness, not to mention the part she and her mother had played.
    She and Pamela took their coffee into the living room where Beatrix sat. She leaned a little towards the radio, which stood on the top shelf of a low bookcase, and inclined her head towards it, her ear pressed up against its grey laminated surface. Ismay knew it would be quite useless to suggest turning the radio on a little louder or moving her chair closer. She went up to her mother and kissed the uplifted cheek. Beatrix took no notice of her. She seldom did, though she sometimes shouted out the more violent passages from the Book of Revelation at any of them indiscriminately. None of them was religious and Ismay had never seen her mother read the Bible but now, mysteriously, she was able to quote long passages from it.
    When their father died Heather had suffered intensely. They had both missed him but Ismay not half as much as Heather. Both were too young for the possibility of their mother remarrying to cross their minds. They would just be alone, the three of them, with Pamela coming round to see them quite often or they all going to Pamela’s. The only change that Ismay could remember was when Pamela met a man called Michael Fenster and Beatrix was always saying how nice he was and they were bound to be married.
    But it wasn’t Pamela who got married. It was Beatrix. Unsuitably, incomprehensibly, to the last man in the world anyone would have considered possible.
    Ismay’s mobile rang while she was there. Of course it was Andrew. He had already phoned her twice that day but that wasn’t unusual. Pamela smiled, but fondly, when she realised who it was and heard Ismay say, ‘In an hour then. Love you.’
    Beatrix, as usual, behaved as if there were no one in the room with her and no phone conversation had taken place. She moved her head away from the murmuring radio. ‘Before the throne,’ she said in a mild tone, ‘there was a sea of glass like unto crystal; and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.’
    â€˜Yes, Mum, I know.’ Ismay, who had heard that one before several times, used to wonder about those beasts, apparently with eyes in the back of their heads, but she accepted them now. ‘You don’t need me here, do you?’ she said to Pamela.
    â€˜Absolutely not. You know she’s no trouble while she’s like this. I could go out and be gone for hours and she’d still be sitting there like that. Are you going to meet Andrew somewhere?’
    â€˜At a pub.’
    Pamela talked about her latest date, this time with a man she had met through an Internet chat room ‘for the more mature’. For the first time in years, Ismay thought, she mentioned Michael, only saying she wished she could meet someone like him. Ismay remembered how Michael had treated her, living with her and getting engaged to her and then walking out a week before they were to be married. She kissed her mother’s unresponsive cheek and, while Pamela talked, glanced towards the single glass door. She always did this, she couldn’t help herself.
    Where there was now polished floor with scattered rugs, a small table and wing chair, the bath had once stood up against the wall. Where there was a circular table with painted surface had been the shower cabinet. Under the picture of Madame Bonnard drying herself the basin had stood and the bronze curlicued towel rail. At the end of the bath a cane chair had been there for abathrobe to be draped across its back. It wasn’t always there but it had