led but a safe one, as any life must be that is
without fear or hope or passion or love or change or anxiety about
money. The house was very large, on three floors, innumerable rooms
opening out of square hallways or long passages, with a great grand
staircase consisting of four flights. When it seemed certain Gwendolen
would never marry, her father had three rooms on the top floor converted
into a selfcontained flat for her, with its own hallway, two rooms, and
akitchen. The lack of a bathroom had nothing to do with her
disinclination to move in. "What was the point of being up there when
her father was always down in the drawing room and always, it seemed,
hungry for his meals or thirsty for a cup of tea? Her unwillingness to go
up to the top floor started at that point. She only went up there if she
had lost something and had exhausted all other places where it might be.
Nothing had been painted in the rest of the house and no other rooms
had been modernized. Electricity had been installed, but not everywhere,
and the place had been rewired in the eighties because the existing
wiring was dangerous. But where the old cables had been taken out and
the new ones inserted, the walls had been plastered up over the holes
but no redecoration had been done. Gwendolen said herself she wasn't
much of a cleaner. Cleaning bored her. She was happiest when sitting
about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in
doing anything else unless you had to. When she shopped for food, she
kept to the old shops as long as she could, and on the departure of the
grocer and the butcher and the fishmonger, she went to the new
supermarkets without registering that the change had affected her. She
liked her food well enough and had made few changes to her diet since
she was a young girl, except that with no one to cook for her she barely
ate hot meals.
Every afternoon, after lunch, she lay down and rested, reading herself
to sleep. She had a radio but no television. The house was full of books,
learned works and ancient novels, old bound copies of the National
Geographic
and
Punch,
encyclopediaslong
obsolete,
dictionaries
published in 1906, such collections as The Bedside Esquire and The
Mammoth Book of Thrillers,Ghosts and Mysteries. She had read most of
them and some she had reread. She had acquaintances she had met
through the St. Blaise and Latimer Residents' Association, and they
called themselves her friends. Such relationships are difficult for an only
child who has never been to school. She had been away on holidays with
the professor, even to foreign countries, and thanks to him she spoke
good French and Italian, though with no chance of using either except for
reading Montaigne and D'Annunzio, but she had never had a boyfriend.
While she had visited the theater and the cinema, she had never been to
a smart restaurant or a club or a dance or a party. She sometimes said
to herself that, like Wordsworth's Lucy, "she dwelt among the untrodden
ways," but it was said rather with relief than unhappiness.
The professor lived on into extreme old age, finally dying at the age of
ninety-four. For the past few years of his life he had been incontinent
and unable to walk, but his brain remained powerful and his demands
undiminished. With the occasional assistance of a district nurse, even
more occasionally that of a paid carer, Gwendolen looked after him. She
never complained. She never showed signs of weariness. She changed his
incontinence pads and stripped his bed, thinking only while she did so of
getting through it as fast as possible so that she could get back to her
book. His meals were brought and the tray later removed in the same
spirit. He had brought her up apparently with no other purpose than
that she should housekeepf or him while he was middle-aged, care for
him when he was old, and read to keep herself out of mischief.
There had been moments in his life