quick last look round, opened the door and locked it behind her. The banisters were icy cold. The palm tree which had been the one jealously guarded splash of colour in the house — and which had been plainly beyond rescue even before her departure — was now most certainly past resuscitation, having frozen to death in the winter. There was a suffocating silence around her. She had arrived. A slip of paper with a message on it had been stuck behind the handle of the door. She took the briefest glance at it, pulled a face then entered, turning the keys in both locks and immediately engaging the safety chain. She leaned against the door and closed her eyes. ‘Thank heaven! I’m home.’ The flat was, as people say, the well-deserved fruit of several years of careful work. When her second husband of blessed memory died suddenly and tragically some five years ago as the result of a stroke and she had had to bury him too, and then, not much later, when her relationship with her son from the first marriage, a boy ‘always in flight, always on the move; with never any improvement in prospect’—resembling in this his father, from whom he clearly inherited the heavy burden of his tendency to depravity — also became untenable and he moved into a sublet, not only did she find she could reconcile herself to the unavoidable, she even felt a little easier in her mind, for however depressed she was by the consciousness of her loss (she had, after all, lost two husbands and — since he no longer existed for her — a son as well), she could clearly see that there was no longer any reason why, at the age of fifty-eight, having always been ‘one or other man’s fool’, she should not at last live entirely for herself. She therefore exchanged — at a notably handsome profit — the family house, which was now too big for her, for a ‘darling’ little flat in the city centre (with intercom in the gateway), and, for the first time in her life, while her acquaintances accorded her unusual respect on account of her loss of two husbands and only tactfully mentioned the son who was generally known to be no good, she, who had up till then owned no more than some bedlinen and the clothes she stood up in, set about the full enjoyment of her own property. She purchased soft imitation-Persian rugs for her floors, tulle curtains and ‘gaily coloured’ blinds for her windows, then, getting rid of the old cumbersome wall unit, installed a new one; heeding the smart advice of the locally highly popular magazine