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it.
    Early in January 1953, Miss Buss reported that Olivia’s health was failing, a month later that she was not expected to live more than a few days. It was Miss Buss who suggested Tony should go down rather than me: she thought I might upset her patient. I didn’t contest the point: I was grateful to be spared a final meeting.
    So it was Tony who was sitting at Olivia’s bedside when she died. I stayed at home in Wells and played with my children.
    I remember thinking, while he was away, of what Olivia’s death would mean: the final sundering of my links with the past, the final proof that it no longer existed. I had succeeded in forgetting not merely the misery I’d endured at Meongate, but the hopes for some kind of vindication I’d vested in its many secrets. Now I wanted

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    none of it. I’d manufactured a new life, embodied in you and Ronald, and had no use for reminders of the old.
    As for Meongate itself, I wish now I’d scoured its rooms for relics of my family, reminders of my parents, tokens of my past, but all I felt at the time was an overwhelming sense of relief that a line could at last be drawn under that desolate phase of my life. I think I might not even have attended Olivia’s funeral had Tony not insisted that I ought. He assumed I would inherit the house under the will and wanted to be on hand to arrange its disposal.
    Old Mayhew had come out of retirement to act as Olivia’s executor. She’d requested cremation, like her third husband, whose son was the only other mourner. I hadn’t seen Walter Payne for nineteen years and was taken aback by the eerie, unwholesome replica of his father that he’d become. For all his efforts at ingratiation, I could scarcely disguise my revulsion.
    Afterwards, we drove to Meongate, arriving before either Mayhew or Payne. Mentally, I was already prepared for this last visit to the house, for such I was determined it would be, but it was not enough to prevent my hand shaking as I opened the door and walked in. In the hall, a row of tea chests and packing cases stood, stacked to overflowing with the portable contents of the house. Miss Buss emerged from the passage and greeted us with cold civility.
    “What’s the meaning of this?” said Tony, gesturing at the chests.
    “Mr. Mayhew’s instructions. I was to have everything ready for removal.”
    “It seems indecently hasty.”
    “I didn’t feel it was for me to comment.”
    “Mr. and Mrs. Galloway.” Mayhew came in behind us. “I hoped to be here to receive you myself. Would you care for some tea?
    Perhaps you’d make some, Miss Buss. Shall we go into the drawing room?”
    I meekly followed, shocked into silence by the echoes and associations that Meongate had preserved for me, my mind drawn towards a similar occasion more than twenty years before, when I’d learnt that Lord Powerstock had disinherited me. But Tony’s mind was very much on the present—and he spoke for me. “Miss Buss said you’d told her to commence packing everything up.” “That is correct.”
     
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    “On whose authority?”
    Reaching the drawing room, Mayhew ushered us in and closed the door. Retirement had not diminished the inscrutability of his thin-lipped, professional smile. “Regrettably, Mr. Payne is unable to join us. I thought we might therefore dispense with a formal reading of the will.” Tony was growing angry. “Do you mind answering my question?”
    “I was merely passing on Mr. Payne’s instructions, Mr. Galloway.
    He is co-executor—and sole beneficiary.”
    “What?”
    “Lady Powerstock left her entire estate to Mr. Walter Payne, her step-son and closest relative. The bequest amounts to this house and its contents, most of the capital being either exhausted or spoken for. I might add that the grounds have been considerably diminished by sales of land to neighbouring farmers.” I was sitting on the sofa by now, letting my gaze flit