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people. You can’t expect them to be interested in a lot of nuts.’ I at once became anxious to dissociate myself from these people, although theirghosts lingered distressfully in my mind. ‘I’m the one who should be writing a novel,’ she continued. ‘If you only knew what my life was like before I came down in the world.’ And she would tell me about her schooldays in Switzerland, and the years she spent in Paris when she first came into her money, and the beautiful estate in Jamaica to which she returned each winter, to her adoring and handsome father whom she accompanied on his travels and who was so pleased to have such a colourful daughter on his arm. ‘People took us for lovers,’ she used to say, and she never really got over his death and the news about his impending bankruptcy. ‘Poor Daddy,’ she said. ‘He died just in time.’ But she could hardly bear to think of the days when the estate had had to be put up for auction, and although she had managed to salvage some of the furniture and bring it to England, she hated seeing it in its present setting.
    I examined this furniture with some respect. I don’t know exactly what I expected to see, but it was certainly not these handsome and hefty Edwardian pieces, walnut tallboys and tables, olive green button-backed armchairs and sofas, all crammed into the mournfully regular little rooms of their Chelsea flat. Although I could not admire Alix’s furniture, I registered the fact that it had a more distinguished lineage than my own, and I could see why the zig-zag rugs and the wrought-iron lampstandards of Maida Vale had inspired her to mirth. The difference between us was that she clung to her memories and allowed them to overshadow the present, whereas I tried hard to disown mine and looked forward to a time when they would not trouble me. Then I would shed my surroundings, like a butterfly sheds a chrysalis, and I would fly towards a future which was not lumbered with other people’s relics. But Alix strove to preserve a past which was not only past but also out of date, since she now had her life with Nick. Sometimes I could feel herweighing them both in the balance, as if … as if they had let her down. It was difficult for me to understand this, although I could only admire her exigence. Her eyes would narrow when she saw Nick’s books on the desk which had once belonged to her father, and she always kept the curtains half drawn because she could not stand the metal window frames, or the view of the houses across the street. Her sitting room was always half in darkness, which seemed appropriate to her tigerish nature. All this I wrote down in my diary.
    And the little details too. How her black maid, Melanie, used to wash and iron her nightgown every morning. How the houseboys always poured hot water into the fragile teacups and emptied them and dried them carefully before serving the tea. The beautiful tropical fruits they had for breakfast, on the veranda. ‘You can get mangoes in Harrods,’ I offered, trying to be consolatory, but she merely tossed her head. And I could imagine her hatred of the cold grey streets and her contempt for Nick’s depressed patients, and the impatience of the wealthy sugar planter’s daughter as the boring colourless days succeeded each other, with only colourless people like myself to visit her. She seemed to be disappointed in her friends as well, in some indefinable way. And I, who was merely a latter-day recruit, felt permanently on probation.
    Yet I was in my way necessary. I was an audience and an admirer; I relieved some of her frustration; I shared her esteem for her own superiority; and I was loyal and well-behaved and totally uncritical. Yet she found me dull, intrinsically dull, simply because I was loyal and well-behaved and uncritical. And I knew that she would always prefer people like her friend Maria, whom she could insult and scandalize, whom she would defame and snub, only to have it all done