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this journey, what did I think I would achieve? I clasped a hand under my knee and heaved up my dead leg and banged it down on one of the little tables, making the lamp-bulb jump and blink. What choice did I have, but to go?
    There was a single window in the room, large and long, giving on to a narrow walkway and the siding of the next-door house. Day had fully taken hold now and the window was a big rectangle of wettish sunlight slashed through with diagonals of indigo shadow; against the gloom in which I sat it might have been a painting, garish and flat as a primitive depiction of a tropical scene. I remarked inwardly again how uninsistent was the sunlight in this part of the world, a matt radiance, unvarying and calm, that would fill every square inch of the day like a bright, colourless gas, seeming not to have its source in the sky but to shine out of the very things on which it was falling, the buildings white as sugar cubes, the pastel motor cars, the burnished, black-green trees that lined every street like so many dreamy guardians. I noted too, more immediately, the dustiness of the room. Since Magda's going I had made no attempt at maintaining the place; I was not even sure where the cleaning things were stored, though I thought surely there must be a broom, a mop, a pail…? I had been under the impression that Magda had kept a daily woman, who came when I was not there, but although I waited in on successive mornings, no one turned up. Perhaps I only imagined gleaming-black Jemima, with her rolling eye and stupendous bosom and cotton-white headscarf tied in a top-knot. Then did Magda do all the household chores herself? I do not know why this possibility should be surprising, but it is. Now, with her gone, dust lay everywhere undisturbed, a fine, soft, mole-coloured fur, cut through by a pathway maze that marked out the pattern of my widowed life in the house: door to hall, kitchen to table, bathroom to bedroom. The margins of my world were disappearing, crumbling into this grey penumbra of soft dirt.
    Widowed, or widowered? Is there such a word? Sometimes even still the language puts out a foot for me to trip over.
    In her last years it was a mystery to me how Magda passed the time when I was not at home, as increasingly I made sure not to be. Housework was hardly the whole answer, even for one as slow-moving and deliberate as she always was. Whenever I enquired of her what she had done during the day she would take on a cornered look, holding her face at that three-quarters angle away from me and letting one shoulder droop, so that I felt I was being edged around by a large, wary ruminant. These cringing reactions of hers always annoyed me, although I could not think in what terms exactly to protest, and I would have to content myself with giving her my steeliest, white-lipped smile, drawing air in swiftly through my nostrils with a reptilian hiss that made her flinch. After these exchanges it gratified me that she would go about the house all evening heaving troubled little sighs, or being extra quiet, as if she were listening anxiously for the abatement of my anger. When we were in company together, at some unavoidable party or college reception, I could not resist making dry asides about her, inviting those unwise enough to engage us in conversation to join in my amusement at her incongruous, ill-attired, mute presence by my side. Those witticisms of mine at her expense were at least part of what made her into a public joke; through the years I had overheard her referred to variously as "Vander's Màdchen," and "Mutter Vander," and, mysteriously, "Old Eva." She did not seem to resent these petty public cruelties to which I subjected her, and would even smile a little, shyly, as if in pride at how appallingly I could behave, her large, button-black eyes shining and her upper lip protruding plumply. And of course this happy tolerance infuriated me all the more, and I would want to strike her, as she stood there