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amid the press of people in her overcoat and her broad, flat shoes, holding a glass of wine she kept forgetting to sip, contentedly isolated in the unfathomable depths of herself, my big, slow, enigmatic mate whom for the best part of forty years I must have loved or else I would have left.
    I stood up from the couch and went into the bedroom again, where I was startled to discover that I had already packed a suitcase. I must have done it in the early hours, when I was drunk. I had no memory of it. I recalled telephoning the airline, and my surprise at being answered not by a machine but by a wide-awake and irritatingly bright human voice – I cannot adjust to the world's increasing nightlessness – but after that diere was only the fuzzy, faintly humming blank of inebriated sleep. Perhaps it was more than the bourbon, I thought; perhaps my mind was going.
    How would one detect the encroachment of senility, when what is being attacked is the very faculty of detection itself? Would there be intervals of respite, flashes of frightful clarity in the midst of maunderings, moments of shivery recognition before the looking-glass, goggling in horror at the dribbled-on shirt-front, the piss-stained flies? Probably not; probably I shall shuffle into senility all unaware. The onset of extreme old age as I am experiencing it is a gradual process of accumulation, a slow settling as of soft grey stuff, like the dust in the untended house, under which the once-sharp edges of my self are blurring. There is an opposite process, too, by which things grow rigid and immovable, turning my stools into ingots of hot iron, drying out my joints until they grate on each other like pumice stones, making my toenails hard as horn. Things out in the world, the supposedly inanimate objects, join in the conspiracy against me. I misplace things, lose things, my spectacles, the book I was reading a minute ago, Mama Vander's redeemed silver pill-box – there is that bibelot again – that I kept as a talisman for more than half a century but that now seems to be gone, fallen into a crevice in time. Objects topple on me from high shelves, items of furniture plant themselves in my path. I cut myself repeatedly, with razor, fruit knife, scissors; hardly a week passes when I do not find myself some morning hunched over the handbasin fumblingly trying to unpeel a plaster with my teeth while blood from a sliced finger drips with shocking matter-of-factness on to the porcelain. Are these mishaps not of a different order from heretofore? I was never adroit, even in the quickest years of youth, but I wonder if my clumsiness now might be something new, not merely a physical unhandiness but a radical form of discontinuity, the outward manifestation of lapses and final closures occurring deep in the brain. The smallest things are always the surest warning, if one but heeded them. The first sign I registered of Magda's malady was the sudden craving that she developed for children's food of all kinds, popcorn and potato chips, toffee bars, sherbet bags, penny lollipops.
    In the street outside a car horn brayed; for me the sound of the car horn is that great republic's most characteristic call, full-throated, peremptory, with an undertone of amused mockery. I snatched up my suitcase and my stick and lurched to the door, like a long-term convict who has heard the dead-bolts shooting.
    The taxi driver was a caricature immigrant from the East, bearish and taciturn, a Russian, most likely, as so many of them seem to be in these newly liberated days. He took my bag unwillingly and turned and lumbered with it down the porch steps. There are times when that entire coastal strip seems a film set and everyone on it a character actor. In the street the lush trees shone in the sun and there were bright blooms in every front yard, yet even now, in this early morning at the height of spring, the air had a musty, used-up feel to it, another effect of the general lack of weather, and no