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and roared towards the door.

    There was silence from the landings below; he looked down the open stairwell and saw light. Foolish to scream at some cat. What was he, a child? He held the bedside lamp aloft like a weapon, and examined what it was his feet had found. 'Get outta here,' he ordered. The thing did not move. He touched it tentatively, then grabbed it angrily. He needed this bed. The fur was hot; a sick animal. Then he felt the contours of a brick, picked it up, turned it over. A brick in a pocket of fur. Ingenious. He got back into bed and twiddled his toes against it. Began to doze.

    Woke with the moonlight in his eyes and his armpits sticky, convinced yet again that the fur at his feet was alive. Hearing her laugh at him and tell him there was nothing to be afraid of.
    Wide awake now, with a sudden urge to take a shower, trying to remember what either the cardinal or the tweed suit and tattoos had said about showers. There wasn't one; there was a bath, next the kitchen. He was hot; his passion for hygiene had been subsumed by exhaustion and now he felt dirty. He put the socks back on, took a towel and set off to explore.

    Down, down down. . . Looking towards the gaslight in the hall, he stopped on the third landing, arrested by sound. There was the lightest possible patter of feet, coming from a room he had not seen. The figure, tall but slight with a mass of pale hair, stood on the landing below, indecisive for a matter of seconds, paused as if the last flight was just too much, then slid down the final banisters in a flurry of white gown. There was an almost imperceptible thump in the landing.
    The figure blew on both her hands, flexed her fingers briefly and disappeared.

    Henry's warm feet had taken root in the spot. He seemed to have stood where he was for an hour, while the feet grew cold again, before he continued down the stairs, clutching his towel, rubbing his eyes with it, trying to dispel the illusion of what he had thought he had seen.

    There was a fine Indian shawl draped over the newel post. It was incredibly soft to the touch, as soft as the fur in his bed. It could have been Francesca's shawl; the one he had given her. Or the one at the bottom of his suitcase he had bought as a gift. From the depths of the house, he could hear the sound of running water and singing. Feeling awkward, Henry Evans went back to bed.

    The fur was still warm. He moved it level with his heart.

    Don't talk now.

    It is always warm in here. As warm as a hospital, or a baby's bedroom. I always loved children, which seems a trite thing for a teacher to say. Before he died, my father discouraged teaching as a choice of career because he said it would wreck my perception of childish innocence and stop me from being able to play. I was preparing to follow his advice (I usually did and he was usually right) when he died. I've been yearning for his advice ever since. It seems so short a step from being the one who was given the wise advice to being the one who is relied upon to provide it.
    I wonder what he would think of me now, and I think I know. We all hark back to childhood here; it is consistently and often accurately blamed for everything. Not in my case, except insofar as it gave me the burning ambition to provide for other children the same sort of security that was given to me.
    We would sit by the window, my cousin and I attempting to learn verse. There are things worse than learning verse, my father said. Harry might not have been able to do that; he liked the sea and he wanted to learn to fish. I tried to teach him nursery rhymes, the old-fashioned, meaningless kind, because I love things which do not change, like the sea.
    There was an old woman who swallowed a spider
    That wriggled and wriggled and wriggled inside her;
    She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
    I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
    Perhaps she'll die.

    Nursery rhymes make me think of birthday teas and I must not. I've been warned that