Tails of Wonder and Imagination

CAT IN GLASS Nancy Etchemendy

I was once a respectable woman. Oh, yes, I know that’s what they all say when they’ve reached a pass like mine: I was well educated, well traveled, had lovely children and a nice husband with a good financial mind. How can anyone have fallen so far, except one who deserved to anyway? I’ve had time aplenty to consider the matter, lying here eyeless in this fine hospital bed while the stench of my wounds increases. The matrons who guard my room are tight-lipped. But I heard one of them whisper yesterday, when she thought I was asleep, “Jesus, how could anyone do such a thing?” The answer to all these questions is the same. I have fallen so far, and I have done what I have done, to save us each and every one from the Cat in Glass.

My entanglement with the cat began fifty-two years ago, when my sister Delia was attacked by an animal. It happened on an otherwise ordinary spring afternoon. There were no witnesses. My father was still in his office at the college, and I was dawdling along on my way home from first grade at Chesly Girls’ Day School, counting cracks in the sidewalk. Delia, younger than I by three years, was alone with Fiona, the Irish woman who kept house for us. Fiona had just gone outside for a moment to hang laundry. She came in to check on Delia and discovered a scene of almost unbelievable carnage. Oddly, she had heard no screams.

As I ran up the steps and opened our door, I heard screams indeed. Not Delia’s—for Delia had nothing left to scream with—but Fiona’s, as she stood in the front room with her hands over her eyes.

She couldn’t bear the sight. Unfortunately, six-year-olds have no such compunction. I stared long and hard, sick and trembling, yet entranced.

From the shoulders up, Delia was no longer recognizable as a human being. Her throat had been shredded and her jaw ripped away. Most of her hair and scalp were gone. There were long, bloody furrows in the creamy skin of her arms and legs. The organdy pinafore in which Fiona had dressed her that morning was clotted with blood, and the blood was still coming. Some of the walls were even spattered with it where the animal, whatever it was, had worried her in its frenzy. Her fists and heels banged jerkily against the floor. Our pet dog, Freddy, lay beside her, also bloody, but quite limp. Freddy’s neck was broken.

I remember slowly raising my head—I must have been in shock by then—and meeting the bottomless gaze of the glass cat that sat on the hearth. Our father, a professor of art history, was very proud of this sculpture, for reasons I did not understand until many years later. I only knew it was valuable and we were not allowed to touch it. A chaotic feline travesty, it was not the sort of thing you would want to touch anyway. Though basically catlike in shape, it bristled with transparent threads and shards. There was something at once wild and vaguely human about its face. I had never liked it much, and Delia had always been downright frightened of it. On this day, as I looked up from my little sister’s ruins, the cat seemed to glare at me with bright, terrifying satisfaction.

I had experienced, a year before, the thing every child fears most: the death of my mother. It had given me a kind of desperate strength, for I thought, at the tender age of six, that I had survived the worst life had to offer. Now, as I returned the mad stare of the glass cat, it came to me that I was wrong. The world was a much more evil place than I had ever imagined, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Delia died officially in the hospital a short time later. After a cursory investigation, the police laid the blame on Freddy. I still have the newspaper clipping, yellow now, and held together with even yellower cellophane tape. “The family dog lay dead near the victim, blood smearing its muzzle and forepaws. Sergeant Morton theorizes that the dog, a pit bull terrier and member of a breed specifically developed for vicious fighting, turned killer and attacked its tragic young owner. He also suggests that the child, during the death struggle, flung the murderous beast away with enough strength to break its neck.”

Even I, a little girl, knew that this “theory” was lame; the neck of a pit bull is an almost impossible thing to break, even by a large, determined man. And Freddy, in spite of his breeding, had always been gentle, even protective, with us. Simply stated, the police were mystified, and this was the closest thing to a rational explanation they could produce. As far as they were concerned, that was the end of the matter. In fact, it had only just begun.

I was shipped off to my Aunt Josie’s house for several months. What Father did during this time, I never knew, though I now suspect he spent those months in a sanitarium. In the course of a year, he had lost first his wife and then his daughter. Delia’s death alone was the kind of outrage that might permanently have unhinged a lesser man. But a child has no way of knowing such things. I was bitterly angry at him for going away. Aunt Josie, though kind and good-hearted, was a virtual stranger to me, and I felt deserted. I had nightmares in which the glass cat slunk out of its place by the hearth and across the countryside. I would hear its hard claws ticking along the floor outside the room where I slept. At those times, half awake and screaming in the dark, no one could have comforted me except Father.

When he did return, the strain of his suffering showed. His face was thin and weary and his hair dusted with new gray, as if he had stood outside too long on a frosty night. On the afternoon of his arrival, he sat with me on Aunt Josie’s sofa, stroking my cheek while I cuddled gladly, my anger at least temporarily forgotten in the joy of having him back.

His voice, when he spoke, was as tired as his face. “Well, my darling Amy, what do you suppose we should do now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I assumed that, as always in the past, he had something entertaining in mind—that he would suggest it and then we would do it.

He sighed. “Shall we go home?”

I went practically rigid with fear. “Is the cat still there?”

Father looked at me, frowning slightly. “Do we have a cat?”

I nodded. “The big glass one.”

He blinked, then made the connection. “Oh, the Chelichev, you mean? Well… I suppose it’s still there. I hope so, in fact.”

I clung to him, scrambling halfway up his shoulders in my panic. I could not manage to speak. All that came out of my mouth was an erratic series of whimpers.

“Shhhh, shhhh,” said Father. I hid my face in the starched white cloth of his shirt, and heard him whisper, as if to himself, “How can a glass cat frighten a child who’s seen the things you’ve seen?”

“I hate him! He’s glad Delia died. And now he wants to get me.”

Father hugged me fiercely. “You’ll never see him again. I promise you,” he said. And it was true, at least as long as he lived.

So the Chelichev Cat in Glass was packed away in a box and put into storage with the rest of our furnishings. Father sold the house, and we traveled for two years. When the horror had faded sufficiently, we returned home to begin a new life. Father went back to his professorship, and I to my studies at Chesly Girls’ Day School. He bought a new house. The glass cat was not among the items he had sent up from storage. I did not ask him why. I was just as happy to forget about it, and forget it I did.

I neither saw the glass cat nor heard of it again until many years later. I was a grown woman by then, a school teacher in a town far from the one in which I’d spent my childhood. I was married to a banker, and had two lovely daughters and even a cat, which I finally permitted in spite of my abhorrence for them, because the girls begged so hard for one. I thought my life was settled, that it would progress smoothly toward a peaceful old age. But this was not to be. The glass cat had other plans.

The chain of events began with Father’s death. It happened suddenly, on a snowy afternoon, as he graded papers in the tiny snug office he had always had on campus. A heart attack, they said. He was found seated at his desk, Erik Satie’s Dadaist composition, “La Belle Excentrique,” still spinning on the turntable of his record player.

I was not at all surprised to discover that he had left his affairs in some disarray. It’s not that he had debts or was a gambler. Nothing so serious. It’s just that order was slightly contrary to his nature. I remember once, as a very young woman, chiding him for the modest level of chaos he preferred in his life. “Really, Father,” I said. “Can’t you admire Dadaism without living it?” He laughed and admitted that he didn’t seem able to.

As Father’s only living relative, I inherited his house and other property, including his personal possessions. There were deeds to be transferred, insurance reports to be filed, bills and loans to be paid. He did have an attorney, an old school friend of his who helped me a great deal in organizing the storm of paperwork from a distance. The attorney also arranged for the sale of the house and hired someone to clean it out and ship the contents to us. In the course of the winter, a steady stream of cartons containing everything from scrapbooks to Chinese miniatures arrived at our doorstep. So I thought nothing of it when a large box labeled “fragile” was delivered one day by registered courier. There was a note from the attorney attached, explaining that he had just discovered it in a storage warehouse under Father’s name, and had had them ship it to me unopened.

It was a dismal February afternoon, a Friday. I had just come home from teaching. My husband, Stephen, had taken the girls to the mountains for a weekend of skiing, a sport I disliked. I had stayed behind and was looking forward to a couple of days of quiet solitude. The wind drove spittles of rain at the windows as I knelt on the floor of the front room and opened the box. I can’t explain to you quite what I felt when I pulled away the packing paper and found myself face-to-face with the glass cat. Something akin to uncovering a nest of cockroaches in a drawer of sachet, I suppose. And that was swiftly followed by a horrid and minutely detailed mental recreation of Delia’s death.

I swallowed my screams, struggling to replace them with something rational. “It’s merely a glorified piece of glass.” My voice bounced off the walls in the lonely house, hardly comforting.

I had an overpowering image of something inside me, something dark and featureless except for wide, white eyes and scrabbling claws. Get us out of here! it cried, and I obliged, seizing my coat from the closet hook and stumbling out into the wind.

I ran in the direction of town, slowing only when one of my shoes fell off and I realized how I must look. Soon, I found myself seated at a table in a diner, warming my hands in the steam from a cup of coffee, trying to convince myself that I was just being silly. I nursed the coffee as long as I could. It was dusk by the time I felt able to return home. There I found the glass cat, still waiting for me.

I turned on the radio for company and made a fire in the fireplace. Then I sat down before the box and finished unpacking it. The sculpture was as horrible as I remembered, truly ugly and disquieting. I might never have understood why Father kept it if he had not enclosed this letter of explanation, neatly handwritten on his college stationery:

I closed the box, sealed it with the note inside, and spent the next two nights in a hotel, pacing the floor, sleeping little. The following Monday, Stephen took the cat to an art dealer for appraisal. He came home late that afternoon excited and full of news about the great Alexander Chelichev.

He made himself a gin and tonic as he expounded. “That glass cat is priceless, Amy. Did you realize? If your father had sold it, he’d have been independently wealthy. He never let on.”

I was putting dinner on the table. The weekend had been a terrible strain. This had been a difficult day on top of it—snowy, and the children in my school class were wild with pent-up energy. So were our daughters, Eleanor and Rose, aged seven and four respectively. I could hear them quarreling in the play room down the hall.

“Well, I’m glad to hear the horrid thing is worth something,” I said. “Why don’t we sell it and hire a maid?”

Stephen laughed as if I’d made an incredibly good joke. “A maid? You could hire a thousand maids for what that cat would bring at auction. It’s a fascinating piece with an extraordinary history. You know, the value of something like this will increase with time. I think we’ll do well to keep it awhile.”

My fingers grew suddenly icy on the hot rim of the potato bowl. “I wasn’t trying to be funny, Stephen. It’s ugly and disgusting. If I could, I would make it disappear from the face of the Earth.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What’s this? Rebellion? Look, if you really want a maid, I’ll get you one.”

“That’s not the point. I won’t have the damned thing in my house.”

“I’d rather you didn’t swear, Amelia. The children might hear.”

“I don’t care if they do.”

The whole thing degenerated from there. I tried to explain the cat’s connection with Delia’s death. But Stephen had stopped listening by then. He sulked through dinner. Eleanor and Rose argued over who got which spoonful of peas. And I struggled with a steadily growing sense of dread that seemed much too large for the facts of the matter.

When dinner was over, Stephen announced with exaggerated brightness, “Girls. We’d like your help in deciding an important question.”

“Oh goody,” said Rose.

“What is it?” said Eleanor.

“Please don’t,” I said. It was all I could do to keep from shouting.

Stephen flashed me the boyish grin with which he had originally won my heart. “Oh, come on. Try to look at it objectively. You’re just sensitive about this because of an irrational notion from your childhood. Let the girls be the judge. If they like it, why not keep it?”

I should have ended it there. I should have insisted. Hindsight is always perfect, as they say. But inside me a little seed of doubt had sprouted. Stephen was always so logical and so right, especially about financial matters. Maybe he was right about this, too.

He had brought the thing home from the appraiser without telling me. He was never above a little subterfuge if it got him his own way. Now he carried the carton in from the garage and unwrapped it in the middle of our warm, hardwood floor, with all the lights blazing. Nothing had changed. I found it as frightening as ever. I could feel cold sweat collecting on my forehead as I stared at it, all aglitter in a rainbow of refracted lamplight.

Eleanor was enthralled with it. She caught our real cat, a calico named Jelly, and held it up to the sculpture. “See, Jelly? You’ve got a handsome partner now.” But Jelly twisted and hissed in Eleanor’s arms until she let her go. Eleanor laughed and said Jelly was jealous.

Rose was almost as uncooperative as Jelly. She shrank away from the glass cat, peeking at it from between her father’s knees. But Stephen would have none of that.

“Go on, Rose,” he said. “It’s just a kitty made of glass. Touch it and see.” And he took her by the shoulders and pushed her gently toward it. She put out one hand, hesitantly, as she would have with a live cat who did not know her. I saw her finger touch a nodule of glass shards that might have been its nose. She drew back with a little yelp of pain. And that’s how it began. So innocently.

“He bit me!” she cried.

“What happened?” said Stephen. “Did you break it?” He ran to the sculpture first, the brute, to make sure she hadn’t damaged it.

She held her finger out to me. There was a tiny cut with a single drop of bright red blood oozing from it. “Mommy, it burns, it burns.” She was no longer just crying. She was screaming.

We took her into the bathroom. Stephen held her while I washed the cut and pressed a cold cloth to it. The bleeding stopped in a moment, but still she screamed. Stephen grew angry. “What’s this nonsense? It’s a scratch. Just a scratch.”

Rose jerked and kicked and bellowed. In Stephen’s defense, I tell you now it was a terrifying sight, and he was never able to deal well with real fear, especially in himself. He always tried to mask it with anger. We had a neighbor who was a physician. “If you don’t stop it, Rose, I’ll call Doctor Pepperman. Is that what you want?” he said, as if Doctor Pepperman, a jolly septuagenarian, were anything but charming and gentle, as if threats were anything but asinine at such a time.

“For God’s sake, get Pepperman! Can’t you see something’s terribly wrong?” I said.

And for once he listened to me. He grabbed Eleanor by the arm. “Come with me,” he said, and stomped across the yard through the snow without so much as a coat. I believe he only took Eleanor, also without a coat, because he was so unnerved that he didn’t want to face the darkness alone.

Rose was still screaming when Dr. Pepperman arrived fresh from his dinner, specks of gravy clinging to his mustache. He examined Rose’s finger, and looked mildly puzzled when he had finished. “Can’t see much wrong here. I’d say it’s mostly a case of hysteria.” He took a vial and a syringe from his small, brown case and gave Rose an injection, “…to help settle her down,” he said. It seemed to work. In a few minutes, Rose’s screams had diminished to whimpers. Pepperman swabbed her finger with disinfectant and wrapped it loosely in gauze. “There, Rosie. Nothing like a bandage to make it feel better.” He winked at us. “She should be fine in the morning. Take the gauze off as soon as she’ll let you.”

We put Rose to bed and sat with her till she fell asleep. Stephen unwrapped the gauze from her finger so the healing air could get to it. The cut was a bit red, but looked all right. Then we retired as well, reassured by the doctor, still mystified at Rose’s reaction.

I awakened sometime after midnight. The house was muffled in the kind of silence brought by steady, soft snowfall. I thought I had heard a sound. Something odd. A scream? A groan? A snarl? Stephen still slept on the verge of a snore; whatever it was, it hadn’t been loud enough to disturb him.

I crept out of bed and fumbled with my robe. There was a short flight of stairs between our room and the rooms where Rose and Eleanor slept. Eleanor, like her father, often snored at night and I could hear her from the hallway now, probably deep in dreams. Rose’s room was silent.

I went in and switched on the night light. The bulb was very low wattage. I thought at first that the shadows were playing tricks on me. Rose’s hand and arm looked black as a bruised banana. There was a peculiar odor in the air, like the smell of a butcher shop on a summer day. Heart galloping, I turned on the overhead light. Poor Rosie. She was so very still and clammy. And her arm was so very rotten.

They said Rose died from blood poisoning—a rare type most often associated with animal bites. I told them over and over again that it fit, that our child had indeed been bitten, by a cat, a most evil glass cat. Stephen was embarrassed. His own theory was that, far from blaming an apparently inanimate object, we ought to be suing Pepperman for malpractice. The doctors patted me sympathetically at first. Delusions brought on by grief, they said. It would pass. I would heal in time.

I made Stephen take the cat away. He said he would sell it, though in fact he lied to me. And we buried Rose. But I could not sleep. I paced the house each night, afraid to close my eyes because the cat was always there, glaring his satisfied glare, and waiting for new meat. And in the daytime, everything reminded me of Rosie. Fingerprints on the woodwork, the contents of the kitchen drawers, her favorite foods on the shelves of grocery stores. I could not teach. Every child had Rosie’s face and Rosie’s voice. Stephen and Eleanor were first kind, then gruff, then angry.

One morning, I could find no reason to get dressed or to move from my place on the sofa. Stephen shouted at me, told me I was ridiculous, asked me if I had forgotten that I still had a daughter left who needed me. But, you see, I no longer believed that I or anyone else could make any difference in the world. Stephen and Eleanor would get along with or without me. I didn’t matter. There was no God of order and cause. Only chaos, cruelty, and whim.

When it was clear to Stephen that his dear wife Amy had turned from an asset into a liability, he sent me to an institution, far away from everyone, where I could safely be forgotten. In time, I grew to like it there. I had no responsibilities at all. And if there was foulness and bedlam, it was no worse than the outside world.

There came a day, however, when they dressed me in a suit of new clothes and stood me outside the big glass and metal doors to wait; they didn’t say for what. The air smelled good. It was springtime, and there were dandelions sprinkled like drops of fresh yellow paint across the lawn.

A car drove up and a pretty young woman got out and took me by the arm.

“Hello, Mother,” she said as we drove off down the road. It was Eleanor, all grown up. For the first time since Rosie died, I wondered how long I had been away, and knew it must have been a very long while.

We drove a considerable distance, to a large suburban house, white, with a sprawling yard and a garage big enough for two cars. It was a mansion compared to the house in which Stephen and I had raised her. By way of making polite small talk, I asked if she were married, whether she had children. She climbed out of the car looking irritated. “Of course I’m married,” she said. “You’ve met Jason. And you’ve seen pictures of Sarah and Elizabeth often enough.” Of this I had no recollection.

She opened the gate in the picket fence and we started up the neat, stone walkway. The front door opened a few inches and small faces peered out. The door opened wider and two little girls ran onto the porch.

“Hello,” I said. “And who are you?”

The older one, giggling behind her hand, said, “Don’t you know, Grandma? I’m Sarah.”

The younger girl stayed silent, staring at me with frank curiosity.

“That’s Elizabeth. She’s afraid of you,” said Sarah.

I bent and looked into Elizabeth’s eyes. They were brown, and her hair was shining blond, like Rosie’s. “No need to be afraid of me, my dear. I’m just a harmless old woman.”

Elizabeth frowned. “Are you crazy?” she asked.

Sarah giggled behind her hand again, and Eleanor breathed loudly through her nose as if this impertinence were simply overwhelming.

I smiled. I liked Elizabeth. Liked her very much. “They say I am,” I said, “and it may very well be true.”

A tiny smile crossed her face. She stretched on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek, hardly more than the touch of a warm breeze, then turned and ran away. Sarah followed her, and I watched them go, my heart dancing and shivering. I had loved no one in a very long time. I missed it, but dreaded it, too. For I had loved Delia and Rosie, and they were both dead.

The first thing I saw when I entered the house was Chelichev’s Cat in Glass, glaring evilly from a place of obvious honor on a low pedestal near the sofa. My stomach felt suddenly shrunken.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

Eleanor looked irritated again. “From Daddy, of course.”

“Stephen promised me he would sell it!”

“Well, I guess he didn’t, did he?”

Anger heightened my pulse. “Where is he? I want to speak to him immediately.”

“Mother, don’t be absurd. He’s been dead for ten years.”

I lowered myself into a chair. I was shaking by then, and I fancied I saw a half-smile on the glass cat’s cold jowls.

“Get me out of here,” I said. A great weight crushed my lungs. I could barely breathe.

With a look, I must say, of genuine worry, Eleanor escorted me onto the porch and brought me a tumbler of ice water. “Better?” she asked.

I breathed deeply. “A little. Eleanor, don’t you realize that monstrosity killed your sister, and mine as well?”

“That simply isn’t true.”

“But it is, it is! I’m telling you now, get rid of it if you care for the lives of your children.”

Eleanor went pale, whether from rage or fear I could not tell. “It isn’t yours. You’re legally incompetent, and I’ll thank you to stay out of my affairs as much as possible till you have a place of your own. I’ll move you to an apartment as soon as I can find one.”

“An apartment? But I can’t…”

“Yes you can. You’re as well as you’re ever going to be, Mother. You only liked that hospital because it was easy. Well it costs a lot of money to keep you there, and we can’t afford it anymore. You’re just going to have to straighten up and start behaving like a human being again.”

By then I was very close to tears, and very confused as well. Only one thing was clear to me, and that was the true nature of the glass cat. I said, in as steady a voice as I could muster, “Listen to me. That cat was made out of madness. It’s evil. If you have a single ounce of brains, you’ll put it up for auction this very afternoon.”

“So I can get enough money to send you back to the hospital, I suppose? Well I won’t do it. That sculpture is priceless. The longer we keep it, the more it’s worth.”

She had Stephen’s financial mind. I would never sway her, and I knew it. I wept in despair, hiding my face in my hands. I was thinking of Elizabeth. The sweet, soft skin of her little arms, the flame in her cheeks, the power of that small kiss. Human beings are such frail works of art, their lives so precarious, and here I was again, my wayward heart gone out to one of them. But the road back to the safety of isolation lay in ruins. The only way out was through.

Jason came home at dinner time and we ate a nice meal, seated around the sleek rosewood table in the dining room. He was kind, actually far kinder than Eleanor. He asked the children about their day and listened carefully while they replied. As did I, enraptured by their pink perfection, distraught at the memory of how imperfect a child’s flesh can become. He did not interrupt. He did not demand. When Eleanor refused to give me coffee—she said she was afraid it would get me “hyped up”—he admonished her and poured me a cup himself. We talked about my father, whom he knew by reputation, and about art and the cities of Europe. All the while, I felt in my bones the baleful gaze of the Cat in Glass, burning like the coldest ice through walls and furniture as if they did not exist.

Eleanor made up a cot for me in the guest room. She didn’t want me to sleep in the bed, and she wouldn’t tell me why. But I overheard Jason arguing with her about it. “What’s wrong with the bed?” he said.

“She’s mentally ill,” said Eleanor. She was whispering, but loudly. “Heaven only knows what filthy habits she’s picked up. I won’t risk her soiling a perfectly good mattress. If she does well on the cot for a few nights, then we can consider moving her to the bed.”

They thought I was in the bathroom, performing whatever unspeakable acts it is that mentally ill people perform in places like that, I suppose. But they were wrong. I was sneaking past their door, on my way to the garage. Jason must have been quite a handyman in his spare time. I found a large selection of hammers on the wall, including an excellent short-handled sledge. I hid it under my bedding. They never even noticed.

The children came in and kissed me good night in a surreal reversal of roles. I lay in the dark on my cot for a long time, thinking of them, especially of Elizabeth, the youngest and weakest, who would naturally be the most likely target of an animal’s attack. I dozed, dreaming sometimes of a smiling Elizabeth-Rose-Delia, sifting snow, wading through drifts; sometimes of the glass cat, its fierce eyes smoldering, crystalline tongue brushing crystalline jaws. The night was well along when the dreams crashed down like broken mirrors into silence.

The house was quiet except for those ticks and thumps all houses make as they cool in the darkness. I got up and slid the hammer out from under the bedding, not even sure what I was going to do with it, knowing only that the time had come to act.

I crept out to the front room, where the cat sat waiting, as I knew it must. Moonlight gleamed in the chaos of its glass fur. I could feel its power, almost see it, a shimmering red aura the length of its malformed spine. The thing was moving, slowly, slowly, smiling now, oh yes, a real smile. I could smell its rotten breath.

For an instant, I was frozen. Then I remembered the hammer, Jason’s lovely short-handled sledge. And I raised it over my head, and brought it down in the first crashing blow.

The sound was wonderful. Better than cymbals, better even than holy trumpets. I was trembling all over, but I went on and on in an agony of satisfaction while glass fell like moonlit rain. There were screams. “Grandma, stop! Stop!” I swung the hammer back in the first part of another arc, heard something like the thunk of a fallen ripe melon, swung it down on the cat again. I couldn’t see anymore. It came to me that there was glass in my eyes and blood in my mouth. But none of that mattered, a small price to pay for the long overdue demise of Chelichev’s Cat in Glass.

So you see how I have come to this, not without many sacrifices along the way. And now the last of all: the sockets where my eyes used to be are infected. They stink. Blood poisoning, I’m sure.

I wouldn’t expect Eleanor to forgive me for ruining her prime investment. But I hoped Jason might bring the children a time or two anyway. No word except for the delivery of a single rose yesterday. The matron said it was white, and held it up for me to sniff and she read me the card that came with it. “Elizabeth was a great one for forgiving. She would have wanted you to have this. Sleep well, Jason.”

Which puzzled me.

“You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?” said the matron.

“I destroyed a valuable work of art,” said I.

But she made no reply.