CHAPTER NINE

Kit armed himself with a map and plenty of cash, just in case. It took him some time to find a garage in Marseilles that would hire him a car but, eventually, he tracked down a Dion, heavy but roomy, with a reasonable-sounding engine. He settled behind the wheel for the drive over the aromatic, breast-shaped headland to Antibes.

At Brignoles he stopped for lunch, and ordered an omelette flavoured with shavings of white truffle. Half-way through the meal he regretted it and pushed the plate aside, his appetite drained. He lit the umpteenth cigarette of the day.

Smoke drifted upwards into the still air as Kit pondered on the nature and complexity of his feelings. He knew he was risking the relationship he and Matty had begun, so painfully, to build. Which... Kit drew in a lungful of smoke... he wanted to build. On the other hand, Daisy had called him, and he was responding. With no shadow of doubt, no hesitation.

He stubbed out the cigarette and got to his feet.

The car surged over the road and bucketed over occasional pot-holes. A breeze blew in at the window with the hint of rain in it that spring winds often have. It cooled his cheek. As he drove, Kit reflected at length on the stepping stones that had brought him to this point: the hesitations, the epiphanies and false turns, the moments of rapture and despair, and motives that were less than clear.

At Antibes he drove to the post office and procured the address that had been left there for him. Unfamiliar with the town and its narrow thoroughfares, he had difficulty finding it and it was late evening before he drew up in front of a typical town house, in a dismal state, with wrought-iron balconies.

The concierge was fat and bad-tempered, and Kit’s enquiry after ‘Miss Chudleigh’ made her even more so. She heaved her bulk out of the minute office cluttered with knitting, newspapers and a large board for hanging up the keys, and sighed at the prospect of the climb in front of her.

‘Bad thing,’ she informed Kit. ‘This mam’zelle. Ill, too. She owes me money.’

‘Has she had a doctor?’

‘We had to get one, and his bill isn’t paid.’

The concierge assessed the Englishman in his rumpled linen suit. How much would he pay? How did he fit into the story upstairs? She was not to know that Kit had taken one look at her and lapsed into appalled silence.

What had happened?

On each floor the atmosphere grew frowsier, with the staleness of trapped air. On the half-landings, the cabinets gave fair warning of what it would be like when the summer heat took over.

Kit’s mouth tightened. What was Daisy doing here – fastidious Daisy – in a peeling lodging house with bad smells? He did not know, could not imagine.

A faint odour of anis overlaid all other impressions as Kit entered Room on the top floor. It was small with a sharply angled ceiling and Kit ducked. The concierge shuffled in behind him and observed Kit blanch visibly as he surveyed... what?

A room with a single bed, a chair and a heavy, rather good, chest of drawers from better times. There was no mirror, no decoration to speak of. No carpet. Nothing except for Daisy asleep on the bed in a garish kimono.

She lay with one cheek turned into the pillow and her hair, less chestnut than he remembered, trailing in strands across the linen. A tin bowl and a rumpled towel lay on the bed beside her.

At the sight, Kit’s heart turned inside out with love for Daisy, with pity, with a sense of ineluctable loss.

‘Go away,’ he said to the concierge, pushed her out into the corridor and shut the door. He stood still for thirty seconds or so then went over to the window and tugged at the étincelette, releasing a shower of rust from the rotting iron balcony above. Salty air streamed into the room, and Daisy woke with a start.

‘Kit,’ she said, articulating through the tail-end of sleep. ‘You took your time.’

‘If you will send me telegrams when I’m at the other end of the earth.’

With an effort, she held out her hand. ‘Joke.’

‘I know.’

He sat down on the bed and took her hand. ‘Daisy, what have you done? Is this my fault? Tell me.’ He gestured at the room. ‘Why here?’

‘Why not? It’s an experience.’ Daisy seemed lethargic and reluctant to talk much. She put up a hand and tugged at the hair that had fallen over her face. ‘But if you insist on explanations, you could say I have mismanaged my life. It happens to a lot of people.’

Under the pulled-back hair, her face sprang into relief. It seemed to Kit that all her brightness had drained away, leaving only a wan imprint. Daisy dropped her hands and wrapped the edges of the kimono over her breasts. ‘Miss Daisy Chudleigh’s diary of a social outcast. From Number Five Upper Brook Street to rue de la Coin, downtown Antibes.’ Abruptly she changed the subject. ‘Where have you been?’

Kit concentrated hard on the kimono because he could not bear to look anywhere else. ‘Iraq.’

‘Matty? Does she know you’re here?’

‘She sent on the telegram.’ Kit flicked up an eyebrow. ‘Does that surprise you?’

A smile curved the pale mouth. ‘Well, life is strange, isn’t it, my Kit? Will you prop me up, please?’

He bent and slid his hand under Daisy’s shoulders. Obviously weak, her head fell back and Kit was forced to support her with his shoulder. Automatically his hand sought, and found, the bump at the base of her spine. ‘Are you going to tell me what has happened?’

‘As you see I became ill.’ Daisy sighed with pleasure against his shoulder. ‘For a variety of reasons. Not much food and perhaps... lately, a little too much to drink.’

‘I can smell it.’ Kit chose his words with care. ‘Daisy. Anis – any spirit for that matter – isn’t a good drink. It mashes the liver. If you want to drink you should tipple on something less punishing to the system.’

‘Experience learnt in the kasbah?’

‘Something like.’

‘Don’t lecture, my darling. It doesn’t suit you.’

His fingers closed over her shoulder and gripped it. ‘Why are you here? Do your parents know? Why didn’t you call on me sooner?’

‘What? And be bailed out with Matty’s money? Now, that would be too much, Kit.’ Daisy’s hand crawled slowly up her body, found and covered Kit’s.

‘Don’t avoid the issue.’ Privately, he acknowledged the point. ‘I have the American shares. I’m told by Raby that I’ve made a bit from wirelesses.’ His fingers bit into her flesh and she yelped. ‘Why, Daisy? What’s going on?’

‘The money ran out after I was evicted from my respectable lodgings in Nice.’ Daisy’s eyes slanted away to the window and looked beyond. ‘Very character-forming,’ she added softly.

‘Bloody hell, Daisy.’

She shifted in his arms. ‘Don’t, Kit. I haven’t the energy to deal with the recriminations and the whys. These things happen. Just be here, that’s all.’

So Kit gathered his frail, white, ill Daisy to him, and buried his face in her hair. Close to, her skin had a yellowish tinge, there were tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and a thumbprint of fatigue below them. What disturbed him most was that her kimono was unwashed. Perhaps that more than anything raked up the old feelings which flared, caught, and blazed with the intensity of what had been – and what might have been.

Kit eased Daisy’s head back onto his shoulder, cupped his fingers round her chin and smoothed the damp, sticky hair that he would swear had not been seen by a hairdresser for a long time. There was a tidemark at the base of her neck and her fingernails were cut inelegantly short... evidence of her suffering which washed Kit in an ache of desire that went far beyond the physical.

He gazed down at her, understanding that once and for ever the power to love had been unleashed in him by Daisy – and thus, unknowingly, she had given him reparation for the wounds dealt by Hesther.

He wanted to tell her. He wanted to thank her.

Instead, he held her so close that again she was forced to protest and he loosened his grip. ‘Why didn’t you send for me sooner?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied tiredly. ‘I thought about it, but somehow I didn’t. I can’t explain. Perhaps I like extremes. Perhaps I need them.’

The days – even more the nights – had been long ones for Daisy and she drifted in and out of sleep, dreams flickering across an interior landscape menaced with shadow.

‘I can’t explain, Kit,’ she repeated. Then she said, ‘Yes, I can. At least I can show you the reason.’ She tugged at his jacket sleeve. ‘Kit, I have a present for you. It’s over there.’

He frowned, and Daisy’s mouth lifted in one of its quick, teasing smiles, edged with tenderness. ‘Before I give it to you, there’s one thing. You must think hard before accepting.’

Puzzled, Kit eased Daisy back onto the pillow and straightened up. He smiled down at her in the old manner. ‘A present?’ he said.

He went to look into the open drawer of the chest – and everything was understood.

‘Your son,’ said Daisy. ‘He was born two weeks early.’

‘Trente secondes, Monsieur. Attendez, s’il vous plait,’’ said the black-robed portress at the door. She snapped shut the grille and was gone a long time before the huge, nail-studded door opened and Kit was allocated a space to enter. He followed the silent, gliding figure, who stopped every few yards and beckoned him on.

The sanctity in the convent was almost palpable, flowing over the Romanesque arches and worn flagstones. Impatient as he was, Kit found himself both curious and impressed. This was a place where outwardly nothing happened but where beneath the ordered fabric he could sense a pulse, presumably directed at God. The idea intrigued him.

They halted in front of a door. ‘If you will wait here, Monsieur.’ The nun spoke in heavily accented English. She disappeared through it, and Kit was left alone in the corridor.

He had not seen Daisy for a week, not since he had peered into the face of his son and staggered with the shock of the encounter. And as he had stood there, reeling and disbelieving, Daisy slid down the bolster into unconsciousness, and there was no time to think.

Within an hour a doctor had come. He pronounced Daisy under-nourished and still weak from the birth, ordered that she should return to the convent where she had had the baby, and stay there until she recovered her strength. Telephone calls were made. An ambulance arrived and Kit, scooping Daisy up in his arms, carried her down to the waiting vehicle. Behind him, on her swollen feet, shuffled the concierge, a smile softening the outer reaches of her mouth at the prospect of the bills being settled.

At the convent, Kit had been banished because Daisy was too ill for visitors – and because his relationship to her had been detected at once as scandalous.

Inhaling town smells of garlic, tobacco, fresh bread and watered dust, Kit spent most of the week in the Café Oriane in the centre of Antibes, drinking wine and brandy, absorbing the fact that he had a son and considering what was to come next. Twice a day, at noon and at six o’clock, he abandoned his table and made his way to the convent to enquire after Daisy. For a week the answer was the same: improving, but not yet, Monsieur.

It was a long wait, in many ways, and Kit journeyed deep into himself, as he had never managed when journeying across Iraq.

The portress reappeared and stood to one side to allow Kit into the room. He blinked at the contrast to the dim corridor outside: painted stern, unyielding white, the room was scrubbed very clean. There was a chair, a painting of the Madonna holding a bunch of lilies, a bed with a cradle beside it, a wooden table with a crucifix, but the sparseness was entirely different in its essence from the poverty at the rue de la Coin.

At the sound of the door, Daisy turned her head. She looked much better, but still alarmingly pale. ‘Hallo, Kit.’ He proffered a bunch of mimosa. The heavy scent wafted over her.

‘Kit,’ she said, with a trace of laughter but with her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, but the smell makes me feel sick. Don’t worry, lots of things do at the moment.’

Kit threw the flowers into the cloister outside the window and Daisy laughed properly.

‘Oh dear, and they were so beautiful. The sisters will be horrified.’

‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to hear you laugh.’ She held out her hand and he took it, rubbing each finger gently in turn. ‘I’ve spoken to your parents on the telephone. Your mother is on the way.’

Kit did not elaborate on the conversation, but he was quite sure that he and Susan Chudleigh would never willingly speak to each other again. We gave her money, Susan had protested to him, and Daisy never got in touch. Of course we were worried. Very worried, but Daisy is not a fool, nor is she a child.

Kit terminated the conversation by informing Susan that she was contemptible and that, if she could not bring herself to visit her daughter, then at least she could have ensured that someone else did.

‘It’s none of your business,’ retorted a sharp, bitter Susan.

‘But it is,’ said Kit. ‘I just didn’t know it.’

‘The only business of yours,’ said Susan, slashing back at him for having put her in the wrong, ‘is to pay up. Daisy will need it.’

Kit was silenced and put down the telephone. It was not so much Susan’s coarseness or, even, her grasp of the essentials, it was that, in the end, always, always, he and Daisy came down to money.

Daisy retrieved her hand and tucked it back under the sheet. She searched Kit’s face for clues. ‘It’s all right darling,’ she reassured him. ‘I’ll live.’

He drew up a chair. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

Daisy told him. Not everything, but enough. Of staying with the respectable acquaintances, contacted by Susan, on the outskirts of Nice, who were, so they said, very broad-minded and willing to help. Unfortunately, Madame Fauçonnier’s broad-mindedness had not extended to her husband, who had pursued Daisy with the logic which held that since the ship was already in port why did she object? Turned out, Daisy was unwilling to contact friends – partly because she now understood precisely how far friendship stretched when it came to unmarried mothers, and partly because a voice in her head was urging her to see her Gethsemane through alone.

Daisy sent letters to Susan informing her that she was fine, the money would last. Of course it did no such thing, but Daisy made no effort to contact Ambrose for more.

‘These extremes, I suppose,’ she said. ‘A test I set myself.’

‘How did you eat? Where did you live?’

‘I remembered Antibes and how much I liked it. It’s modest, but full of what I love.’ The pale skin stretching over the cheekbones developed a touch of pink as Daisy talked. ‘Colour and heat. Good food. My French has improved, you know, not Versailles French, street French. I worked at a local boulangerie for a couple of weeks, then I helped out at a cafe until I became too big to be of use. I got good tips.’

For God’s sake, thought Kit.

‘Pregnancy didn’t suit me.’ Daisy’s eyelashes hid the expression in her eyes. ‘One of God’s little tricks on women. I felt dreadful quite a lot of the time, and I got into the habit of having a drink in the afternoon and I shouldn’t have done. And in the evening,’ she added. Her eyelids snapped up and she directed her quick, slanting look at Kit. ‘Do you know what, Kit? And I can only say this to you because I know you understand me in a way no one else does.’

‘What?’

‘I liked the sensation of going down. Slipping. Leaving everything behind. Not caring much.’ Not caring at all, she thought, remembering the afternoon when, desperate for francs, and also any human contact, she had gone with a tall fisherman to a hotel room. The give and take of the episode – her giving of her thickened body, which was not very expert in the business of undressing and sex, and taking the money in consequence – seemed ridiculously easy.

Because Daisy did not have the strength to shield Kit and because her predicament had made her impatient with false pride, she told him.

His chair screeched along the stone floor. ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ he said, punching his fist on his thigh. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘It didn’t matter, Kit. Truly. It was over in fifteen minutes and I ate dinner that night. A good one. Coq au vin,’ she added, echoing Susan in a way he had never imagined.

‘Is that meant to be funny?’ he said bitterly.

Afternoon sun streamed into the room from the cloister. A couple of the sisters were pacing round it, the rosaries at their belts swinging in time to their bodies.

‘In the end, I had enough to rent rue de la Coin. The sisters were kind and let me have the baby here, but I didn’t want to stay because I could tell they didn’t approve, so I went back to the room. But I didn’t seem to recover very well.’ Daisy slid over the nightmare birth, the bleeding afterwards, the chilly expression of the nun attending her, the impatient doctor, the fear, and the freezing sensation of being alone.

‘How long ago?’

‘Two weeks. A bit longer.’

The thought flashed across Kit’s mind that he had been a father for all that time.

‘So you see, my darling, why I had to ask you to come because it is all very well me behaving for me, but now I have your son, my son, to consider.’

Kit did not reply for a long time, and Daisy thought of the letter she had written telling him she would love him for ever, and reflected that promises like that had a way of spoiling lives — and that was why events like the fisherman did not matter.

The baby stirred in the cradle, puckered his face and moved his head from side to side. Daisy watched him, rather as she might a small, furry animal in the zoo. ‘I suppose he needs feeding,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could lift him up for me?’

The baby rooted unsuccessfully at his mother’s breast, but failed to find what he wanted and began to yell. Daisy tried to help him, but she was still too weak. ‘I don’t like this bit,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’m a natural mother, but the sisters say this way is the best.’ She made an attempt at a joke. ‘It’s not like me to be unfashionable.’

Uneasy with the crying, Kit abandoned his scrutiny of the cloister and helped to position the baby’s head against Daisy’s breast. The crying broke off into blissful silence. Daisy raised her face to Kit. ‘He’s greedy, your son,’ she said.

Later on, the nun came in and dismissed Kit in a swish of cheap black cotton. ‘Vows pouvez revenir demain, Monsieur.’

‘Can’t I stay, Sister?’

‘Monsieur, je suis désolée...’

Kit got into the Dion, and drove down to Cap d’Antibes where he walked along the cliff above the sea until it was quite dark. As dusk fell, a fresh breeze blew up and the sea grew dark and winy. He pulled off his hat and, in characteristic fashion, ran his fingers repeatedly through his hair.

He looked back at the town. The lights in Antibes flicked on and, from that distance, threw a sparkled enchantment. Behind one of them lay Daisy. Love for her welled through him and spilled over: passionate, longing, filling both body and soul, generous and complete.

Love had given Kit wholeness and transcendence; but love also brought the threat of fracture and madness, and those things had to be avoided. Daisy appeared to know that instinctively. Kit had been slower to learn.

But what of Matty? How much could Kit expect of her – knowing that by his behaviour he could expect nothing at all?

‘Darling Kit.’ Daisy was sitting up, looking better. The nuns had washed her hair, and there was more colour in her cheeks. ‘You would be proud of me. I ate a whole plate of soup and some bread.’

He put a couple of yellow-wrappered novels and a bottle of brandy onto the table with the crucifix. ‘I don’t think you looked after yourself at all, Daisy.’

Daisy tried to remember exactly what she had done, and failed. ‘I think I just drank,’ she said.

The baby began to cry. Daisy gestured to a bottle standing in a tin jug. ‘Why don’t you give him his bottle?’ she said. ‘I’ve given up the other business.’

‘Me?’

‘Don’t look so surprised. I imagine some men somewhere in the world give bottles to their babies. Pick him up, darling Kit, and sit down. He is yours.’

The baby was surprisingly light and, expertly wrapped into a papoose by the nuns, easy to hold.

‘Go on,’ urged Daisy, and lay back to watch him struggling to hold the baby at the correct angle and to deal with the bottle. Eventually, the rubber teat was in place, the baby sucked and a runnel of milk snaked down his chin and onto the shawl. Daisy was amused.

‘I never thought,’ she said, ‘that I would say the things I am going to say to you over a baby’s bottle. I imagined a serious, dramatic talk with a lawyer or something.’

Milk was seeping into Kit’s jacket sleeve. The baby sucked and nuzzled and grew heavy with contentment. ‘What have you called him?’

Daisy rolled the edge of the sheet between her fingers and said carefully, ‘I thought perhaps you would like to choose since I would like to give him to you.’

Kit stiffened, the baby lost the teat, and it was a good half-minute before he replied. ‘I didn’t think you meant it when you first said it.’

‘But I did. I’m giving him to you to do with what you think best. You must decide. That is both my punishment and yours.’ She reflected. ‘Nothing is without its consequences, is it?’

‘And what about you, Daisy?’

The sheet rolled back and forwards in her fingers. ‘What will I do? I will stay here for a while. You know how I like France. I like the food, the sun and the people. Who knows, I might find a rich man at one of the hotels.’

‘Stop it, Daisy.’

‘Don’t worry. Perhaps, after a decent interval, I’ll come home and see if Tim will still marry me. I don’t know. I don’t see my way quite yet. But don’t worry about it.’

Kit’s sleeve was sodden. Trapped, he could only stare at Daisy and say, ‘Of course I’ll worry.’

‘That woman we met in the boîte, wearing a striped jersey and a fringe – you didn’t like her but I’ve often thought about her and wondered if she and I had something in common. If you like, she had cast anchor.’

‘Daisy, will you please stop talking such nonsense.’ Kit had had enough. He got up, dislodging the baby, and thrust him and the bottle at Daisy. ‘I can’t bear to hear you say things like that.’

To the baby’s wail and Daisy’s cry of protest, he left the room and let himself out through the convent door. On the seafront, he walked into the Bar Leduc where he ordered a double brandy. Three glasses later, Kit tottered back to the hotel and flung himself onto the bed.

When he woke up it was ten o’clock in the evening and his mouth was so dry and furred it was painful to swallow, but that was nothing to the pain that thumped in his head. Moving like an old man, he found the bathroom and plunged his head into a basin of cold water. When he looked up, a stranger’s face regarded him from the brass-framed mirror. Daisy’s voice echoed in his ear. ‘Extremes.’ And Kit shivered. He knew about extremes. He put his face into the cold water for a second time, and knocked his nose on the brass tap. Eyes streaming, nose throbbing, head pounding, he got dressed as quickly as he could and snatched up his hat.

The convent was in darkness when the Dion drew up in front of it. Kit hammered on the door and when no one appeared hammered louder. A light went on in the house opposite and a man poked his head out through the shutter.

‘Go home, salud. That is a house of religieuses, not poulettes.’

‘Monsieur.’ When she finally opened the door, the nun was so outraged by Kit’s presence that she stammered. ‘Allez-vous-en... This is not the time. Leave us in peace. This is a house of God.’

‘I’m so sorry, Sister,’ he said and, placing his hands on her shoulders, pushed her gently to one side. The nun’s hands flew up to her chest and she sagged against the wall.

But Kit did not care. He ran down the long stone corridor with its shadowy spaces and plaster saints, through the murmurs of sleeping women, and the half-coughs and groans of patients, until he reached the door of Daisy’s room.

‘Daisy.’

She was awake, watching the moonlight stream at an angle through the window, her face half in the dark, half in the light. As it had once before, in the garden at the Villa Lafayette, the moon lit her hair and skin. She seemed not of this earth and it frightened him.

‘Daisy.’

Kit slid to his knees beside the bed. ‘Have you forgiven me?’

She turned her brilliant eyes on him. ‘Oh, Kit. Only you would organize a break-in at a convent in the middle of the night. Of course I’ve forgiven you.’ Her gaze returned to the door. ‘We won’t have much time before they come clucking in.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps this is the time to say goodbye.’

‘Daisy—’

‘When I left you in the garden that time at the Villa Layfayette, I made a choice, Kit, though I didn’t know it then. You remember. The day you agreed to marry Matty you made a choice. I’m not saying yours was the wrong choice, because I think Matty gives you something you need, Kit. Somehow you knew that.’

He cherished her hand against his mouth and kissed each finger one by one.

‘You must do what you think fit with the baby.’

‘He’s your son, too,’ said Kit. He brushed their entwined fingers with his lips. ‘Don’t you want him?’

‘Yes I do, very much. More than I can tell you. But how could I keep him? Think of the whispers and the finger-pointing. The innuendo that will always follow him. In the playground. At school. I would never get away with it. People are inquisitive and children are cruel... I was cruel to Matty so I know. You see, when I refused to visit the convenient doctor in Harley Street, I didn’t understand that bit of it. And now I’ve got him and I love him, I can’t let that happen.’

Kit was silent, and Daisy stroked the bowed head with her free hand. ‘Please, darling. Take him for me. Please. I will abide by whatever you decide.’ She tugged at his hair and Kit raised his face – an older, haunted face. Daisy ran a finger along an eyebrow, which had turned almost white from the sun, along the thin nose, and down to the mouth.

‘Anything,’ said Kit.

Several pairs of rapid footsteps came down the corridor and Kit, burying his head in the curve of Daisy’s arm, turned his face into her full breast and inhaled milky maternity. ‘I will love you for ever.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, catching her breath. ‘But one part of it is over, Kit. And I’ve promised myself not to become a mass of regret, otherwise it won’t have been worth it. Nor should you.’

There was a gabble of whispered, excited French outside the door.

‘I managed it badly,’ muttered Kit into the soft roundness, ‘didn’t I?’

‘So did I.’

With the passion and possessiveness of one who knew that neither was permissible any longer, he pressed kisses onto the breast beneath the starched cotton, desperate to imprint her flesh on his.

‘Monsieur. I must demand that you leave at once.’ Flanked by her flock of nuns, the Mother Superior held an oil lamp high above her head. It cast a long shadow over the room. ‘You have insulted our trust, and our hospitality, and I hope you will leave at once. Your behaviour is not that of a gentleman.’

Kit got slowly to his feet and looked down at the figure in the bed. The black shapes by the door shifted and closed on him.

Daisy lifted her hand and whispered, ‘Take him, won’t you? Please. I trust you, Kit. You’ll know what to do. Don’t worry, I won’t ask for him back.’ She paused and said, ‘Goodbye, Kit.’

‘Daisy.’ Kit bent over and kissed her on the lips. For the last time, her arm snaked up around his neck.

He took Daisy’s hand, held it cupped in both his own and then laid it gently on the sheet.

‘Daisy,’ he said to her, full of longing. ‘Daisy. I may not have loved you very cleverly, but I loved you. Whatever happens, I won’t forget.’

‘I know.’

‘Monsieur. At once.’ Mother Superior’s voice was shaking with anger. ‘This is a sick patient. I will be forced to summon the police if you do not leave at once.’

As he went obediently through the door, Kit turned and looked back through the accusing faces. Under the picture of the Madonna with the lilies, Daisy was lying motionless, watching him, her hand where he had placed it. The moonlight lit up the pale mouth and long neck, and the tears that poured in a stream down her face.

‘Smile, darling,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I can’t bear it.’