...
What did he want, she asked him, coming disturbing them at that hour, but
in her face there was, he fancied, something more than the surly question
justified, some curiosity, some eagerness that seemed to show that she did
not have many visitors here and that their company might be an eager
relief.
"I'm Peter Westcott and I've come to see my father."
She did not answer this, but only, with her hand to her breast stood back
a little and watched him with frightened eyes. She was wearing an old,
faded, green blouse, open at her scraggy neck and her skirt was a kind of
bed-quilt, odd bits of stuffs of many colours stuck together. Her scanty
hair was pulled into a bunch on the top of her head, her face where it was
not brown was purple, and her hands were always shaking so that her fingers
rattled together like twigs. But her alarmed and startled eyes had some
appeal that made one pity her poor battered old body.
"You don't remember me," he said, looking into her frightened eyes. But she
shook her head slowly.
"You'd much better have kept away," she said.
"Where is he?" he asked her.
She shuffled in front of him down the dark hall. Except for this strange
smell of rotting apples it was all very much as it had been. The lamp
hanging at the foot of the stairs made the same spluttering noise and there
was the door of the room that had once been his grandfather's, and Peter
fancied that he could still see the old man swaying there in the doorway,
laughing at his son and his grandson as they struggled there on the floor.
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