Austin Friars, January: his daughter turns over, in a flood of splintered sunlight, the Book of Hours that belonged to Lizzie Wycks. ‘Your wife, what was she like?’ What can he tell her? We were practical people, who did each other acts of practical kindness; she died and I missed her. Her affections were deep and stern and when she spoke to the children about their derelictions she would say, ‘I tell you this for your own good.’ When she went into company she wore a gable hood like a woman of fashion but when she was at home she wore a housewife’s coif. She was a maker of lists, a tabulator
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