If I were going to be mad I should have gone mad long ago: when Roddy
came back; when Mark died; when I sent Richard away. I should be mad now.
It was getting worse.
In the cramped room where the big bed stuck out from the wall to within a
yard of the window, Mamma went about, small and weak, in her wadded
lavender Japanese dressing-gown, like a child that can't sit still,
looking for something it wants that nobody can find. You couldn't think
because of the soft pad-pad of the dreaming, sleepwalking feet in the
lamb's-wool slippers.
When you weren't looking she would slip out of the room on to the landing
to the head of the stairs, and stand there, vexed and bewildered when you
caught her.