Theodore had begun to mount the stairs bearing his tray, followed by the twins who, according to one of their many selfimposed rituals, carried the animal between them, his foolish smiling face emerging from under Edward's arm, his woolly legs trailing, and his sausage of a wagging tail rhythmically lifting the hem of Henrietta's gingham dress. Theodore, Octavian's valetudinarian elder brother, formerly an engineer in Delhi and now long unemployed, was well known to have left India under a cloud, although no one had ever been able to discover what sort of cloud it was that Theodore had left India under. Nor was it known whether Theodore in reality liked or disliked his brother, his contemptuous references to whom were ignored by common consent. He was a tall thin grey-haired partly bald man with a bulging brow finely engraved with hieroglyphic lines, and screwed-up clever thoughtful eyes. 'Paula, must you read at the table?' said Mary. Paula Biranne, the twins' mother, was still absorbed in her book. She left the disciplining of her children, with whom she seemed at such moments to be coeval, entirely to Mary. Paula had been divorced from Richard Biranne for over two years. Mary herself was a widow of many years' standing. 'Sorry,' said Paula. She closed her copy of Lucretius. Paula taught Greek and Latin at a local school. Meal times were important to Mary. They were times of communication, ritualistic forgatherings almost spiritual in their significance. Human speech and casual co-presence then knit up wounds and fissures which were perhaps plain only to Mary's own irritated and restless sensibility, constantly recreating an approximation to harmony of which perhaps again only she was fully aware. At these points of contact Mary held an authority which nobody challenged. If the household possessed a communal unconscious mind, Mary constituted its communal consciousness. The regularity of breakfast lunch tea and dinner was moreover one of the few elements of formal pattern in a situation which, as Mary felt it, hovered always upon the brink of a not unpleasant but quite irrevocable anarchy.