"Look," he addressed the cat, "that's all I can do for now. Whether or not you eat is up to you. I can't go on calling you "kitty," and I'm not going to call you 'Sidhi' or anything equally absurd." The cat closed its eyes, whether from relaxation or boredom Kincaid couldn't guess. "Sid. From now on you're just plain Sid, okay?" He took silence as assent and got up, dusting off his knees.

He must find a key if he were to continue looking after the cat-he couldn't go on playing the amateur burglar.

Where had Jasmine kept her keys? He thought she hadn't often used them since she became ill, but they must have been easily accessible. The small secretary seemed the obvious choice, and his search did not take more than a few minutes. He found a single key on a monogrammed brass key ring, tucked away in a wooden catch-all box on the desk's surface.

As he turned away a flash of color in one of the secretary's slots caught his attention. It was a weekly engagement calendar of the type sold by museum shops-each week's page accompanied by a Constable painting. He flipped through the last few months, finding visits to the clinic, birthdays, and his own name entered with increasing regularity. In the weeks of March he began to see botanical notations; the blooming of the japonica and forsythia, the daffodils, and as he turned to April, the flowering of the pears and plums, and the first tulip in the garden. All were things visible from the windows of the flat, and Kincaid felt that this had not been Jasmine's yearly ritual, but rather a cataloguing of a last spring. In yesterday's space, opposite Constable's "View from Hampstead Heath," she had written "Theo-Sunday?" and then, in very careful script "my fiftieth birthday."

He hadn't known.