gravely, one might say respectfully, and his father, who when he did
anything at all did it in style, had given him a toy fort fully
garrisoned with resplendent Highland soldiers. And there had been a
party of children whom, as a single child, he disliked and despised and
whom he had ordered about unreproved. From start to finish the day had
been his very own.

Soon afterwards his mother disappeared. They said she was dead. He
knew that people died, but death conveyed nothing to him, and when his
father and Christine went down to Kensal Green to choose the grave, he
picked flowers from the other graves and sent them to his mother with
Robert's love. Christine had turned away her face, crying, and James
Stonehouse, whose sense of drama never quite failed him, had smiled
tragically; but Robert never even missed her. His only manifestation
of feeling was a savage hatred of Christine, who tried to take her
place. For a time indeed his mother went completely out of his
consciousness. But after a little she came back to him by a secret
path. In the interval she had ceased to be connected with his evening
prayer and his morning bath and all the other tiresome realities and
become a creature of dreams. She grew tall and beautiful. He liked to
be alone--best of all at night when Christine had put the light out--so
that he could make up stories about her and himself and their new
mystical intimacy. He knew that she was dead but he did not believe
it. It was just one of those mysterious tricks which grown-up people
played on children to pretend that death was so enormously conclusive.
Though he had buried the black kitten with his own hands in the back
garden, and had felt the stiffness of its pitiful body and the dank
chill of its once glossy fur, he was calmly sure that somewhere or
other, out of sight, it still pursued its own tail with all the
solemnity of kittenhood.