"Godforsaken house," he exclaimed! His hands went into banter with the walls a dreadful scrapping and scraggling, not so much a panic but a desperate frustration, for the Louis' ancestral home had a habit of shifting walls, floors and furniture. Even light switches and sockets had been known to move on a magical and most assuredly feminine whim. And always when Louis' back was turned.

You see she loved him. Monstrous! She had loved him for a life time and more if you could believe the gossip she spread about herself and the ancient kings of Egypt. She adored every hair on his tired old body. She had hailed each strand of youth that had slipped from his scalp and had collected as many as she could find and hidden them in box under the stairs. She performed like a conjurer turned assassin, in the shadows, in secret, in silence. Each move a reflex, her baggy skin hung around her neck like a balaclava, her perfume as innocent as a hurricane wind.

And every time he got caught like this he would always think of her. And she knew it, and this would warm her heart. That was why she was so pernickety about tidiness and design. She was always trying to prove herself to him. Each desperate time she tidied the living room, was an act of passion and he knew it. It did not matter how much he fumed, how much he cursed her when he tripped over newly placed shoes or stubbed his toe on the sudden materialisation of a wardrobe. She loved him from youth into deep old age and that was what counted.

So it can be argued that for Louis, a man who had never read a cheap love story or ever heard a loving lament, life had been generous. Yes, it was pretty good going for a tired old hospital nurse for whom temper had replaced passion, who in his youth was once a great stallion of a man.

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