All My Sins Remembered [antikvár]

London, 1990 It was a lie, but it was not a lie that could do any damage. The writer reflected on the relative harmlessness of what she was doing as she waited on the step for the doorbell to be answered. It was a cold and windy autumn afternoon, and the trees that bordered the canal in Little Venice were shedding their leaves into the water. She had turned away to look at the play of light in the ripples drawn behind a barge when the door opened at last behind her. There was a smiling nurse in a blue dress. 'Mrs Ainger, hello there. Come in, now,' 'How is she today?' Elizabeth Ainger asked. 'Not so bad at all. Quite clear in the head, as a matter of fact. She even asked when you were coming.' 'She's getting used to me,' the biographer said. 'I'm glad it's one of her good days.' The nurse showed her into a drawing room at the rear of the house with a view of a small garden through double doors. There were porcelain ornaments arranged on the marble mantelpiece, a little blue painting of an interior hanging above them, embroidered cushions and faded rose-patterned loose covers. These neat, traditional furnishings were faintly at odds with the picture that hung on the wall behind the old lady's chair. It was a double portrait, in oils, of two young women. They were looking away from each other, out of the frame of the picture, and there was tension in every line of their bodies. The painter's peculiarly hectic style owed