By way of a conclusion, I would like to offer a few remarks on Elizabeth Bowen's short story, ‘Hand in Glove’ (1952). Rather than providing a definitive account of the state of touch in contemporary writing, I use this opportunity to look forwards to the spectral dimensions of tact. This forward glimpse, however, necessarily involves a backward glance – towards ghosts, burial and death – and to those writers and critics to whom it owes so much. Such comments can only ever point to a few of the areas into which discussions of tactile poetics might extend themselves, and this concluding chapter, by necessity, remains haunted by what it leaves out.

Elizabeth Bowen's ‘Hand in Glove’ plays out the return of the repressed. Alongside the ghosts of which it tells, it continues to haunt readers long after its closing sentence. The story itself seizes one with a sense of the text's afterlife. Known as ‘the clever Miss Trevors’, sisters Elsie and Ethel are the talk of the town. Orphaned by their parents, they live with their elderly aunt, a Mrs Varley de Grey, who acts as a chaperone to her nieces but who evidently has little control over their actions. Indeed, when the presence of their aunt becomes troublesome, Ethel and Elsie lock her in her bedroom and prohibit contact with the outside world. Over the years, the sisters pilfer items from Mrs Varley de Grey's trousseau, which is stored in seven large trunks in the attic, until eventually, all that remains – apart from a proposal of marriage – are evening gloves. Presuming that their aunt's gloves must be locked within the one trunk that still defies them, they covet the keys she conceals under her pillow. In the meantime, the sisters’ social lives take their toll on their existing gloves and as a result, before they go out each evening, Ethel and Elsie ‘manfully dab away at the fingertips’ with benzine, a cleaning chemical formed from the distillation of benzoic acid with lime (p. 768).