“She seems awfully old,” Maire said tactlessly when she and Annie sat down to a cup of tea before doing the dishes.

“Old indeed?” Annie looked at this baby with withering scorn. “To you maybe, who’s barely out of the cradle—she’s not more than fifty,” Annie sniffed. “Twenty or more years younger than me, you’ll be driving me to my grave, Maire, if you call the likes of her old.”

“I just meant…” Maire was overwhelmed by Annie’s capacity for speech, being herself a slow thinker with her tongue. She could go no further.

“And what did you mean?” Annie said crisply, loyalty bristling in her.

“Well—I thought you said she was beautiful…” Maire said, hanging her head for she well knew she was raising a storm.

But Annie was apt to do the unexpected. She was too strong a nature to have taken on the rigid mannerisms of what we like to call “a character.” She did not fly out at Maire. She drank her tea and only after quite a time, she spoke softly, “It’s a hard thing for her.”

“But Mr. Gordon—he’s handsome,” Maire said anxious to make amends.

Annie sniffed. “Handsome is as handsome does,” she said shortly. Annie would never admit that anyone who married a Dene was quite worthy, and she resented the fact that Charles did not show his age. She washed the dishes in silence, handing them over to Maire mechanically and thinking that it was queer to feel so weak in the knees, and that perhaps she should have a little nap before tea. After all she had hardly slept a wink with all the excitement.

Maire kept her thoughts to herself and was not perhaps aware of how quickly they changed, how quickly she forgot that first impression, which had been caused no doubt by the shock of a real person’s coming between her and Annie’s legends and her own dreams. Violet was not of course beautiful with the changeless white and gold beauty of a princess in a fairy tale as she had become in Maire’s imagination. But she was still beautiful in more human terms.

This Maire felt when she brought in the breakfast tray the next morning and met for the first time, straight on, Violet’s clear blue gaze. Had anyone ever not been melted by it?

“Good morning, Maire,” Violet said, smiling a welcome to the shy girl whose hands always seemed to tremble when she was carrying anything. “What a lovely day after the rain!”

There was something about this voice too which troubled Maire though she did not know what it was, as if very simple things sounded like poetry. She did not dare raise her eyes again—they rested on the slim nervous ringed hands, and Maire thought without resentment, “What it is to be a lady and have such smooth hands.”

There was something about the atmosphere of this room, the bottles of perfume on the dresser, the soft blue velvet wrapper flung down on the chaise longue, which filled Maire with excitement and devotion. So many impressions crowded in on her all at once that she was dismayed to find she hadn’t heard Violet’s question. It came to her after a second of silence. “Did Mr. Gordon have a good breakfast?”

“Oh yes,” Maire said blushing, “very good.”

“And he’s gone out, has he?” Violet asked.

But when Maire had answered that Mr. Gordon had gone over to the farm to see Mr. Pennyfeather, she did not know how to get out of the room, and stood there, her hands at her sides, mortally embarrassed. Only when Violet noticed this and suggested that she might go now, did she run out, as if she had been released from a spell.

Violet would have liked to lie there for half the morning, not do anything except feel, soak in the peace—the wonderful peace of having arrived with Charles, of having really reached home. It was strange to think that even after thirty years of marriage such tensions could build up around the hours of passionate love and acceptance of each other. The months in England had been such a period of tension when Violet was forced to face the fact that she and Charles were not good friends; at such times they rubbed each other the wrong way and concealed their mutual irritation under a façade of extreme politeness, concern about health.

“You must have a good long rest after lunch, Violet,” Charles would say, knowing or not knowing (Violet could never make up her mind which) that this meant that she was looking tired, knowing or not knowing that it had a concealed barb in it. And feeling diminished, looking at herself too much, too often in the mirror, she had to find a more flattering reflection in someone’s eyes—and despised herself for it. At such times she envied plain acquaintances whose marriages had lapsed into nothing more than a steady taking-for-granted kind of companionship. No, her marriage had never ceased to be perilous, demanding, disappointing, ecstatic. It ebbed and flowed on its own secret tides and she wondered now sometimes what would happen when the tide ebbed for good. Like a poet who thinks in each dry period that he will never again be visited by the angels, Violet during each of these periods suffered a kind of terror and despair. It was necessary to maintain, to create the physical tension between them—without it, the meaning would go out of their mode of communication which was to be almost deliberately casual, flat. Charles could never express himself in words; and she did not wish to. Their flirtations with people outside this magnetic circle had never been serious and had perhaps been necessary.

Violet would have liked to lie in bed all morning thinking of these things, but the curtains had been pulled back and the brilliant daylight poured in on her, dazzling her eyes, making its imperative demands. Personal life which had always been intense in this house (so Violet guessed) partly by reason of its isolation, personal life must be framed in a ritual, a discipline. By nature she had always known this; here in the house what she knew instinctively was borne out concretely in every detail. Emotion must be concentrated or it would just vanish into the high empty spaces. This was not a room designed for daydreaming, a cosy boudoir. It took on its beauty by candlelight, and its greatness when the shutters were opened, the candles snuffed, and the small currents of wind and the great still spaces of the night free to take possession.

So Violet pushed the tray away and got up and went to close the windows, and to look out. That was the first part of the ritual—one must look out and discover the day. Now the grass was still wet with dew under the oak grove and the greenness seemed to shine. She met the blue sky full on with a shock of pleasure, for here a blue sky was always diaphanous, never flat, but radiant as if light poured through it. She had not at first noticed Charles but now he emerged from the plantation of trees at the top of the hill, hands in his pockets, Pennyfeather walking at a little distance behind him. Violet could tell by Charles’s stance that he was being authoritative and that he was not pleased, and she smiled. Then as he glanced down at the house, she leaned out to wave, and he waved back and she could sense his smile of pleasure in the air between them and the thread of their union pulled taut. A person always would give this landscape a peculiar poignance, she thought. A person looked so small, yet gave the spacious scene its necessary focus. How lonely, it must have felt here, she thought, all these years.

There was so much to be done, so much, that Violet hardly stopped at the dressing table, but dressed with nervous impatience, finding her brogues at the bottom of the shoebag and a heathery tweed skirt and sweater, then at the door turned back and put on her pearl earrings and a pearl necklace. She could not meet this day when the rituals would be established less than formally.

First she had a long talk with Annie in the kitchen while Maire did the upstairs. It began as a serious talk about meals, expenses, what they might count on from the farm, how often meat was delivered and so on. Violet had been prepared for the fact that Annie would know best, would as a last resort call up the shades of parents and grandparents to defend the boiled potato or vegetable marrow as the almost unique vegetable. Some things would have to be accomplished gradually and only by the use of tact amounting to genius. And Violet was prepared to take her time, so she agreed with almost all of Annie’s suggestions and plans, especially as they were both eager to get business out of the way.

“Now you’ll have a cup of tea,” Annie said firmly, and that meant, Violet knew, a heart to heart talk.

“The dear kitchen, Annie—the smell of it…” she sighed. It was the smell of onions and mint and tea, and a general spicy smell which came from the little spice cupboard to the left of the stove; this mixed with wood burning and the sharp dank taste of coal in your mouth, and of damp dishcloths drying out on a rack.

“I don’t know as we’ll ever get the laundry free of the damp,” Annie was saying. “The walls were mildewed. And what with all the rest, I’ve hardly had time to dry it out.”

“You’ve done wonders, Annie. I don’t know how—”

“Well, it was high time you came back, Miss Violet, I’ll say that. I’m telling you I was all of a tremble when I put the key in the lock the first time—the emptiness of it, Miss Violet! It was enough to scare the heart out of you.” Annie shook her head, then looked across at Violet and smiled her rare smile. “But in no time, what with the fires and the open windows it began to feel like itself.”

“It’s strange isn’t it, Annie, how it never changes … only we’ve changed. The house is the same,” Violet said in her musical voice, for she was Irish enough to enjoy the melancholy of this.

“You always did talk nonsense in such a way that the angels themselves would imagine you spoke the truth,” Annie said roughly. And Violet laughed, “Oh Annie it’s good to be home!”

“That’s more like it.” Then as Violet got up to go Annie threw in casually, “I wouldn’t be surprised now if Miss Barbie took it into her head to come over one of these days—”

“I’d be very much surprised,” Violet said quietly and turned away. She did not want to think of Barbie just now, just yet.

No, this first day must be carefully designed. Later, supported by the design, she could afford to remember the difficult, the painful things. Not now, not yet.

So she slowly climbed up the back stairs, without hurrying, and out into the brilliant sunshine that flooded the hall and showed up rather cruelly the faded wallpaper, torn strips hanging down at the far end … Charles must see to that, Violet noted.

She stood with the long table between her and the portrait-covered wall and looked for a moment at the gathered Denes, one by one. They were all there except her father and mother, dressed in brocade and satin, looking down at her without surprise, without condemnation, accepting her as she accepted them—even Great-Aunt Sarah St. Leger, the one exaltée of the lot, for she had been so altered in mind by the horrors of the Famine that she had devoted the rest of her life to good works. The Dene attitude toward this aunt could be summed up in something Violet had heard her gentle unworldly father say with a sigh, “Yes, Sarah,” he had said, “no doubt she hoped that someday one of us would follow in her footsteps. But I fear she was the exception that proves the rule.”

“What’s the rule, Father?” Barbie had asked. They were standing just where Violet stood there and, she remembered, it was raining and the plan to pick mushrooms had had to be abandoned for fear Barbie would catch a cold.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, playing with the ring on his little finger as he did when he was faintly embarrassed, “something about a pattern of life carried on through the generations. Sarah St. Leger was outside the pattern. Possibly she had greatness so the pattern constricted her. But to some of us,” he added half to himself, “it has meant a kind of freedom. For the matter of that, we’re all eccentrics,” he said, patting Barbie’s little dark head.

“Violet isn’t,” Barbie said with scorn. “She just wants to be liked.”

And he had laughed, “Yes, I doubt if Great-Aunt Sarah would approve of Violet.”

But Violet knew by the way her father looked at her that he did approve, so it didn’t matter about that old Aunt.

Did it matter now, since this scene so long ago had come back so vividly to her mind? Or had it after all mattered then, mattered so much that she had buried it and never thought of it again?

No, said Violet, looking up at the small aloof erect head on the wall, dark hair falling in ringlets and deep red evening dress (for this portrait had been painted before Great-Aunt Sarah’s devotion to the poor and sick had been unlocked). No, Violet said to herself, our life, Charles’s and mine, has not been meaningless. If she thinks so, she’s quite wrong. Nor for that matter, had their father’s—unlucky, impractical though it was. Dene’s Court had lost some of its grandeur in the days of her father, but what did that count beside his gentleness, his quiet wisdom, his patient botanical studies? His entire lack of business acumen—what did that matter beside what he was as a person?

And now, Violet thought, as if she had been interrupted unkindly, I really must get out and find Cammaert. Leaving the house, going out into the cool fair June day, she felt her heart lift with almost aching delight. It came over her in waves that she was really going to live here, that they would not have to leave it again, that she would for the first time in her life see every season in the house, in the woods, across the rough flung carpet of the lawn. The rising up of the rooks in battalion in September would not be the sign that they too must rise and go.

Cammaert was busy with the petunias in the parterres in front, but he was only too glad to lead her through the familiar green tunnel, past the stables overgrown with nettles, along by the brook and finally along the high brick wall to the gate of the big garden. Violet was accompanied every step of the way by memories of her mother who had done this every fair morning when she was well enough, always stopping to listen to the brook, always eager with anticipation, walking too fast for the little girls behind her and then swooping down upon them with a smell of verveine which she got from Floris in London, a white Chinese shawl flung round her shoulders and the long fringe getting caught in the barrettes of the little girls’ hair. They had reached the gate long before Violet had finished with all that flowed down the brook to her, and now she stood hesitating, while the vision of the glorious rather stiff set pieces her mother spent hours arranging came before her eyes, and she was conscious, holding the flat basket her mother had carried, that she was about to pick up and continue a musical phrase. Where it had all stopped, it would begin again, and the empty basket be filled. Cammaert was holding the gate open for her—would it all be changed?

The paths needed scraping; there were, she noticed, breaks in the wall in two places (the work of hard frost no doubt); the little arbor where her mother often sat embroidering, sheltered here from the wind, had quite fallen in. But the three benches surrounding the sundial, rusty and in need of paint, were still there. And above all, the smell was still there—Violet ran to press rose geranium and lemon verbena between her fingers. And then she felt ready to face Cammaert and to go with him slowly from rose to rose, listening to the pent-up tales of the years, of the awful drought which had killed some of the espaliered peach trees against the south wall, of rainy summers which had brought blight and mildew, of frosts which had cracked the wall open and ruined one parterre of what Cammaert called “newfangled roses.” While he talked Violet listened and condoned and above all looked around, shading her eyes from the sun, regretting that she had not worn a hat. The garden had always looked as it did now, half-finished, a little ragged, with the parterres of picking flowers at one end and the vegetables and the rows of sweet peas fencing this part off from the center round the sundial where an attempt had been made at a formal French garden, though the box had died years ago so the edges looked crumbly. It had always been a place of struggle, full of dreams of things which never got done—Her grandfather had wanted a fountain. Her mother spent days in bed making lists, surrounded with catalogues. It had always had an unfinished look, yet in those days there had been three gardeners. Violet realized for the first time what it had meant to work here alone, the long often hopeless battle.

“We’ll never be able to thank you, Cammaert,” she said, laying a hand gently on his unyielding stiff old arm. “But it looks beautiful,” she shouted, wondering how much he heard, “I’ll start picking tomorrow.” But he had turned away with a grunt, and was busily cleaning aphis off a rose.

His love for the gardens was, she thought, like an illness, a despairing love, never satisfied, intensely self-critical, with apparently no joy in it. But it had instead a kind of greatness. It was selfless. It did not even need her praise, or only as she was part of a whole which was by no means altogether composed of human beings.

“I wonder, Charles,” she said, as they sat in the library drinking martinis before lunch, grateful for the coolness here after the hot sun, “can we ever give them the support they have given us—Annie, Cammaert—can we ever serve in the way they have served?”

“Pennyfeather’s been lining his own pockets, I can tell you,” Charles said cutting through her tone deliberately.

“Oh well, he’s not one of us. It’s business with him”—Violet was scornful of this manager imported from England—“What did you expect?”

“The accounts are in the most awful mess. I’ll have my hands full,” Charles said cheerfully. He liked nothing better than a challenge of this sort. He swelled like a pigeon with pleasure.

“You’ll do very well as a country squire, darling,” Violet said demurely.

But Charles did not rise to this barb. He was wholly absorbed in his morning’s discoveries. He walked up and down talking of the need for new plantations (“that rascal has been cutting and selling, I’ll wager”), lamenting their lack of capital (“the farm needs new stock badly but we’ll have to wait”) while Violet, half listening, drank her martini and breathed in the peace.

“These chairs really do need recovering,” she said aloud.

“You’re not listening,” Charles said crossly.

“I’m sorry—what was it, darling?”

“Never mind.” Then they laughed. It was such a familiar pattern. “Have you had a good morning?” Charles asked and it meant, “I love you, even though you never listen to what I say.”

The clock on the stairs struck one as if to frame the moment. After Violet’s answer, they sat silent, looking at the fire.