CHAPTER TWO

Polly Dysart entered the church of All Saints, Nether Hinton, on the arm of Sir Rupert, her father, to the expectant hush that normally greets the arrival of a bride. Unlike her more fortunate younger sister Flora, she was not a good-looking girl, merely passable in a healthy, rather jolly manner. Yet today her looks had risen to the occasion. Granted Polly was a shade too broad for her grandmother’s remodelled satin dress and, being tall and large-hipped, of a different shape from the corseted waist and bosom for which it had been made, but it sat well enough and the Honiton lace veil (washed carefully in tea by Robbie) billowed around a face rendered soft and pink from emotion.

The Reverend Mr Pengeally made his opening remarks and Flora allowed relief that Polly had made it to the altar to wash over her. Her father had been against the marriage, for no better reason than that James Sinclair, stockbroker, was, in Sir Rupert’s opinion, nowhere near good enough for a Dysart, even if he was ambitious. James’s family did not matter a twopenny toss to her, Polly had sobbed into Flora’s shoulder after a tense encounter between her fiance and father – she was desperate not to lose the one man who was likely to marry her. Flora, who knew Polly and her permanent grudge against life better than any, had remained silent.

She stole a look at her bridegroom’s unremarkable profile. The situation had been delicate. James was ambitious, but also sensitive, and not unnaturally he had taken offence at the implication that he was lacking in both social and financial credibility – particularly as the Dysarts were known to be as poor as church mice. But they possessed something very desirable: breeding, stretching way back through a history of leet courts, manor houses, knighthoods, internecine wars, and the armorial bearings reposing in the College of Heralds.

‘Do you take this man...?’ asked Mr Pengeally, levelling his short-sighted gaze onto Polly’s face beneath the veil.

She does, yes, she does, thought her sister. Half choked by the smell of lilies, Flora grasped her bouquet tightly in her gloved hands, and the nightmare receded of processing with Polly into the church from which the bridegroom had bolted.

‘I do,’ said Polly loudly, and Flora made a mental note to search out the charity for distressed stockbrokers and make a large donation.

Too provincial, considered Susan Chudleigh from her vantage point at the end of the pew. (Susan possessed only one yardstick with which to measure things: an inflated notion that anything outside London was not worth considering.) This wedding is too provincial for words. She turned her head forty-five degrees in order to target the guests on the right-hand side of the church, and saw no one that she recognized or who looked worth pursuing. At least, Susan thought complacently, assessing Polly’s clumsy hips and half-grown shingle under the veil, my children are good-looking. Her face hardened, however, when her gaze encountered a diminutive figure standing beside Marcus. Try as she might, and God knew she had tried for twenty years, Susan could not bring herself to love her niece, Matty.

Because the pew was full, Daisy was pressed up against her mother. Susan’s surreptitious sweeps over the guests and a certain rigidity of her lips gave her away and Daisy had a shrewd notion of what Susan was thinking. Even at a wedding – no, especially at a wedding – Susan concentrated on the business of social analysis and it never failed to amuse her daughter.

Religion held little appeal for Daisy, or, more precisely, the Church of England variety rendered her angry and frustrated. It preached nothing to her except Do and Don’t and, in the end, when she tried to dissect the meat from the bone, its certainties slithered away. Thus Daisy occupied herself during the theological bits of the Reverend Mr Pengeally’s address by counting the number of polka-dot frocks in the congregation. There were five: black on beige, black on white, two whites on black and daring red on black. Daisy tugged at the skirt of her own geometrically patterned frock with its fashionably longer hemline so that it appeared even more so.

Five pews ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle, sat the bridegroom’s family. From the back, they presented an unbroken line of stiff collars and regimented haircuts, interspersed with rather dull dresses and trimmed straw hats. Directly across from them sat the Dysarts and Daisy applied herself to working out who was who. She fixed on a figure in a grey morning suit with fair hair slicked well back and concluded that that was Polly’s brother, Kit. At the other end of the pew sat Sir Rupert, a bull-necked, broad-shouldered man who, judging from the angle of his head, was gazing not at his daughter but at a point above the altar. Behind him was a woman in a navy blue coat and a hat that could only be described as lacking, who appeared to be staring at something on Sir Rupert’s shoulder.

The previous evening the Lockhart-Fifes had let drop at dinner that Sir Rupert had fought in the Great War and had suffered from it, although they had been vague about how. The information had been delivered in a hushed tone and Daisy had understood: the Chudleighs also had friends who had survived, some burnt, some missing limbs or coughing phlegm, and it had often struck her that a component of their spirit had also been blown to bits in the stink and carnage over a decade before. They frightened Daisy, these survivors; today’s men who, by some trick of history, had become yesterday’s.

‘Love is a bottomless well...’ said Mr Pengeally, nearing his conclusion.

Is it? If this was true, Daisy had not observed her parents drawing upon it, more like a teacup, and she considered nudging Marcus to share the joke but thought better of it.

Beside Daisy, Matty’s small gloved hands tapped her prayer book – ‘claws’, Marcus called them in his kindly but patronizing way. She looked down at her lap: it was true. The leather concealed their dry, papery skin. She smoothed out the wrinkles in the glove and tried to ignore her hands.

At the altar, Polly climbed to her feet and allowed James to lead her into the vestry. Seven minutes later, exactly as Rupert had allotted on the timetable, they walked back down the aisle.

Outside, a mild June sun poked at intervals through billowy clouds and sent shafts of light through the avenue of limes that led up to the church door. It had rained earlier that morning, and the hoofprints left by the horses on the mud road were filled with water. The guests chatted in groups about scandals, hunting and farming practices, leavened with gossip, and Polly would have been hurt and offended had she known how little her wedding featured compared to these important topics. Nevertheless, the villagers, many of whom had abandoned their Saturday tasks to walk up to the church gate, took in every detail.

Mrs Dawes, the Dysarts’ cook and housekeeper, scraped a slick of mud off her boot and watched the bride and groom pose for the photographer in front of the double doors. ‘Not bad,’ she commented. Mrs Dawes had no particular affection for Polly.

Ellen Sheppey clutched at her handbag and scrutinized Polly. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But not as pretty as my Betty, is she, Ned?’

A little washy from two pints in the Plume of Feathers, her husband, who worked in the kitchen garden at the big house, could not be bothered to answer.

‘Well, I admit, your Betty does have an edge.’ Mrs Dawes sounded a shade waspish. A widow of many years, she had never managed to produce any children before Albert was taken from her. She lapsed into silence at the might-have-been and then said, ‘It’s not like the old days, is it, Ellen? When Sir Rupert got married, me mam took me to look at the huge tent on the lawn and the wedding breakfast laid for five hundred.’

‘No.’ Ellen raised herself on tiptoe. ‘It was different then.’ She turned to Ned and said crossly, ‘Cat got your tongue, Ned?’

The photographer issued a request and Dysarts and Sinclairs clustered around the couple. The Sinclairs were of middle height and inclined to plumpness and the Dysarts towered beside them. Inch for inch Polly matched James; Flora, overdressed in her bridesmaid’s silk georgette, was taller even than her sister, and Sir Rupert, chest braced in military fashion, seemed huge. An example of the rumpled good looks in which Saxon men specialize, Kit dominated the group. Sunburnt from a recent trip to Turkey and Albania, he kept himself a little apart from the others, and gazed over the fields as if he wished he was somewhere quite different. Long-nosed with blue eyes under heavy lids, Kit’s was almost a lazy face. But not quite. It had charm, yes, a hint of an unsettled depth, kept private – the face of someone, perhaps, who was a loner.

At last Polly and James broke free from the photographer and made for the waiting car, leaving the guests to pick their way down the path fringed by drenched shrubs to Hinton Dysart. Over the centuries obstinate Dysarts had refused to take the longer way round to the church and slashed their way with small swords and canes through the scrub until the path had become part of the local topography.

Her hat pulled down over her eyes as usual, Matty lagged behind because, she told herself, she wanted to look around. Having lived in London for most of her life, interspersed with quick dashes for the country Fridays to Mondays, her experience was urban and the smell of the churchyard whirling with blown lime blossom was pleasant. In the end, she could not put off the difficult part of the proceedings any longer and tagged on with the last of the guests.

She crossed the bridge, stopped and looked through the fringe of trees. Further up, there was a tiny boathouse and a landing stage made from a couple of planks. Even from that distance it was obvious the landing stage was rotting and the river in need of dredging. Several centuries ago it had cut a loop around the piece of land on which the house was built, before slicing through a mixture of clay and chalk towards Bentley. Matty watched the weed flap to and fro and tried to assess how deep the water was.

Then she turned her face towards the flat-fronted house – a dreaming house – whose windows reached almost to the lawn, surrounded by the tangle of vegetation and moss-encrusted statuary. It must have been beautiful once, she thought, mentally realigning a stone urn and clearing a path. It still was, in its rundown way.

A flotilla of cars was parked on the gravel in the drive and chauffeurs talked and smoked. Polly was posed on the steps up to the main door and her veil lifted and flurried in the breeze.

‘Hold it,’ ordered the photographer, and a puff of light exploded in the guests’ faces and made them blink. The group fractured and, with a nervous laugh, the bride picked up her dress and ran inside.

A scent of damp grass and of heavy, loamy soil filtered up to Matty. Starlings chattered under the huge plane tree by the river and a string of raindrops slid down the balustrade of the stone stairs. Slowly, Matty climbed the steps.

She placed her high-heeled shoe over the threshold of the hall and again she stopped. For as sure as she knew anything, she knew that turbulence and old grief were trapped within the walls of the house, imprisoned and unexorcised. As much in surprise as in dismay, for these feelings were quite new, she drew in a sharp breath. Then, as quickly as they had come, the dissonance faded. Only an echo remained. Head down, she passed quickly on to the dining room.

Whereas Daisy, ushered into the hall by several interested male guests, gave an exclamation of pleasure. She saw a square, beautifully proportioned room, with a plaster ceiling worked into flowers and pineapples, shabby Persian runners on a stone-flagged floor, an Adam fireplace, family portraits and a sofa, upholstered in faded brocade, set against the fireplace.

‘How... how complete,’ she said.

‘Good,’ said a voice behind her, and Daisy turned round.

‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Kit Dysart.

‘I do, very much.’

Kit found himself the focus of a pair of blue eyes so dark that the iris melted into the pupils. They were offset by lashes which were thick and glossy but not nearly long enough, according to their owner, good cheekbones, a wide mouth and a long neck. It was a fresh, vivid face, flushed with health, and rendered a little mysterious by the angle of the tilted hat. But it was not so much the arrangement of features that made Daisy, rather a fusion of spirit and body that lit her from inside.

She was used to scrutiny and she waited for a second or two before asking Kit, ‘Has your family always lived here?’

‘Yes. Originally there was a Tudor house which a great-great-great grandfather, Sir Harry, demolished. He had made a pile in India and came home to build a house in the latest fashion.’

‘Slaves?’

‘Good heavens, no. Sir Harry made his fortune trading in spices. Besides, slaves came from Africa.’

Daisy laughed and Kit thought he detected genuine relief in the sound. ‘Well, that’s all right, then. You’re quite respectable.’

‘We haven’t been introduced.’

‘Daisy Chudleigh, and who cares too much about introductions?’

‘Hallo, Daisy Chudleigh.’ Her smile hit Kit in the region of his stomach. Glowing, set off by her pink dress and hat, seemingly unconscious of the effect she was making, Daisy was not at all ordinary.

He stared at the carmined mouth as he said, ‘Of course, this kind of house is no longer fashionable.’

‘That’s what I like.’

At that Kit smiled back: the house was important to him, so much so that if he was asked to describe how important, he would have retreated in monosyllables. Pressed, he would have said it was part of his blood and bone.

‘Will you take me into the wedding breakfast?’ she was asking. ‘Providing you don’t have to field a great-aunt or something.’

‘My relations are dispensable,’ he said. ‘And Great-Aunt Hetta has just lost her escort.’ He offered his arm to Daisy.

‘Won’t she be mortally offended and rewrite the will?’ Daisy laid a finger on his arm.

‘That is a gamble I’m going to take.’

For a second, Kit and Daisy looked at each other, and then he led her into the dining room.

Uncharacteristically, Polly had set her heart on a large wedding, but her wish had not been granted. Rupert was too stretched financially and it was not, he informed his daughter, as if she was marrying a duke’s son. At this reproof, Polly burst into tears, a habit she had acquired during her engagement, and Rupert, gazing down at her shingled neck where the hairs were just beginning to grow, gave himself up to irritation.

‘Of course,’ he said in his cold way, which actually concealed powerful emotions, ‘it might have been different if you were marrying Bowcaster’s son.’

In the end, Rupert sold a pair of candlesticks, and, in return for their outlay of silver card cases, leather blotters, fitted luncheon baskets and toast racks laid out in ranks in the library, the guests were served consommé Madrilene, filets de sole Bercy and selle d’agneau bouquetière (or, as Rupert put it, French muck), washed down with a Château Haut-Brion 1913 and Château Yquem. The less-favoured guests were placed at tables in the library and drawing room. The more fortunate were in the dining room, one of Hinton Dysart’s most remarkable features as each of the four walls were covered by oil frescoes, so fashionable in the 1760s. They had been painted, went family lore, by an Italian artist who inadvisedly fell in love with Sir Harry’s youngest daughter and hanged himself in the cellar when Sir Harry banished him from the house. The frescoes were still lustrous and dominating, deflecting attention from the smoke marks on the ceiling, the flakes of paint scattered under the windows, and the lacework of mould on the wooden shutters.

Matty noticed these details. Those were precisely the sort of things that caught her eye, and as the conversation and bursts of laughter (mainly from Daisy’s end of the table) rose and fell, she built up a mental picture of the house. Clearly it required attention, from the grimy plasterwork, to the linen tablecloths whose hems had unravelled. Instinctively, she understood that this was a house whose bones were beautiful, would always be so, but which, like age spots, imperfections were beginning to mar. She directed her gaze through the window to the garden and found herself wishing she was out there, walking through the damp grass over the shadowed lawn.

‘Miss Verral?’ Her neighbour touched her on the elbow. ‘You’ll have the hot news from London. Is it true the Prince of Wales is selling up his steeplechasers because the King requested it?’

The two subjects, Aunt Susan had taught Matty, that will always get you through sticky conversational patches are the Royal Family and ghosts. Falling at the first hurdle, Matty was regretful. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘Oh.’ Her neighbour, a young man with a crop of freckles and greased-back hair, was disappointed.

I must try, thought Matty frantically. ‘I did hear someone say—’ she began, but was interrupted by an elderly gentleman who exclaimed, ‘Socialism?’ Then again on a higher note. ‘Socialism? The devil!’

‘Mr Beaufort.’ An earnest woman with plaits coiled like earphones tried to argue. ‘It is a fact of life. Socialism has arrived, and we have to live with it. Now we have a Labour government again.’

‘And a woman in the cabinet,’ said Matty who made a point of reading newspapers.

‘Good God,’ said Mr Beaufort and turned away. Over the bowls of fruit, Matty’s eyes met the woman’s and they exchanged a smile. Matty felt better.

An hour later, Polly stood in her bedroom in her petticoat. Her abandoned wedding dress lay on the floor beside her. Flora knelt to pick it up.

‘You next,’ said Polly brightly, to mask the nerves that had begun to jangle at the prospect of being alone with James – and the other business. Flora brushed at the creases in the dress and draped it over Polly’s single bed.

‘I should jolly well hope so,’ she said.

The bride sat down on the bed with a thump and kicked off her satin shoes. ‘Did my dressing case get packed... and my night things?’ Her wedding ring was very obvious on her left hand. ‘Flora...’ She looked up at her sister. ‘You will come and visit us? Often, I mean. For a decent stay.’

Flora squeezed Polly’s hand. ‘Course, silly.’

Polly fingered the bedspread. ‘I’ve always hated this colour,’ she said in a tone that indicated she was making discoveries. ‘But now I don’t want to leave it.’

‘Get dressed, Polly.’ Flora held up Polly’s chiffon going-away dress.

Polly shivered. ‘I’m a bit nervous.’

Flora fastened the tiny buttons up the back and began on the sleeves. ‘Everyone seems to survive it,’ she said carefully, drawing on a knowledge of married life that was vague in the extreme.

Flora watched Polly do a passable imitation of floating down the main staircase, at the bottom of which the guests had bunched, and felt guilty. She did not like James and disliked even more the rented house on the outer fringes of Kensington.

The guests pressed forward to say their goodbyes. Polly extended a hand, glove voguishly wrinkled at the wrist, and muttered her goodbyes to the cheeks pressed against hers.

‘Good luck, Polly.’

‘Good luck, Mrs Sinclair.’

She touched her cheek to Flora who kissed her sister extra hard to make up for her disloyalty before Polly disappeared through a snowstorm of confetti into the waiting car.

‘Thank God,’ said Flora to Kit as they watched it disappear in a shower of gravel. Her shoes pinched and there were damp patches under her arms. ‘Now perhaps everyone will go.’ Kit gave her a nudge and Flora looked to her right.

‘Oh, Lord,’ she said. Matty, who stood beside her, had, quite obviously, overheard. ‘Sorry, but it has been a long day.’ Keen to make up for her rudeness, she continued, ‘I gather you and the Lockhart-Fifes are coming over for a game of tennis tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Yes,’ said Matty. ‘We are.’

The aftermath of any big event leaves a backwash and it was evident in the unnatural languor of the Dysarts the following day. After ordering the young to shake up their livers with a good game, Rupert took the adults off to the drawing room where he bored Susan Chudleigh with family history over anchovy toast and strong Indian tea.

Kit had hauled his old flannels out of the drawer, and Flora had located a dismal pair of shorts from Polly’s room. They faced an immaculately turned-out pair of Chudleighs who, after the first exploratory balls, proved excellent players. Dysart solidarity was called on. Kit, disregarding aching legs and the heavy feeling around his eyes, began the attack. Marcus riposted with punishing shots and Daisy proved equally fiendish. Although not as powerful a player as her brother, she was fast and accurate. The game swung this way and that. Flora hugged the back line, Kit guarded the net, the Chudleighs beat a path back and forth across the turf and shouted encouragement to each other and insults to the opposition.

‘Come on, Kit,’ said Daisy at one point. ‘You’re a walkover.’

Roused, challenged – and disturbed by the white figure – Kit shot a return over the net. Marcus lobbed the ball to the back of the court. Flora swooped low and sent it back.

‘Got you,’ Kit called.

Daisy laughed. ‘By no means.’ And so it went on. Back and forth went the ball and so did the challenges and Matty, who never played games because her heart had been weakened by rheumatic fever, watched at the side and gained the curious impression that Kit and Daisy were holding some kind of private conversation.

She sat on the bench and sipped at the lemonade issued by an alarming woman whom the family called ‘Robbie’ and fell into her habit of negative reflection. Why am I not like Daisy, fast and free? Why do I lack that connection (Matty thought of it in terms of an electric plug) that would link me into life? That would make me like they are.

None of these questions produced sensible answers, and she thought of the mother she had never really known and wondered for the ten-thousandth time if Jocasta would have been the sort of person to help her daughter.

It was hot. Matty pushed the rug off her knees and fiddled with the glass. Her eyes with their slightly startled expression assessed the world over its rim. I’m rich, she told herself, I’m twenty-three, my health is, at last, under control, and I must stop seeing things so blackly.

‘Got you,’ shouted Daisy. ‘It’s all over, bar the shouting.’

The figure of Robbie carrying lemonade reinforcements emerged through the lime trees that edged the tennis court. A large woman who walked with a confident sway of her hips, with dark, wavy hair plaited and coiled on the top of her head, Robbie was not so much fat as well made and well covered.

‘I should imagine you’re enjoying yourself, Miss Verral?’ Robbie made it sound like an order. She put down the jug and dabbed at the sweat on her upper lip.

‘Thank you, yes.’

Robbie had already formed her opinion of Miss Verral: a poor thing if ever she saw one. She replenished Matty’s glass and then, on closer inspection, changed her mind. Miss Verral’s chin had an obstinate look so the girl couldn’t be all pap.

‘Have you lived with the family long... Miss... er?’

‘Call me Robbie, Miss Verral. Everyone does.’ Robbie tucked the rug back around Matty’s knees. ‘I’ve been with the family over twenty years and looked after all three. They’ve become mine really, though they don’t like me to say it.’ She straightened up. ‘Instead of my own, I suppose. My fiance was killed in Belgium, you see. And after him I didn’t fancy marriage much. Besides there weren’t many to choose from the ones left. There.’

No, I don’t suppose there were many tough enough, thought Matty, as Robbie attacked the cushions behind her back. Retrieved from their winter dormancy in the shed, they released clouds of dust. ‘Of course,’ said Robbie, banging a cushion in emphasis, her body shaking with the movement, ‘things are quite different here now.’ She banged a second. ‘Money,’ she added cryptically.

Matty was not sure that she had heard correctly and if she had she did not want to discuss it. She deflected the subject.

‘Lady Dysart,’ she asked, ‘when did she die?’

‘When the children were small,’ replied Robbie. ‘She was American, you know. She had money, but of course that’s all gone.’

‘Thank you, Robbie,’ said Matty. ‘The cushions are very comfortable now.’ On occasions Matty could sound adamant and, once again, Robbie’s gaze flicked to the obstinately cast chin. The two women measured each other up – one small and nervous and on the brink of discoveries, the other used to running things to her satisfaction.

‘Leave some lemonade for us,’ shouted Flora from the court. ‘It’s blistering.’

Matty leant back against the bench. The sun was gathering strength by the minute, and the figures of the tennis players were outlined sharp and clear against the startling green of the limes. The ping of the ball on gut, the flurry of pigeons and, above all, a sense of encroaching summer laid a gentle compress on Matty.

After tea, Kit offered to show the Chudleigh party around the garden. ‘The house is being cleared up after yesterday and we would only get in the way.’

He led them down the pleached lime avenue at the back of the house towards the ha-ha, which was the only barrier between the garden and the fields where cattle grazed. Then on to the old boathouse and the river glinting in the afternoon sun.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t what it was,’ said Kit, pointing at the garden. ‘But one day...’

Matty could tell that ‘one day’ mattered to Kit very much. Daisy blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and said nothing.

‘Oh, never mind, Kit,’ said Flora, ‘I like it as it is, all wild and how it wants to be.’

‘I agree,’ said Marcus, who didn’t but who was rather taken with Flora.

They made their way down to the river and walked along the fisherman’s path past the plane tree. ‘Look,’ said Kit at one point. ‘The view.’ Obediently they scanned the horizon which was marked by a low ridge that sloped towards Alton. The landscape was not luxuriant or deeply wooded, except for dark patches of green here and there indicating a pocket of clay. Otherwise the chalk ridges ran alongside fields already jade with corn.

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ said Kit abruptly to hide his feelings.

Daisy stamped out her cigarette. ‘You have deep roots here, Kit.’

He flashed her a look which said, Yes, I do. They retraced their steps around the back of the house towards the walled kitchen garden on the west side of the house. ‘There’s Sheppey, the gardener, over by the raspberries.’

At their approach Ned put down his secateurs and pulled off his hat. He was a thin man, weatherbeaten and horny-nailed.

‘I hope you don’t mind us interrupting you, Sheppey?’

‘Oh no, Mr Kit.’ Ned did not smile, but he looked gratified. ‘I was just securing the raspberry canes. We shall have a good crop this year.’

‘Good,’ said Kit. ‘I’m sorry about the nectarine.’ He gestured towards the south wall where hundreds of nail holes pitted the bricks.

‘Yes, sir. That dratted bug got it.’

Daisy looked at her watch. Suddenly she felt out of place and thought longingly of London and of the Hansons’ houseparty she was due to join later in the week. She moved back a step and her foot crunched on splintered glass from an abandoned cold frame.

They left the walled garden and went to look at the grassy hump where the earlier Tudor house had stood. Matty was beginning to feel tired, and depression was drifting over her. Earlier Dysarts had worked on this garden. One of them had planted the roses, another the irises. Still another had put in the yew-encircled lawn and clipped it into conformity, while someone else had planted the pleached limes. Now the spirit of their efforts had slipped away and vanished.

At the south end of the lawn, the path petered out into dense bramble mixed into overgrown laurel. Daisy waved a finger in its direction. ‘Is there anything behind that?’

His eyes hooded, Kit said flatly, ‘Only another bit of overgrown garden.’

Puzzled by the note in his voice, Matty looked at the scrub and her attention was caught by a movement in the thicket — a flash of blue among the green. She peered harder and, without warning, abject misery streamed through her body. An anguish and desolation that she recognized from her own loss so long ago. Then it vanished, leaving Matty white and breathless.

‘Are you all right, Matty?’ Daisy asked, and then explained to Kit and Flora that Matty sometimes had ‘turns’. Matty went as red as, a moment before, she had been white.

‘I am perfectly fine, thank you,’ she said.

All the same, she allowed Marcus to slip his hand under her elbow. They returned to the house in silence, Matty holding tightly onto Marcus’s linen-sleeved arm, which felt so reassuringly normal, telling herself she had imagined the whole episode.