We established ourselves beneath a phalanx of trees towards the bottom of the garden, which sent down the occasional light hail of fragrant missiles from the branches above, and in the rustling, deciduous shade I felt an exquisite languor; a sense of almost historical leisure which belonged, I knew, not to me but to the house itself. Martin had brought with him some schoolwork, a battered volume across whose yellowed pages moved a miniature army of arcane symbols; manoeuvres which he appeared to be interpreting with a pencil stub on a pad of white paper in his lap.
‘What’s that?’ I said oafishly, raising myself up on my elbow; for I had assumed a shamelessly horizontal position on the warm grass and had been staring up at the fluttering tracery of leaves against the brilliant blue sky with a mind as scrubbed of thought as a bone.
‘Greek. Translation.’
‘Oh. Is it difficult?’
‘Quite. I suppose I could cheat. Everybody else does. I like it, though.’
‘What’s your school like?’
‘It’s OK.’ A breeze ruffled the pages of his book and he clamped his hand over it. His face was secretive, shifty. ‘It’s normal, I suppose. Better than the centre, anyhow.’
‘Is it a boarding school?’
‘Mostly. There’s a few like me. Day bugs, that is. They’re all complete pillocks. The parentals wanted me to board, but it was too difficult.’
I tried to imagine him in a classroom, amidst the riotous, scruffy jumble of his peers. I knew these boys from my brothers’ childhood, their fluting, patrician voices, their faces hewn of stone above the regulation déshabillé of their uniforms; all that casual, careless perfection incubating in the draughty chambers of a dream.
‘Why did they want you to board?’
‘Dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘Family stuff. We always have. And the journey’s a pain, I suppose.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘Hour and a half each way.’
‘But that’s ridiculous!’
‘What’s the alternative? They didn’t want to send me anywhere else. It isn’t for much longer, anyhow. This’ll be my last year. And besides, there’d have been no point moving me. They’d already paid for all the facilities and stuff.’
‘What facilities?’
‘You know, cripple stuff. Ramps and things.’
‘Your parents paid for them?’
‘Yup.’ He nodded. ‘And a swimming pool. That was a kind of present for the school. Well, it was more of a bribe, actually. They’ll take all the other stuff down once I’m gone.’
‘Why?’
‘Spoils the look of the school. It’s crap anyway. Just tacky crap.’
‘What if someone else wanted to use it, though?’
‘Like who?’ He looked at me with adolescent contempt. ‘To be quite frank, I don’t think you’d find another set of parents prepared to send someone like me to a school like that.’
I remembered my parents’ own inexplicable determination to send my partly deaf young brother to one of these privative institutions. In the spirit of refutation, I considered sharing this coincidence with Martin, but having already revealed so much about myself had no more appetite for confidences.
‘So why did they?’
‘I told you. We always have. The dogfucker. Grumps. Great-Grumps. Everyone.’
He didn’t seem particularly put out by the presence of these corroded manacles around the tender, fleeting flesh of his own life. I realized then that, rather than resent his parents’ decision, he was grateful for it. At times like these I felt our differences so strongly that our moments of intimacy receded, their once-pungent reality framed and reduced, like holiday photographs.
‘I hated school,’ I said, collapsing my elbow beneath me so that I lay once more on my back.
‘You hate everything.’
I found this comment excessively spiteful, particularly given that I had provoked it with an observation more passing than pointed; and one, too, which deserved if not sympathy then at least the lesser balm of politeness. I sensed in this bitterness the residue of our earlier conversation, which Martin’s sensibility had evidently been too undeveloped fully to digest. I wondered whether perhaps he was offended that I had come to him on the hoof, as it were, a fugitive from larger dilemmas in whose shade he was inevitably dwarfed; or whether, more realistically, he was still sore at my rejection of his comforting hand, a gesture which can’t have been easy for a boy of his age to make, and which I had rewarded with a reaction indistinguishable from revulsion. I searched, in any case, for some grounds on which to disagree with him, and to my perturbation was unable instantly to find any. As seemed to have become my habit, the longer I delayed making any answer the less I could seem to separate Martin’s accusation from the truth; and by the time I had thought through the reasons for his disaffection with me, the two had become inextricably melded. Was it true that I hated everything? It was certainly the case that I could think of little immediately that I loved; but it was for this very reason, I reminded myself, that I had sought to change my circumstances so dramatically. What I had said to Martin about feeling that I had, after my marriage, reached the end of my life was more or less true. Having up until that moment believed that I had hardly begun it, this was quite a leap. What I felt, more exactly, was that I had missed the substance, the filling between these two states, which I felt sure would have contained the meat of love; indeed, the essence of life itself.
I made, then, no reply to Martin as we sat there beneath the trees; and as he had during my silence turned unhappily back to his book, we were stranded far from conversation for some time, before an indistinct shout from the house caused us both to turn.
‘Lunch,’ said Martin decisively, slamming his book shut, although I had been able to make no sense of the sound.
I was grateful for the distraction; and grateful too for the work of pushing Martin back up the lawn to the house, which gave our relationship a clarity our conversations frequently lacked. The heat was very fierce as we made our way over the long, striped perspective of the grass, but although I soon felt the familiar grind of it on the top of my head, it no longer had the character of an assault. Indeed, I felt almost flippant at the speed with which I had adapted to this new element, and walked through it as proudly as if I had sprouted gills or grown wings. Ahead of us I could see the dormant arrangement of garden furniture being activated by Mr Madden, who went about the business of removing the chairs from where they lay doubled up over the table top and setting them in an orderly circle with the bored efficiency of a factory assembly line worker. His demeanour was not particularly abject, and yet I found myself wondering as I watched him whether he was happy. Seeing him so obedient in solitude, I had the sense that he was waiting for something, or even waiting something out, although I had no idea what it could be. Mr Madden possessed all the attributes of what could reasonably be described as a happy life – but in that moment I had a flash of identification with him which informed me, in the vaguest possible sense, that like me he did not feel entirely at home here.
Pamela and Toby came jauntily around the side of the house, arm in arm, and when Mr Madden hoisted the umbrella from the centre of the table they quickly took their seats, as if at any moment it might start to revolve like a propeller and lift the whole arrangement into the air. Seconds later we reached the table, and after I had slotted Martin’s chair into position I looked up to find Toby’s eyes on me.
‘You’re sweating,’ he said, as intimately as if we had been alone; or as if some circuit had already been established between us along which such currents of significance could now flow.
‘I’m hot,’ I said, not wanting the others to think me rude, although the remark had not seemed to me worth dignifying with a reply.
I was in fact sweating quite profusely, despite my earlier feelings of acclimatization; and I was far from grateful to Toby for pointing this out. There are some men, I have noticed, who are driven continually to make observations of this type; who appear to see no reason why what enters their head should not exit from their mouth.
‘Say hello to your brother, you scallywag,’ said Pamela to Martin, leaning across the table awkwardly so as to jollify the remark further by ruffling his hair. Martin flinched at the gesture, screwing up his face with a child’s distaste.
‘Hello, bro,’ he said dully.
‘Wotcha, Mart-hole,’ Toby replied, with a fluting attempt at an accent.
‘Why on earth do you call him that?’ tinkled Pamela, looking from one to the other of them with charming bewilderment. She was wearing a blue sleeveless dress made of silk, and blue earrings. Her shoulders looked very narrow, and her bare arms brown and taut. The impression was one of doll-like fragility; and she was emanating it so indiscriminately that even I felt tempted to place a protective arm around her tender frame.
‘Because he thinks it’s funny,’ said Martin in a loud voice.
‘But what does it mean?’ persisted Pamela naively. ‘It sounds rather rude.’
Toby did not reply, but sat motionless in his chair as if in a trance. The pause dampened conversation, and gradually our attention was drawn to him as his startled blue eyes gazed at some distant vista.
‘It is rude,’ he said finally, as if in wonder. ‘It’s very, very naughty!’
At this he suddenly lunged sideways in his chair with a shout and flung his arms around Pamela, who shrieked with delight as he began to tickle her. I was extremely embarrassed at the spectacle of Pamela writhing in her chair; and more so when Toby’s fine, excitable hands found the fleshy tops of her bare arms and began to squeeze them energetically. ‘Woah! Woah!’ he crowed as he squeezed, an unsettling imitation of a teenaged boy let loose for the first time on the female form.
‘Stop! Stop!’ cried Pamela.
I stole a glance at Martin, confidently expecting him to be telegraphing his contempt, and was surprised to see him giggling in quiet volleys as he watched them.
‘Toby, sir!’
The curious exclamation caused us all to jump; but it was not until I had looked up that I realized it was Mr Madden who had pronounced it. I had never heard him speak with such force, and his face as he towered over the table was plump and red with compressed fury. He had a bottle of wine in one hand, and a wooden board with bread on it in the other.
‘Darling!’ said Pamela coaxingly, laying a hand on his arm. ‘It was only a bit of fun!’
Toby was looking up at his father pugnaciously, his chin jutting out.
‘He’s too old for that sort of thing,’ said Mr Madden, ignoring Pamela’s intervention just as his arm ignored the presence of her hand.
‘And what sort of thing might that be?’ said Toby coolly.
‘Rough-housing. Playing with your mother. Not in my house, sir.’
Toby sniggered; but despite the admittedly comical sound of the words, he did not have the courage to dispute them. There was a long and awkward silence, during which Mr Madden put the bread and wine on the table, his eyes downcast. He appeared to have forgotten about the incident, but then Toby did a curious thing: he yawned, noisily and provocatively. Mr Madden’s head snapped up so suddenly that his black hair flew skywards and I saw that his face had darkened to a violent purple.
‘Young man!’ he said, lunging over the table and banging his hand hard beside Toby’s place to punctuate the words. Everything on the table clattered and shook. Toby drew back in fear. ‘Don’t imagine that I’m not still capable of taking you out onto the drive and giving you a bloody good hiding! I wouldn’t think twice about packing you back off to London, but your mother wants you here. I’d advise you to keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself so long as you’re at my table!’
‘Piers, please!’ said Pamela weakly. I was surprised to see that she appeared to be as frightened as everybody else.
‘I won’t have it,’ said Mr Madden gruffly, straightening himself up. ‘Bloody layabout cheeking me at my own table.’
Mr Madden’s table, despite the passionate references it was drawing, was in disarray. The salt cellar lay on its side, disgorging grains. The bread had jumped off its board. Knives and forks, meticulously laid, now formed exclamatory symbols on the tablecloth. I glanced at Toby. A distinct blush stained the expression of scornful superiority he had assumed. I was surprised that he had submitted to his father’s authority by remaining at the table. I would, in his position, have absented myself, whether for reasons of fury or dignity. I suspected that it was not fear that kept him tethered to his seat, but laziness. He liked being here, that much was obvious. Indeed, he was the sort of person I could not imagine being anywhere that he did not like; which made his acceptance of his recent humiliation even more perplexing. Looking at him, it suddenly struck me that his parents’ munificence, the splendour of their lifestyle, had perhaps cultivated in him an opportunistically tolerant attitude to their company. This notion was utterly alien to me, given that any encounter with my own parents was always accompanied by the necessity for enduring the range of their peculiarities, whether at home or outside it. Going home had always been a trial, the reward for which had been that in the moment of leaving I occupied the point furthest in time from the next occasion on which I would have to return.
Still, I was at a loss as to Mr Madden’s reasons for behaving as he had done. I glanced at him repeatedly while we ate, in a near silence punctuated only by a sparse conversation between him and Pamela about affairs at the farm. The colour gradually subsided from his cheeks. He neither spoke to nor looked at his elder son. The first thing which intrigued me was how he felt about the fact that Pamela had so obviously sided with Toby. The second was why, at this late stage in Toby’s development, Mr Madden should feel so disturbed by his behaviour with his own mother. If Toby had always behaved like this, why had something not been done about it before? If not, why had Pamela and indeed Martin not reacted to it with more surprise? It had seemed, from my perspective, quite natural to all of them. Had Mr Madden never seen anything of the sort before?
The speed of his response to it suggested that he had. Was I to conclude, then, that Mr Madden’s objection was part of an ongoing and unheeded protest against Toby’s behaviour with Pamela, and perhaps Toby in general? It was evident to me that in some terrible, unguessable way, Mr Madden disliked his own son. Why?
‘Oh, this heat!’ said Pamela, pushing away her plate and leaning back in her chair so that her face protruded beyond the rim of shade cast by the umbrella. ‘It’s simply glorious. I shall be flat on my back by the pool all afternoon. How about you boys?’
‘I’m in,’ said Toby.
‘Darling?’ Pamela turned to Mr Madden. ‘Why don’t you just take the afternoon oft? You’re absolutely exhausted. It would do you good to put your feet up by the pool for a bit.’
‘Hmph,’ said Mr Madden.
‘Go on, why don’t you? The boys would love it. I feel like we haven’t spent enough time together as a family. If Toby will put the hoops up, we could even have a spot of croquet! Stella?’ Pamela’s gaze fell uninvitingly on me. ‘What are your plans?’
‘I thought I might go for a walk,’ I improvised, as it was clear that the poolside idyll did not include me. I was aggrieved by this, as I was longing to swim; but I could see that after their earlier contretemps, the family might require some time alone to regroup.
‘How lovely,’ said Pamela approvingly. ‘Look, why don’t you just shoot off? We can manage the clearing up.’
Summarily dismissed, I rose from my seat.
‘I’ll see you later,’ I said to Martin; although when he did not look at me, I glanced more generally at the others, as if my farewell had been directed at them.
I walked quickly away from the table and across the lawn. So awkwardly did I feel myself to be moving that I almost expected to hear laughter ring out behind me. Once I had made it to the shaded gravel path to the side of the house I slowed down. I felt immediately the relief of being on my own. The strain of being always in the company of people – and their numbers seemed daily to be increasing – whose connection to each other was as profound as their relation to me was tenuous, was greater than I had anticipated. I had imagined, when I had first considered the idea of appending myself to a family, that the organism’s self-sufficiency would ensure my own liberty; that being by its very nature exclusive, I would naturally be disqualified from the politics into which I would ultimately and inevitably have been drawn by any other social grouping. It surprised me to realize that the Maddens, contrary to what I had expected, seemed if not to require then at least to have uses for the presence of a third party. It was not that they were ‘showing off in front of me – most of the time, in fact, I felt as if they had forgotten I was there; rather that by providing the necessary opposition to their congruity, by marking so clearly the place where they ended and all else began, I was giving it shape and purpose.
I remembered my father once accusing my mother of not being proud of us, her family. He longed, I believe, for us to have a story, if that doesn’t sound too obscure; and thought that my mother’s persistent practicality was the thing stopping us from doing so. She wouldn’t have believed it herself, was the inference. Admittedly we weren’t much good with strangers. We grew tongue-tied and deflated, while my father tried to coax us into the air like recalcitrant soufflés. By the time our troupe was one member down, my father had his story, although it certainly wasn’t the kind of story he’d had in mind; and I dare say my mother secretly wished that she’d gone along with it all while there was still time, so that she’d have had something to repeat to herself after it had all got so quiet.
I reached the fork in the path that led to the cottage and stopped, realizing that in spite of my relief at having been liberated from the society of the back lawn, in fact I had little idea of what I wanted to do. Bearing right I would reach the gate to the front drive. Although I was familiar with the route which led from there to the big house, I had little notion of what would happen if one went in the opposite direction. I decided to investigate; and if in the course of my journey I came across the ‘top field’ I could perhaps satisfy my curiosity over the conversation I had overheard between the Maddens the previous afternoon.
I set off to the left of the gate and within a few paces had left behind the gravelled area, which gave on to a corridor of rough, loosely cropped grass. To either side were tall hedges, the left flank of which, I calculated, formed the boundary of the cottage garden. Directly ahead, at the end of this corridor, the land seemed to give away, and I felt a looming spaciousness which suggested I might soon arrive at open farmland. I had little idea of how the grounds of Franchise fitted into the larger puzzle of the surrounding countryside. The windows of the cottage looked out only onto various manicured aspects of the garden, and even from the upstairs rooms of the big house I could remember seeing little more. The property appeared to be almost entirely screened from what lay outside it by clever arrangements of trees and hedges; which, although they certainly ensured privacy from it, meant that one had little idea of what might be going on in the world beyond.
I progressed along the corridor, the longer grass cool in the shade beneath my feet. Small birds landed ahead of me and then sprang away as I approached, vanishing, garbled ribbons of song trailing behind them. I went on like this for some fifty paces, the gloom appearing to deepen all the way, until I came to a small gate. I opened it; and quite abruptly, everything changed. I found myself flung from the verdant enclosure of the garden into a boundless blast of heat and light, a molten, flattened plain which unfolded as suddenly as if the tall hedges had collapsed like pieces of cardboard scenery to reveal it. I stopped, my eyes, which had grown briefly accustomed to the shade, shrinking from the radiant sea of gold which seemed to rise and fall before me in a warm tide. The vastness of the panorama, which stretched uninterrupted for as far as I could see, stunned me; and I thought that I had never seen something so brutal and lovely as this long embrace of sky and land, breast to breast. I stood there for some time entirely emptied of thought or even the slightest awareness of myself, the sun hot on my face and my eyes filled with colour. My sense of wonder was acute, if inarticulate. (I could not, for example, have told you precisely what it was that grew before my eyes in such a mass of blond and slender wands – some variety of gram, I supposed.) The randomness with which I had stumbled on the silent, swaying field and caught it in this gratuitous display of beauty appeared to me as a benediction of sorts. I felt comforted by it, and at the same time diminished; by which I mean that the feeling of insignificance was in itself a consolation.
Eventually I felt compelled to move, though I didn’t want to; some deeper impulse insisted on it. I felt sure that Mr Madden would not appreciate my walking through the field, much as I would have liked to do so. I decided instead to skirt its boundaries, and as there was a generous margin of dry, crusty soil between the field itself and the fence which hemmed it, it seemed I would be able to walk without difficulty. I set off, glad of the breeze which ruffled the great golden pelt of the land and then lifted past me to stir the heavy branches of the trees beyond. It is difficult to convey the contentment I felt in the presence of these sights and sounds. It was as if a certain roughness, a grubby layer of matted, misbegotten aims, was being sloughed from me; as if in this deluge of simplicity I were being absolved of some nameless, primordial confusion. I did not ascribe any more specific meaning to this feeling. I did not, for example, immediately fall on it as a vindication of my move to the country, nor evidence that I had arrived at, or even embarked on, some form of recovery.
Working my way across the top of the field, I saw that I was approaching a wooden fence whose trajectory extended across my path and away to the right for as far as I could see. I had imagined, from further off, that I would either have to climb over it or change direction; but from nearer I could see that a quaint arrangement of steps had been built directly ahead of me over the fence. These did not conform to any image I might have had of a ‘stile’; they more resembled a chunky wooden ladder secured astride the fence, so that one could almost have walked up and over them without slowing one’s pace. I took the presence of this clever construction as a direct approbation of my walking where I had been, and an encouragement to continue. A small yellow arrow affixed to the fence beside the ladder and pointing directly ahead confirmed this impression; and thus egged on, I was about to vault energetically over the fence when it struck me that the presence of these inducements hinted at a wider specification than my own incidental use of the route. My encounter with the creature rallied from memory; and I realized that I was standing not on the untried terrain of discovery and adventure, but on a public footpath.
My idyll having met with unexpected foreclosure, I stood rooted beside the fence for some time. It was hard to suppress the memory of the leaflet slipped beneath my door, and still more the menacing armoury of the creature’s room; all of which suggested that I had wandered into a zone of personal danger from which at any moment some undreamed-of assault might come. Too alarmed now even to take another step, I pivoted myself about from the waist to examine the ground at my feet, swaying unsteadily with the attempt not to move. I was mindful of the nooses I remembered from the creature’s room; but tried to be alert also to any other form of trap which might have replaced them. The sky was a hard, hot enamel of blue overhead; and as the wind rolled off the field the shifting ocean of gold sent up wordless whispers to my terrified ears. Eventually I knew myself to be at an impasse; for having found nothing specifically of which to be afraid, the whole landscape entered into the collusion. One way or another, I would have to journey through risk and conjecture to get home. Having understood this I felt rather more courageous; and with courage came the retrospective notion that I had been rather too craven in my fears. The dangers which moments earlier had paralysed me now seemed like no more than superstitions; and before long I had decided to continue with my walk as if nothing had happened; which, of course, nothing had.
I had turned and placed my foot on the first, broad step of the ladder when I heard a shout. I stopped immediately and looked about. The cry had sounded far off, and I wondered if it had been an echo from the house or road, for I could see no one in the vicinity. It came a second time, and I looked about again. At first I could see nothing; but then a distant shape snagged my gaze, moving quickly between the two planes of field and sky. It was a man, and he was waving his arms and coming rapidly towards me through the field, leaving a dark furrow of flattened stems behind him. He had something in his right hand which I understood, surprisingly calmly, to be a gun. I remained exactly where I was, with one foot on the step, which I felt was the most sensible thing to do. In fact, there was nothing else I could have done, for despite having no real consciousness of fear, at the first sight of the man I had experienced a rapid sensation of drainage, as if everything warm and pulsing in me had been voided through a trapdoor. I was no more animate standing there than a lamp-post, and no more capable of running away.
‘Stop!’ shouted the man – rather unnecessarily – quite close to me now. My first impression of him, being entirely dedicated to assessing his potential for harming me, was blurred. He was young – in his thirties, I thought – and if not big then fairly square. In those panicked seconds I was surprised to notice the burly movement of his thighs as he ran, like two large hams beneath the rippling cloth of his trousers. His face, if I were to be honest, did not look like it bore the intention of murdering me; in fact, as he waded from the field and jogged to a halt in front of me, I was almost distracted from my terror by the curious look of him. His was unlike any face I had ever seen; but its peculiar aspect was characterized more by lack than by the presence of anything unusual. Some dimension appeared to be missing from it, although it was hard in those moments to get a sense of what it was. He had by now been standing in front of me for some time, catching his breath. The gun, I was glad to notice, was held behind his back.
‘What do you want?’ I finally enquired, impatient at his failure to state his intentions. I felt a surge of valour in the wake of my earlier cowardice, as if I had strained my capacity for self-protection and now didn’t care what happened to me.
‘What are you doing?’ he said finally, still breathless. He looked me in the eye, and it was then that I saw how the two sides of his face seemed to meet in a point or ridge at the centre, as if he had two profiles but no head-on aspect. His eyes were very close together and turned slightly inward; a physiognomical misfortune, giving the bizarre impression that he was looking at himself. Otherwise he was not unattractive. He looked healthy, at least, and had a generous head of brown curly hair.
‘I am going for a walk,’ I replied. ‘As this is a public footpath, I don’t see that it is any of your business.’
It was backhanded of me to use as my vindication the very thing I had bemoaned minutes earlier; but as I still had no idea of who the man was, I was forced to defend myself in any way I could.
‘I wouldn’t walk over that if I were you,’ he said presently, nodding at the ladder. He had quite a broad accent, of the sort I had already heard in the village. ‘It’s broken, see?’
He lunged purposefully towards me and I drew back. In the event it was only so that he could demonstrate a fault in the step on which I had been about to place my weight. It had come almost entirely away from its bracket. Had I stepped on it, I would almost certainly have injured myself.
‘How could they leave it like that?’ I cried; before remembering that ‘they’ was in fact Mr Madden, whom I had defended against the creature’s accusations so passionately only the day before. ‘This is a public right of way!’ The man’s expression was impassive, which inflamed me further. ‘If you knew about it,’ I added, ‘why didn’t you inform somebody?’
This, I felt, was a pertinent enough question; but you would not have guessed from the man’s face that I had asked him one. Indeed, he seemed to be waiting for me to say something more.
‘Why didn’t you tell somebody?’ I repeated. I wondered if he was in some way backward. His head cocked from one side to the other at hearing the question again, with the beady, rigid stupidity of a chicken.
‘You like walking, then?’ he said finally.
‘Yes I do,’ I briskly replied. I had been about to pose my question for the third time; but the apparent futility of the whole encounter stopped me. It irritated me to see that the man’s obtuseness had triumphed over my own rationality. With curious clarity, I quickly understood that my ideas about how the conversation should proceed, and indeed about everything that had happened in the past few minutes, were entirely misplaced; not because they were wrong, exactly, but because they belonged elsewhere. The fact that the man and I did not appear to be communicating clearly seemed, in this light, to be more my fault than his. In my mind I went over what had happened and realized that he had come bounding over the field in such an alarming fashion solely to alert me to the broken step; and what is more, that he had found my ingratitude, as opposed to the admission of irresponsibility towards which I had vainly been trying to direct him, something of an affront. I began to regret the confrontational style of my approach; and at the same time became aware of news of an indisposition being telegraphed to me from several regions of my body at once.
‘I’ve seen you about,’ said the man, fixing me with the single beam of his misaligned eyes.
‘Have you?’ I vaguely replied. Suddenly I was not feeling at all well. My head had grown heavy and a strange prickling sensation coursed about my nose and eyes and down my throat. I tried to focus on the man, and concentrate on what he was saying, but with the mounting turbulence in all my senses he seemed remote. I felt a wave rise between my ears and I sneezed three times in quick succession.
‘You’ve not been here long,’ I heard him say. ‘But you’ve been busy.’
I rubbed my eyes, which had swollen so rapidly that I feared they might shut altogether. Dimly I realized that the man would not be capable of acknowledging my sudden decline, nor of encompassing it in whatever plans he might have had for this social encounter. Were my eyes really to seal themselves shut, I might even have to ask him to lead me back to the cottage. It was essential that I escaped immediately, and I summoned every reserve of will I possessed to detach myself as quickly and politely as possible.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said thickly, ‘but I’ve just remembered that I’m late for something. I have to go.’
I glimpsed his face as I turned on my heel, and the image of it stayed in my mind as I fled streaming through the heat along the top of the field, through the gate, and back along the shady corridor towards the house.