The Country Life

Chapter Nine

Turning left at the top of the stairs, I arrived at a closed door which I guessed was the entrance to Martin’s bedroom. I stood outside it for a moment in order to collect myself. The abominable rudeness with which Martin had behaved, not only towards me but also towards his mother, on the last occasion we met, returned to my mind and filled me with apprehension.

I summoned up the courage to knock on the door — two swift raps — and was surprised when a cheerful ‘Come in!’ was relayed to me from the other side. I entered, noticing the well-polished brass doorknob, and found myself in a large room, above whose clutter rose two tall windows which looked out to the front of the house. At the foot of each window was an indented seat, with long panelled shutters on either side folded back like birds’ wings. In spite of its elegance, the room was very untidy; so much so, in fact, that for a few seconds I was unable to locate Martin. Bookshelves sagging with their cargo lined an entire wall; adjacent to them was a desk piled high with more of the same. Strewn across the floor was the usual detritus of adolescence: brightly coloured record sleeves littering the carpet as indiscriminately as fallen leaves, knotted items of clothing, ancient, corroded coffee cups. Stray, small shoes, as dejected and heartbreaking as a child’s shoe found on a beach, were the only evidence of Martin’s abnormality. Mrs Barker would, I felt, take no prisoners here when she stormed the barricades at ten o’clock.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Martin. He was sitting in his wheelchair by the bookshelves, as camouflaged as a forest creature in foliage.

‘It’s me,’ I replied, quite sternly; in my moment of contemplation outside the door I had decided on a firm approach.

‘Come in.’ He wheeled round in his chair and gestured with his long arm. ‘Sit down.’

There was a leather armchair beside him and he leaned forward from his chair — so steeply that I feared he might fall out of it — to sweep it free where the tide of jumble had risen over the seat. I weaved my way across the room and sat obediently beside him. The chair was most comfortable. I was aware of the fact that in a matter of seconds any authority I might have possessed had been wrested from me; but curiously, I did not mind. There was something righteous about my charge’s presence in this sunny room which his presence in other rooms had so far entirely lacked. I had the feeling that all who entered here abided by his law.

Now directly beside me, Martin was engaged in a close examination of my face. I caught a glimpse of his, the terrible, preternatural spectacle of his features, before I was compelled to look away, embarrassed by my recollection of the sunburn. Immediately I became anxious that he might think me repelled not by my own appearance but by his, and so directed myself to yield to his gaze once more.

‘You look nice,’ said Martin finally, as if he had arrived at this judgement by a complex means of assessment which I might well have failed.

It is hard to describe the way in which Martin’s mouth moved when he laughed or spoke — I have attempted it before — but it was unlike any physiognomical procedure I had witnessed before in my life. His lips incised in parallel almost the entire span of his face, and gave it the odd appearance of being divided into two parts or blocks connected, perhaps, by a hinge at the back of his head; so that one had the feeling, particularly when he opened his mouth wide — which he did frequently — that the upper section of his head could at any moment flip open, revealing his brain sitting like a steaming cauliflower on a platter. Some possible obstruction in his larynx gave his voice a nasal, remote quality; rather like a ventriloquist’s dummy, which reiterated the resemblance to a puppet or doll I noted some time ago. His thick tongue, whose unfortunate appearance in the kitchen had left its image firmly engraved on my mind, gave him a slight lisp.

‘Thank you,’ I said, surprised. Disingenuously, I added: ‘So do you.’

‘Ha! Ha!’ Martin’s mouth opened so wide that I genuinely feared the flipping mentioned above. His laughter was loud and I caught a gust of his breath, which was surprisingly sweet. ‘Ha! Ha! That’s very funny.’

He said this as if he meant it; and I saw, somewhat to my dismay, that he had taken my compliment as an ironical joke; and, what’s more, found it amusing.

‘Stella,’ said Martin abruptly. ‘Stel-la. Stella.’

‘Yes?’ I said, trying to sound encouraging, although I was somewhat confused.

‘Will you open the windows, Stel-la? It’s got rather pongy in here.’

He said this last comment in a mock-aristocratic voice. I got up, keen for something to do, and threw up first one sash and then the other. The drive below lay deserted in the heat. A faint, warm breeze drifted in.

‘Are you happy, Stel-la?’ he said, when had I sat down again.

‘I see no need to continue pronouncing my name in that way,’ I replied. I was taken aback by his question, and wondered what mischief he meant by it.

‘Are you?’ he repeated.

‘I suppose so,’ I said, settling back in my chair. I was surprised to feel myself on the brink of quite a lengthy reply. ‘How would one ever know? I’m as happy as anyone should be, living in a civilized country with no real disadvantages; but whether I am as happy as I could be, I see no way of finding out. I don’t happen to think that happiness is the be-all and end-all of everything.’

‘Then what is?’ said Martin.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Coming to an accommodation with oneself, I suppose. Not injuring others. Living a good life. Why ask me?’

‘Well,’ said Martin, putting his large hands on the wheels of his chair and rocking back and forth. ‘You did say that you thought happiness wasn’t that important. It’s an unusual thing to say, Stel-la.’

‘I didn’t say that I thought happiness was unimportant. Merely that it wasn’t the most important thing. I happen to believe that the search for happiness is often itself the greatest cause of unhappiness.’

‘But if you were happy, you wouldn’t be searching,’ said Martin.

‘I didn’t say I was. I was speaking generally. I think it is almost impossible to be happy and to know yourself to be so at one and the same time. People believe that happiness is a goal, as opposed merely to the absence of problems. Looking for happiness is like looking for love. How do you know when you’ve found it?’

‘I always imagined they came together,’ said Martin.

‘Nonsense. Love makes people more miserable than anything else.’

‘Have you been made miserable by love, poor Stel-la?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Oh, go on.’ He smiled, and began to rock himself a little faster. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘I should hope not. No.’

‘Tell,’ he said. ‘Tel-la, Stel-la. Tel-la, Stel-la.’ He rocked himself to the rhythm of the words. ‘Tel-la me-a Stel-la.’

‘Stop that immediately,’ I said.

‘Only if you tel-la me-a—’

‘I will not be blackmailed. Please behave yourself.’

At this moment the door flew open, and Mrs Barker, incandescent with sanitary fury, appeared upon the threshold.

‘Getting the better of her, are you?’ she said, grinning, to Martin.

‘Get-ta the bet-ta of Stel-la,’ chanted Martin.

‘I’ll need you both out,’ commanded the hag. ‘I’ve got to set this pigsty to rights. Go on, off with you.’

‘Keep your hair on, Mrs Barker,’ said Martin, while I boiled with anger beside him at the woman’s imperious manner. ‘Don’t get those elephantine bloomers of yours in a twist.’

‘You watch your lip,’ said Mrs Barker mildly. She positioned herself beside the open door and extended an arm towards the corridor. ‘Out.’

Martin rolled dutifully towards the door and I followed. As we passed the bulk of Mrs Barker, he looked up at her and made several loud kissing noises. I kept my head down until we were on the landing. We paused at the precipice of the stairs, and I remembered Martin’s disability; a fact which made me feel ashamed for the severity with which I had spoken to him just now.

‘Shall I help you down?’ I said solicitously.

‘Don’t be a vache,’ said Martin. ‘Just carry the chair.’

Not being in a position — considering my earlier assault on Mrs Barker — to reprimand him for his language, I said nothing. Martin pulled a lever by the wheels which locked them, and then, with a single, terrifying movement precipitated himself out of the seat and slithered to the ground. For a moment I feared that he had hurt himself, but almost immediately he began to rotate himself with crablike movements upon his long, tensile arms, his shrunken legs dragging on the carpet behind him. As soon as he was positioned facing down the stairs, he began with remarkable alacrity to descend them, twitching his hips and reaching forward with each arm in turn to fling first one immobile limb and then the other ahead of him.

‘Come on,’ he called.

I picked up the chair — which was not, contrary to Pamela’s assertion, particularly light — and began slowly to make my way down behind him. He sat waiting for me at the bottom in a kind of heap, and when I positioned the chair for him in the hall grabbed its handles and levered himself up, like someone emerging from a swimming pool. He disengaged the brake and spun off towards the front door, which he opened dextrously. He sailed through the doorway and then disappeared abruptly from view. Fearing that he had rolled down the front steps, I ran out after him, and to my surprise found him sitting leisurely in his chair on the hot gravel drive.

‘How did you get down?’ I said.

He pointed to the side of the steps, where I saw a small ramp I had not previously noticed.

‘Dumbo,’ he said.

‘There’s no need to be rude,’ I said, descending the front steps. ‘What shall we do now? Would you like to go for a walk?’

‘I can’t walk,’ he said.

I was beginning to weary of Martin’s confrontational style of behaviour. He seemed determined to obstruct me at every turn. Although no longer strictly afraid of him, his volatility made me nervous. I had no idea of what he might do at any given time.

‘You know what I mean,’ I said tersely. ‘You could show me around the grounds. By the time we come back, Mrs Barker will have finished.’

‘All right,’ he said, affably enough. ‘You’ll have to push me, though. My arms get tired on uneven surfaces.’

‘OK,’ I said. I put my hands on the handles of his chair. ‘Which way?’

‘Through there.’ He pointed to a path running from the right of the house into some trees.

We set off. The heat was very fierce at the front of the house and the burnt skin on my face ached. I was relieved when we made it to the trees, which I saw marked the beginning of a small wood. The wheelchair made quite heavy going over the rough path and I began to sweat and lose my breath.

‘What do you think of the show so far?’ he said from below, in a silly voice.

‘Excuse me?’

‘What-do-you-think-of-the-show-so-far,’ he repeated, this time in the synthesized, unmodulated tones of an automaton.

‘Oh, I see. Lovely. Verdant,’ I hazarded.

‘Not this. I meant everything.’ We trundled over an uneven patch and he gripped the sides of his chair. ‘Maman. Papa. Moi, even.’

‘I don’t really know yet. I haven’t been here long.’ I was surprised that he should want to know what I thought of him.

‘Oh, come on,’ he said, tipping back his head so that he could see me, with a smile which suggested that he thought the gesture winning. ‘Don’t tell me that you haven’t already made up your mind down to the last detail. You must think something.’

His dwarfish appearance and leering mouth, particularly when seen from above, gave him the look of a sprite or ghoul; not wicked, exactly, but naughty and dedicated to disruption. I decided straight away not to tell him anything. His voice had that same imploring tone that he had used — vainly, I was glad to recall — to extract tales of past romantic disappointments; about which now he seemed to have quite forgotten.

‘Why are you so keen to know what I think?’ I said, heaving him over a delta of ruts. Seeing that I was not to be so easily seduced, he had given up his gamin gazing and was now looking straight ahead. I was struck, as I pushed the chair through the dark, lovely glade stilled by the profuse calm of summer, by the odd realization that this was exactly how, during those few days in London, I had imagined my life in the country would be. Or was I merely recognizing, in the paradisal picture around me, a kind of mental ideal which, based on what I knew while still in London of the place to which I was going, might have constituted such an image? In other words, had I really imagined it like this, or was it just that I had happened on an enclave of time and place so logical in its felicity that it transcended its actual existence to become a kind of paradigm; a vision which, being perfect — and corresponding too to the few things I had known about my future situation — took on the texture of memory, wherein all the flaws and stains of lived events are purged? I have often experienced this feeling of doubt when encountering extreme beauty or happiness.

Martin had not replied to my question, and so I continued: ‘After all, it’s not as if you know me very well. Why should my opinion matter to you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Martin sulkily. ‘I think it’s obvious why. I don’t exactly get out much.’

I felt chastened by this remark. I had humiliated him by attributing to prurience or mischief what was in fact a hunger for novelty. Trapped as he was, both now and for the foreseeable future, in the same stale set of circumstances, it was natural that a newcomer should exert more than the usual interest.

‘That’s true,’ I said, keen to made amends. ‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that I haven’t been here long enough to have any view which I could be sure wouldn’t change over the next twenty-four hours.’

I was really quite tired out by this point. We had reached a kind of clearing, at the centre of which was a pond. Beside it stood a small, sagging tree — a willow — whose lachrymose branches drooped into the pool below, giving it the appearance of a vast melting candle. The stagnant water was thickly covered by a bright green blanket of algae, above which all manner of creatures circulated in a busy airborne community.

‘Shall we stop here for a minute?’

‘If you want,’ said Martin uncharitably.

I wheeled him round to face the pond and let go of the handles of his chair, intending to sit down on the grass beside him. To my horror, however, his chair began abruptly to roll forwards towards the swampy water. I cried out, lunging for the handles while Martin sat, inert, his small body jolting as the wheels trundled down the slope. Just in time, I managed to grip the back of the leather seat, and dragged the chair back from the brink and up the slope, my chest heaving with panic.

‘Oh, my God!’ I panted. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Martin coolly. ‘You should always put the brake on before you let go.’

There was a slightly menacing edge to his voice. I remembered having seen him put on the brake himself at the top of the stairs, and suspected, maliciously, I admit, that he had neglected to save himself on this occasion to upset me.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

I wondered if he would tell Pamela what had happened, and began to think immediately about how I would be able to broach this subject and gain the promise of his discretion before we returned to the house.

‘I can’t swim,’ said Martin. ‘I’d have drowned.’

‘There’s no need to be like that,’ I snapped. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t have let you drown. I’d have jumped in and saved you.’

‘How?’ said Martin. ‘I’d have sunk like a stone beneath all that muck. You wouldn’t have been able to find me.’

‘If what you require,’ I said imperiously, ‘is my assurance that I would have paid with my life to save your own, then you have it. We would have died together.’

‘My,’ said Martin. ‘How romantic.’

‘Quite,’ said I. ‘So if you would be so kind as to accept my apologies, then I should be grateful to hear no more about it.’

‘I’m sure you would,’ Martin replied, eyes aglint. ‘I think my mother might be interested, though.’

‘That,’ I said firmly, although my heart quavered, ‘is up to you.’ I applied the brake to his chair and sat down in the shade beside him. ‘Obviously I would prefer it if you didn’t mention it to her.’

‘Perhaps we might strike a bargain,’ said Martin, after a pause.

‘Really! And what might that be?’ I knew filli well what the evil dwarf meant.

‘You know,’ said Martin, folding his arms across his chest.

‘I hope,’ I replied, ‘that you are not trying to blackmail me into giving dubious and ill-formed opinions of your family in return for not telling tales. If you intend to ask me what I think of you under such circumstances, then you will hear nothing flattering. It’s up to you.’

Various insects had come to plague me as I sat on the grass, and I swatted at them irritably with my hands. I wished that we had moved ourselves elsewhere, away from the gloomy prospect of the pond, and the near accident to which it testified.

‘What makes you think that I care what you think of me?’ said Martin presently.

‘I asked you the same question not long ago,’ I replied. ‘Your answer, such as it was, suggested that you did care. If you deny it, then I will call your bluff. As I said before, it’s up to you.’

‘As a matter of fact, I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks of me. It doesn’t make any difference. I was only joking, anyway.’

A look of pain collected on Martin’s face, like something dense and murky at the bottom of a drain. Seeing the poor, naked savagery of his features, I was moved to feel pity for him. He made a sorry opponent; and I wondered at myself, that I should have been so unkind to him.

‘Shall we carry on?’ I said then, standing up. I had an awareness of time passing, wasted, untouched. It seemed imperative to me that we continue with our walk.

‘All right,’ conceded Martin grudgingly. ‘Although that was mean, what you just said.’

‘I withdraw it,’ I said magnanimously.

‘Oh, shut up,’ muttered Martin, as I wheeled him in a half circle and headed back towards the path. ‘You’re getting on my nerves. Turn right here.’

We emerged from the wood and before long arrived at a wall, which formed one end of an enclosure. The wall was about six feet high and several yards across, and, being built of apparently very old red brick, over the top of which spilled a froth of vines and flowers of various types, was extremely picturesque. At its centre was a black wrought-iron gate, through which I could make out some form of horticultural splendour within.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘This,’ said Martin, leaning forward in his chair to open the latch, ‘is the Elizabethan Rose Garden.’

Having left behind the wood, we were once more exposed to the sun; which, it being now late morning, was astonishingly fierce. I found — and indeed have always found — that the heat exerted a peculiar effect on me. Sunshine can, of course, be very enjoyable, but when it becomes excessively strong, as now it was, I find that I lose sense of myself quite dramatically. I do not mean ‘lose my senses’, in other words go mad; rather, I am describing a certain loss or interruption of frequency brought about by the dominating presence of an external force. Heavy rain, I find, has precisely the opposite effect; meaning that it enlarges consciousness by waterlogging the other senses. The sun, however, has in my view a blanching, shrivelling influence upon thought; or rather, it seems to make everything the same, and thus melts the boundaries of self.

To continue, I was not feeling quite myself — a dangerous condition, leading to the sort of behaviour people describe as being ‘out of character’ — as we entered the Elizabethan Rose Garden. This did not, however, blur my impression of the lovely enclave in which I now stood. The garden was quite idyllic; indeed, my amorphous mental state may well have been responsible for the force of my reaction to it. It was rectangular in shape, and consisted in several long rows and wedges of rose bushes with a maze of well-kept gravel paths between, all perfectly symmetrical; a geometrical theme which gave the garden a look of arcane symbolism, like an astrologer’s map. Here and there wrought-iron benches were placed; and at the very centre of the garden, standing on a smooth circle etched in gravel, was an old stone sundial. The roses, being in filli bloom, were a grand, faded pink and many of them were very large. I reached out to touch one beside me, whose head hung engorged from its stem. To my embarrassment, it disintegrated instantly beneath my fingers in a gentle explosion of velvet petals, falling in a sort of confetti about my feet. I could not help but think, looking at the naked stem, that I had murdered the lovely flower; and I cast about for Martin, hoping that he had not witnessed my act of vandalism.

Fortunately he was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that he must have wheeled off along one of the paths, I set off at no great pace down the nearest avenue to hand to find him. I was, in fact, happy to be alone. The garden was very quiet, its only music the faint, chirruped chords of summer, and in the scented hush I found myself transported back through time to its ‘Elizabethan’ ancestry, imagining myself there to be an altogether more favoured and elaborately costumed Stella, enjoying privileged seclusion in a world as orderly beyond these walls as within them; a respite of scale rather than substance, furnished by an authority who granted her every whim as systematically as it confounded mine. I often, incidentally, have fantasies of this type. Being essentially happy with myself, my daydreams strive instead to transform my circumstances; usually preferring a more kindly age, offering iron-cast certainties and a less vertiginous view of the future.

I had sat down on a bench beside the sundial by this time and — perhaps, again, due to the peculiar effect of the sun — all at once found that my daydream had delivered me, as if through a secret tunnel bored beneath a fortress wall, to the outermost, unpatrolled reaches of thought where lately I had forbidden myself to wander. The garden faded and then vanished before my eyes, and in the analgesic white light which followed it I was unexpectedly met by a vision. The vision was of a crowded street seen from high above; not an English street, but a narrow, Continental chasm. Everything was very brown and dusty and noisy. From my vantage point I could see the lacy balustrades of balconies depending high up from the elaborate, crumbling fronts of buildings; and then realized that I, too, was standing on a balcony with my fingers gripping the iron railing. I leaned perilously over the edge and saw far, far below trails of tiny, dusty cars beetling along the floor of the ravine. The sun was hot on the back of my head. I was leaning so far over that the rail dug into my stomach. The weight of a solid but indeterminate misery pressed at my back as I leaned, forcing me further over still. The blare of car horns filled my ears. My heart was thrashing in my chest with terror. Then, all of a sudden, I flipped over and fell; but to my surprise, I did not plummet to the pavement. Instead I floated, my weightless body describing elegant arcs like a fluttering leaf, and as I gently descended I looked about. One or two people stood on the balconies opposite and when they saw me they waved. I waved cheerfully back; and it must have been at around this point that I woke up, or came to, and found myself back in the rose garden.

Perhaps less than a minute had passed since I had exited so importunately from the present moment. When I returned the loveliness of the quaint garden, momentarily forgotten, struck me with redoubled force. In this instant of recognition — whose constituent parts, memory and perception, were in this case particularly charged — I experienced the magical, elusive flash of certain happiness: something I had not felt for some time and which, arising as it did from a rapid modulation of fear to safety, provided the substance for my first, indelible identification of Franchise Farm as home.

‘What are you doing here, Stel-la?’

Martin was sitting beside me on the gravel path in his chair, his presence so complete and unheralded that it had the flavour of an apparition. His face was screwed into a grimace in the sunlight so that it seemed frozen in an attitude of rigid surprise, as if a door had been slammed on it.

‘I’m thinking,’ I said. His question, insinuating as it was, demanded a fuller reply. ‘I was thinking,’ I improvised, ‘of how amazing it is that this garden has been here since Elizabethan times. One imagines history to be inorganic, and yet here it is, written into the landscape.’

I was rather proud of this insight, but Martin seemed to find something funny in it.

‘Ha, ha!’ he brayed, mouth agape. ‘Ha, ha!’

‘What?’

I fully expected him to repeat my comment, in a voice which would ensure that not one of its nuances was left unmocked. This feeling was not altogether new to me: I find speech a precipitous and exposing business, and often perform it with palpable ‘stage fright’; a feeling which, I don’t doubt, has resulted over the years in the formality with which now I am unable to avoid expressing myself.

Martin, meanwhile, having prolonged his hilarity beyond all reasonable limits, finally gave me his reply:

‘The garden isn’t Elizabethan, you idiot! It’s a breed of rose, the Elizabethan rose. Grumps planted them.’

‘Who,’ I enquired, ‘is Grumps?’

‘My grandfather,’ said Martin primly, as if he were offended that I hadn’t heard of him.

‘Well, I can’t say I’m not disappointed,’ I maintained, after a pause. ‘Although he did a good job of it.’

‘It’s open to the public,’ said Martin, still apparently affronted. ‘Every Saturday during the summer. It’s very well known. People pay to come and look at it.’

I found this information rather surprising, suggesting as it did that the Maddens had been driven by penury to make a going concern of their own garden.

‘I think that’s sad,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a private place. I liked the thought of it being secret. Knowing that it’s an exhibit spoils it.’

‘If one is fortunate enough,’ pronounced Martin, ‘to possess something unique, of more than average worth, one has a duty to share it with one’s fellow man.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ I replied. ‘But if all this were mine, I don’t think I’d want to share it with anyone.’

‘There you are.’ Martin folded his arms with satisfaction. ‘That’s why things are better off in our hands. We know how these things ought to be done.’

‘Who is “we”?’ I enquired.

‘The upper classes,’ said Martin, his face crumpled and white, like something botched and screwed into a ball. I caught a glimpse of the cavity of his mouth, dark and moist.

‘I do apologize,’ I said sarcastically. ‘I didn’t realize that was who you were.’

‘Our family,’ intoned Martin, ‘has lived in this house since the seventeenth century, and in this area since long before that.’

‘Does that make you upper class?’ I was becoming quite irritated, in a desultory fashion. ‘I’d have thought it just makes you local Anyway,’ I closed my eyes and leaned back against the elaborate grid of the bench, and as it pressed into my flesh the taste of my vision lingered briefly on my tongue, ‘aren’t you a bit old to be boasting about your family? There used to be girls who did that at school. If they weren’t comparing how much money their parents had, they were droning on about some old relative of theirs in a bearskin who’d got his name in the Domesday Book.’

‘My—’ Through the crack of my eyelid I saw Martin’s mouth, flapping like an open door in the wind. I guessed that he had been about to tell me that his ancestors were in the Domesday Book. ‘Bearskins were earlier,’ he said finally. ‘Don’t you know anything?’

I sat up again and opened my eyes. I knew that I had to get out of the sun immediately. My sunburn was proving to be very inconvenient, a form of incontinence. I glimpsed a wedge of shadow on the sundial in front of me, and for no reason other than idle curiosity peered at it more closely. There were numbers engraved all around its circumference, and the shadow fell exactly between a twelve and a one. It then dawned on me that this was the time. I was about to remark on what a clever thing the sundial was when I thought that Martin might laugh at me for it, my logic having a backward flavour.

‘Goodness, look at the time!’ I exclaimed instead. ‘We’d better be getting back.’

‘Do we have to?’ complained Martin. ‘I was having fun.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ I replied, getting to my feet. My head swam for an instant. ‘Personally, I always prefer to quit while I’m ahead. How do we get back to the house?’

I grasped the handles of Martin’s chair and wheeled it around on its axis. Much as I pitied him for having to submit, physically at least, to my authority, there were advantages to having him chair-bound. I imagined running around the rose garden trying to catch him as he scampered off on his little legs, and almost laughed aloud. I had certainly been in the sun for far too long.

‘That way,’ said Martin, pointing directly ahead.

We set off in the opposite direction to that from which we had entered the rose garden and before long came to a gate identical to the first. I tried to work out where this would lead us, and figured that it would be somewhere to the side of the house. Martin leaned forward and opened the latch; and when I propelled him through I was surprised to see that we had entered directly what was evidently the bottom of the back garden. Turning around, I realized that the side wall of the rose garden was also the side boundary of the back garden. To our left was a queue of trees, evergreens, so dense that it was difficult to see what lay beyond them. In front and to our right was a great lawn, at the top of which was the back of the house.

‘Come on,’ said Martin, jiggling up and down as if he were spurring on a horse.

I braced my back and began to push.