ELEVEN

      ‘Have a drink.’ Burgo poured me a glass of wine. ‘Fleur’s polishing Stargazer’s hoofs and Dickie asked for twenty minutes’ grace to get his hoses linked up.’

      I sat down. The garden had grown dim and my ears were filled with a sound like rushing water. I picked up the glass and took several reviving sips. He was saying something but I could not understand it. I tried to pull myself together and fixed an expression on my face which I hoped was intelligent, or at least sensible.

      Burgo’s eyes were Fleur’s shape exactly, slanted, sylphic. But his were darker and sharper. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, jeans that had once been khaki and were faded by the sun and scruffy navy espadrilles. The impact of his presence left me in no doubt that I had been deceiving myself if I thought I was interested in him only as Fleur’s brother. He was saying something about England in summer. I forced myself to concentrate.

      ‘It’s perfect.’ Burgo narrowed his eyes to look across the expanse of lawn down to where a pair of crinkle-crankle hornbeam hedges drew one’s gaze to a statue of Flora and beyond that to where the beechwood began. ‘I’ve longed for this.’

      He leaned back in his chair to follow the progress of a house martin as it swooped over the grass, looking for insects. The wisteria’s second flowering, nearly over now, dripped scent over our heads and bees foraged ceaselessly in the collapsing mauve blossoms.

      ‘Have you?’

      ‘Now, for a brief while, I can stop thinking,’ said Burgo. He brushed back his hair from his forehead. ‘I can breathe again. Allow myself to feel.’ He turned his head sharply and looked at me.

      I dropped my gaze immediately. I wished I could breathe. I drank half my glass of wine in several swallows and stared fiercely at the grey teak of the table, mottled with silvery patches where wasps had tried to chew it.

      ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he asked.

      ‘Only on loan. How was Provence?’

      ‘Hot. Dry. Scorched to dust.’ He glanced at the knot garden, swirls of box, germander and lavender, which surrounded the terrace. ‘I much prefer the sound of blackbirds to cicadas.’

      I was conscious of a feeling of gratification. I had no idea then that this was the beginning of a hateful process of keeping a tally. It took me weeks, months even, to recognize that in some secret, shamefaced part of my mind I was reckoning the score between Anna and me.

      ‘How was Leningrad?’

      ‘Beautiful but depressing. It confirmed all my assumptions about Communism.’

      While he talked I examined a patch of violas flowering in a gap between paving stones at my feet. I came to know intimately the blushes and streaks of lilac on their primrose-coloured faces. Suddenly he was talking about my mother.

      ‘Oh, it’s kind of you to ask. She’s no better, really. If anything, slightly worse. At least … physically she’s the same but she seems rather confused.’

      ‘What do you mean confused?’

      I related the conversation about the toaster.

      ‘I’ve known Cabinet Ministers who believed there were fairies at the bottom of the garden.’

      ‘Lots of people don’t have much grasp of science. I’m one of them. But she’s said other things that bother me. Yesterday she refused to eat her potatoes because she said they were winking at her and it put her off. And when she talks she sometimes growls like a dog. She used to have a light, rather charming voice but these days she sounds like a sailor from Marseilles. In timbre, I mean. Of course, she speaks English.’

      ‘Perhaps she’s been lying down too long and isn’t getting enough blood to the brain.’

      ‘Perhaps. I wonder.’ What a relief it would be if the explanation were so simple. These days a thread of anxiety about my mother ran through all my waking hours. Talking about my fears with someone who did not immediately dismiss them as nonsense was comforting. But of course he was being polite. The symptoms of my mother’s illness could not be of interest. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a tedious subject: other people’s sick relations.’

      He made a motion with his hand, sweeping this aside. ‘Has a doctor seen her recently?’

      ‘In desperation I persuaded our GP to call but she shut her eyes and refused to speak to him. He went away very cross.’

      ‘If the man’s not up to dealing with a mildly difficult patient I’d go over his head and get a specialist in.’

      ‘Do you think I should? But I don’t know how. I thought one was supposed to ask to be referred.’

      ‘Sometimes you have to cut corners. Leave it to me. I’ve got meetings all day tomorrow but I’ll sort something out. Don’t worry.’

      It was as though the clouds had parted and a god had descended on suitable throne-bearing apparatus. But fear of disappointment made me tell myself he would have forgotten all about it even before I left Ladyfield to return to Cutham.

      Aloud I said, ‘That would be a greater kindness than I could ever repay.’

      Burgo gave me a look I recognized, which seemed to ask if I intended to maintain the fiction that social punctilio had any part to play in our relationship. I felt the blood rush to my face.

      ‘Here we are!’ Dickie appeared round the corner of the house. ‘Hello, Bobbie.’ He hobbled round the table to kiss my cheek. ‘The pool’s filling nicely and Mrs Harris is setting out the grub. Exciting, isn’t it? Of course Fleur doesn’t care two straws for our little garden and we all know Burgo’s mind is fixed on solving the troubles of the world. But you share my pleasure in our own little Utopia, eh?’

      ‘I certainly do! I’m longing to see the pool with water in it.’ I kissed Dickie with real affection. He was perhaps the nicest man I knew. And I was thankful to have a third person to ease the tension that continually threatened to take Burgo and me to a point beyond the bulwarks of propriety when we were alone. ‘And I adore picnics.’

      ‘It won’t be a real picnic,’ said Burgo. ‘I saw Beddows and Billy carrying down a table and chairs. We shan’t have to sit on rugs that smell of dogs, eating disintegrating Scotch eggs and drinking tepid tea.’

      ‘At my age,’ said Dickie, ‘I like to be comfortable. And the leg doesn’t take kindly to the hard ground. I agree there ought to be something primitive about a real picnic. But Mrs Harris has her standards and it makes her miserable to fall below them.’

      ‘I once went to a smart entertainment which the hostess called a dîner sur l’herbe,’ said Burgo. ‘We were rowed out to an island in the ancestral lake by uniformed flunkeys. We ate lobster and swan from heirloom porcelain and silver and were entertained by a wind trio of hautboy, serpent and crumhorn. On the return journey the flunkey in charge of the picnic baskets, who had been keeping up his spirits with the lees of the bottles, upset the boat. The male guests had to dive to the bottom of the lake to fetch up priceless Sèvres and dishes hammered by Paul Storr. My dinner jacket shrank to the size of a baby’s vest.’

      Dickie and I laughed at this and I felt immediately reassured. What remained of my disquiet dissolved as we walked down to the China House.

      ‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Dickie. ‘I know so little about the Chinese except unpleasant practices like binding women’s feet and the slow drip, drip of the Chinese water torture.’