He swung his camera over one shoulder and led her back down the drive. ‘A lot of the knot garden’s young because it’s not easy to move mature box hedging about, so it’ll look quite different in ten years,’ he explained. ‘For now I’ve made use of lavender for edging with young box behind, ready to take over, and there are a lot of aromatic plants like marjoram and thyme. The miniature roses are quite mature, so they’re already making a good impression visually.’

When they reached the knot garden, Clancy halted to admire it. The paved path formed a square with a circle laid within it. At the centre stood an obelisk. Above borders of lavender, butterflies flitted and bees buzzed, Nelson snapping at any that hovered too close. ‘It’s gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Is this what you’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks?’

‘Re-doing really,’ he admitted. ‘The pathways were already here but I relayed the flags on fresh sand, adding shale in various places. The four yew pillars at the corners were OK to reshape. Just about everything else had to be done from scratch.’

He left Clancy to walk the circular path and branch off to approach the tall stone shape in the centre, tall, four-sided and pointy, while he took out his camera, one of those that looked professional but was actually point-and-shoot. ‘Oh,’ she breathed. ‘It’s a monument to the family members and household staff who died in the two World Wars.’

‘Pretty sobering,’ he agreed, trying a few shots of bees on lavender and close-ups of the shale and gravel, their colours brought out by the sun. He was pleased with the purplish slate shale beside the flowering lavender and tiny muted green leaves of thyme. Clancy was still reading the words inscribed on the obelisk, her head tilted. Her hair was glossy and bright in the sunshine, the blue of her dress contrasting beautifully with the yellow-green yews. Nelson stood beside her, gently waving his tail if she glanced at him. Aaron fired off about five frames, glad that Nelson had his good side to the camera. He didn’t think anyone would be particularly sold on the sight of his permanently closed socket.

He began working through the shots he wanted, asking Clancy to stroll along paths, looking like a heroine on a book jacket walking towards her future, or watch butterflies pensively in the sun. Nelson settled down to sunbathe. Aaron produced a book from the truck and asked her to settle in the shade of the arbour at the very back of the knot garden and pretend to read. He’d borrowed it from his mother’s store of notebooks, chosen for the highly stylised illustration of flowers on the cover – all from non-existent species, in his opinion.

Clancy could have been born to the task of ornamenting garden shots, propping a hand beneath her chin thoughtfully or hooking a foot behind the opposite ankle and looking studious. He took about ten times the shots he needed just because he was enjoying looking at her through the lens. ‘I think I’ve got enough,’ he said eventually, feeling regretful.