‘The tree will outlive me,’ he said.

No, he wasn’t at all sad and he didn’t look as if he would die young either. He was so handsome. So very handsome. Olive-skinned, with brilliant dark eyes which changed their colour in the sun, and a mane of wavy hair. He was a model. Clothes sat beautifully on his frame. His stance casual, his stomach flat, his back straight. He had a sensuous, languorous stride on the catwalk. The villagers hated him. He knew it. The village boys now smoked marijuana, pot, heroin. Isolde and Karen smoked too, squatting on their haunches on the earthen floor of the small kades. Probably their mother Sonia smoked pot too. They all smoked pot, the whole family. What euphoria it produced. What heavenly forgetfulness being high. That was the other plane of reality they all escaped to. The landscape was not of this world. The colours, unearthly, kaleidoscopic. They floated up to the mountains, bodiless, supported by billowing clouds that carried their bodies in a sensuous drift. The purest ether they breathed in. The aching flesh was cushioned in downy softness as if brushed against by a million feathers. They swam in oceans and never drowned; stepped onto islands where fruits clustered ripely on trees, flowers burgeoning out of their smooth trunks. But they needed so much money to purchase this bliss, this temporary escape.

Prospero’s island. Those beguiling airs seducing the senses. And when they returned after a trip it was excruciating. Life was so dull. So drab. The dark cavern with its invisible ceilings and jagged frozen stalactites jabbed the wounded heart. The yawning pits gaped wide open at their feet. They felt fear, fear of falling in, swallowed by flailing dreams. Winged panthers clawed at their throats. But to pay for the paradisal dreams to summon you through trance-like sleep money had to be found. So the big house began to vanish bit by bit. The doors, the windows, the bricks, the tiles, until only a long passage was left. By then Isolde, Karen, Sonia had all gone away, emigrated to Australia. One day, the villagers thrashed Jerome. There was blood all over his body, his hair clotted with blood, his shirt sodden.

‘For his evil ways,’ Madeleine said. She, who was so tolerant and compassionate.

‘The house, the house,’ Jerome mourned. ‘What am I to do? How can I live? I don’t have money. No one supports me. No one gives me money.’ So his castle, the citadel, the tower, the turrets dwindled away. He had to sleep on a mat. There was no furniture left, he had sold it bit by bit. His nephew Denham slept on a plank supported by bricks. He studied by the light of a bottle lamp. Sometimes in sleep his body would slip into a deep furrow in the earthen floor.