Jeremy Grenville was nervous. Tonight would be Eve Theobald’s first introduction to the family and he wanted her to understand them. He did not expect her to like them. That would be too much to expect, but he hoped she would get a clearer impression of the influences that had formed him. He knew that she thought him something of a coward. She called him, affectionately, a wimp.

‘I don’t understand,’ she would say. ‘ If you don’t like it you can always get out. You’ve got a degree. There are lots of jobs you could do.’

It was hard to explain that he believed he had a responsibility for the place, that although he had been sent away to prep school at eight, he thought he belonged there.

‘I don’t see why,’ Eve would say. ‘Your family’s been exploiting that land for generations. So what? Why does that tie you to it too?’

Once he had made the mistake of using the word ‘duty’ in his conversation with Eve. His mother had been strong on the idea of duty. He had been brought up with it. Eve only laughed and said that he had been brainwashed by that crazy school of his. It was not duty, he thought now, but guilt which made him anxious to do his best for the Cadver. He had never lived up to his mother’s expectations of him. She had made it clear from his childhood that her hopes for the estate rested with him, that he was connected to it emotionally, through inheritance, in a way his father could never understand. He had been three years old when the valley was flooded, and it was his earliest memory. He could remember his father taking him to watch the huge earth movers working on the dam and returning to the house to find his mother crying. It was the only time he had seen her weep.

Throughout school and university he had failed her. It was not that he did badly or did not try, but that he did not shine. She wanted a hero to protect the Cadver and there was nothing heroic about his shyness, his inadequacy on the sportsfield, his inability to inspire his fellows. Even now in the management of the estate he tried to please her and still her approval was half-hearted and grudging.

He stood by the window and looked down the drive to the Lodge where all the lights seemed to be on, and thought that it was not fair for Eve to jeer about his commitment to the place. She had her own ideals, her own idea of principle.