His mind made up, James returned to the garden with a brown paper bag into which he dropped five specimens of thornapple fruits, all he could find, and for good measure two flowers and some leaves as well. He was sealing up the top of the bag with a strip of Scotch tape when Rosamund came up the path.

‘I suppose you’ve forgotten we’ve got to take those raspberries to Aunt Julie?’

James had. But since the only thing he wanted to do at that moment was boil up the contents of the bag, and that he could not do till Wednesday, he gave Rosamund his absent-minded professor look, shrugged his shoulders and said it was impossible for him to forget anything she was capable of remembering.

‘I’m going to put this upstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch you up.’

The Fyfield family had lived for many years – centuries, some said – in the village of Great Sindon in Suffolk, occupying this cottage or that one, taking over small farmhouses, yeomen all, until in the early nineteen hundreds some of them had climbed up into the middle class. James’s father, son of a schoolmaster, himself taught at the University of Essex at Wivenhoe, some twenty miles distant. James was already tipped for Oxford. But they were very much of the village too, were the Fyfields of Ewes Hall Farm, with ancestors lying in the churchyard and ancestors remembered on the war memorial on the village green.

The only other Fyfield at present living in Great Sindon was Aunt Julie who wasn’t really an aunt but a connection by marriage, her husband having been a second cousin twice removed or something of that sort. James couldn’t recall that he had ever been particularly nice to her or specially polite (as Rosamund was) but for all that Aunt Julie seemed to prefer him over pretty well everyone else. With the exception, perhaps, of Mirabel. And because she preferred him she expected him to pay her visits. Once a week these visits would have taken place if Aunt Julie had had her way, but James was not prepared to fall in with that and his parents had not encouraged it.

‘I shouldn’t like anyone to think James was after her money,’ his mother had said.

‘Everyone knows that’s to go to Mirabel,’ said his father.

‘All the more reason. I should hate to have it said James was after Mirabel’s rightful inheritance.’

Rosamund was unashamedly after it or part of it, though that seemed to have occurred to no one. She had told James so. A few thousand from Aunt Julie would help enormously in her ambition to buy herself a flat in London, for which she had been saving up since she was seven. But flats were going up in price all the time (she faithfully read the estate agents’ pages in the Observer), her £28.50 would go nowhere, and without a windfall her situation looked hopeless. She was very single-minded, was Rosamund, and she had a lot of determination. James supposed she had picked the raspberries herself and that her ‘we’ve got to take them’ had its origins in her own wishes and was in no way a directive from their mother. But he didn’t much mind going. There was a mulberry tree in Aunt Julie’s garden and he would be glad of a chance to examine it. He was thinking of keeping silkworms.