‘Rosamund’s out of the question,’ said James’s mother, and she didn’t say it very warmly. ‘She’s only eleven. I couldn’t possibly let her have sole charge of Oliver.’

‘But James would be all right, wouldn’t he? James has got so tall, he looks almost a grown man. And James is terribly mature, anyway.’

His mother didn’t answer that. She gave one of those sighs of hers that would have effectively prevented James asking further favours. It had no effect on Mirabel.

‘Just this once. After tomorrow I’ll stay at home like a good little mum and in a month Mrs Hodges will be back. Just from seven till – well, eleven would be the absolute latest.’

‘I’ll sit with Oliver,’ said James’s mother.

Mirabel’s guarantee came to nothing, however, for far from staying home with Oliver, she turned up at Ewes Hall Farm three days later, this time to leave him with them while she went shopping with Gilbert’s mother. She was gone for four hours. Oliver made himself sick from eating toffees he found in Rosamund’s room and he had uprooted six houseplants and stripped off their leaves before James caught him at it.

Next time, James’s mother said she would put her foot down. She had already promised to sit with Oliver on the coming Saturday night. That she would do and that must be the end of it. And this resolve was strengthened by Mirabel’s failure to return home until half-past one on the Sunday morning. She would have told Mirabel so in no uncertain terms, Elizabeth Fyfield told her family at breakfast, but Gilbert Coleridge had been there and she had not wanted to embarrass Mirabel in front of him.

On the Tuesday, the day to which the Women’s Institute meeting had been put forward, the fine weather broke with a storm which gave place by the afternoon to steady rain. James was spending the day turning out the glory-hole. He had been told to do it often enough and he had meant to do it, but who would be indoors in a stuffy bedroom when the sun is shining and the temperature in the eighties? That Tuesday was a very suitable sort of day for disposing of books one had outgrown, tanks and cages and jars that were no longer inhabited, for throwing away collections that had become just boxfuls of rubbish, for making a clean sweep on the path to adulthood.

Taking down the books from the top shelf, he came upon an object whose existence he had almost forgotten – the bottle labelled datura stramonium. That was something he need not hesitate to throw away. He looked at it curiously, at the clear greenish-brown fluid it contained and which seemed in the past months to have settled and clarified. Why had he made it and what for? In another age, he thought he might have been an alchemist or a warlock, and he shook his head ruefully at the juvenile James who was no more.