I began to wonder whether he was someone who’d escaped from Binfield House. But no, he was sane enough, after a fashion. I knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, nature-worship, roll in the dew before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in Ealing. He began to show me round the estate. There was nothing left of the woods. It was all houses, houses—and what houses! Do you know these faked-up Tudor houses with the curly roofs and the buttresses that don’t buttress anything, and the rock-gardens with concrete bird-baths and those red plaster elves you can buy at the florists’? You could see in your mind’s eye the awful gang of food-cranks and spook-hunters and simple-lifers with £1,000 a year that lived there. Even the pavements were crazy. I didn’t let him take me far. Some of the houses made me wish I’d got a hand-grenade in my pocket. I tried to damp him down by asking whether people didn’t object to living so near the lunatic asylum, but it didn’t have much effect. Finally I stopped and said:

“There used to be another pool, besides the big one. It can’t be far from here.”

“Another pool? Oh, surely not. I don’t think there was ever another pool.”

“They may have drained it off,” I said. “It was a pretty deep pool. It would leave a big pit behind.”

For the first time he looked a bit uneasy. He rubbed his nose.

“Oh-ah. Of course, you must understand our life up here is in some ways primitive. The simple life, you know. We prefer it so. But being so far from the town has its inconveniences, of course. Some of our sanitary arrangements are not altogether satisfactory. The dust-cart only calls once a month, I believe.”

“You mean they’ve turned the pool into a rubbish-damp?”

“Well, there is something in the nature of a—” He shied at the word rubbish-dump. “We have to dispose of tins and so forth, of course. Over there, behind that clump of trees.”

We went across there. They’d left a few trees to hide it. But yes, there it was. It was my pool, all right. They’d drained the water off. It made a great round hole, like an enormous well, twenty or thirty feet deep. Already it was half full of tin cans.

I stood looking down at the tin cans.

“It’s a pity they drained it,” I said. “There used to be some big fish in that pool.”

“Fish? Oh, I never heard anything about that. Of course we could hardly have a pool of water here among the houses. The mosquitoes, you know. But it was before my time.”

“I suppose these houses have been built a good long time?” I said.

“Oh—ten or fifteen years, I think.”

“I used to know this place before the war,” I said. “It was all woods then. There weren’t any houses except Binfield House. But that little bit of copse over there hasn’t changed. I walked through it on my way here.”