He was gone before she woke up. (Why could he not have stayed until she woke, she thought, so that she might wake beside him?) It was six a.m. and light like day. The church clock sounded, a minute ahead of her watch. In Japan it was afternoon already. She went to the window and pulled back the curtains. There were no other houses to see. There was no one to hear, not inside the house or outside of it. There were birds singing. She felt she was the only person anywhere. She was a city girl. She had never had that feeling before, that she was the only person in the world, getting up out of bed and drawing the curtains onto a bright day where no one was. She stood at the window looking down at Claire’s garden. There was the lawn, and there were all the flowers, and behind the flowers a hedge like a wall, so dark that it was almost black at that time of the morning with the sun low behind it. The hedge was high so that if someone was walking on the other side he wouldn’t be visible from the house, it would be way above his head. And he would see nothing of the garden or of the people in it. He would have to stand a little bit back even to see the upstairs windows of the house. She saw Richard there, out in the field. She didn’t know if he saw her looking down, her face behind the glass.

Beyond the hedge was Richard’s farm. The fields were all one shade of green, stretching out a long way. It was a duller, bluer green than the grass in the garden. Jonathan said that if she stayed long enough she would see them turn to gold.

The lovely garden of Joséphine de Beauharnais

I want lots of flowers, she said to Charlie. Colour. I want masses of colour.

The garden lay white under snow. It was 1947, a cold winter that seemed to be meant to cauterise the recent past. When Claire looked out there was no distinguishing any more between the surface of the garden and that of the fields beyond, smooth and white to the grey horizon. Even the line of the fence was erased where a drift had swept against it. She had woken before him. Gone out into the snow. Now he had come out to join her.

Roses, lupins, irises, dahlias. Delphiniums, I love delphiniums. Peonies, big deep red ones. What else? Rhododendrons and azaleas. Can one grow rhododendrons here?

But you don’t know anything about gardening.

It was true. Those were about all the flowers she knew, apart from ordinary little flowers like daisies and forget-me-nots, which never found their way into London florists’.