I’ll learn. I can begin to learn before the snow melts. As soon as the snow goes I’ll start work. I’ll get Billy to help.

She hadn’t lived in the house long enough yet to make a mark on it, so full it was of the family past, but the garden was clear out there, blank now.

It’ll be wet, Charlie said, when all that snow melts. You won’t be able to get into the ground, you’ll have to wait a while.

Well, I can start planning, darling, can’t I?

She brought down Uncle Ralph’s gardening books from the shelf in his study that had become Charlie’s study, moved them into the sitting room, moved a table before the window where she could see as she planned. She took some sheets of paper, white and plain as the snow outside.

Again then they went out, the two of them together into the snow, paced the white ground. They left their footprints first in straight lines like geometry across it, recording the length and breadth of the lawn from the house to the half-buried fence, making the notes that she would transfer to the sheets of paper; then pacing the distance to the trees, the position of individual trees and shrubs, Ralph’s long-neglected border. They might have been treading the foundations of a house they were to build, young marrieds building a life anew for themselves.

What a mess we’ve made of the lawn now!

When they looked back the footsteps seemed to have lost all order, jumbled, criss-crossing as if there had been a gang of children playing. Or dancing. Charlie’s laugh made her feel warm in the cold. Almost as if he had touched her, skin to skin, beneath all the wool that they were wearing.

Then his voice ironical, a serious look. It’s not all playing, you know. Gardening’s science too.

Do you think I don’t know that, living with you and all your talk?