To make it more exquisite for her I eked out the journey to Donnybrook, stopping separately for oil, petrol, and water. On the outskirts of the little town stood a fruit barn, a sort of indoor market on a garage forecourt: and we wandered about amongst the produce, taking our time admiring the persimmons and the quinces and the ruby blood plums, the sweet potatoes, the golden queen peaches, and of course the Granny Smiths, sharp and succulent and twice the familiar size but selling for only 40 cents a kilo, that’s to say about 5 pence for a pound. Only in France, I remarked to Ros, had I ever seen that which grows on trees or pops up from the ground made to look so appetizing. And we wandered round again, squandering the afternoon, snatching every minute we decently could from the waiting maw of sentiment.

But at last there was no further postponing it. We loaded up the boot with more fruit than we would have been able to eat had we been staying a whole year in Donnybrook, and drove on into the town, turning left over the picturesque hump-backed bridge beneath which Ros had whiled away her childhood summers, floating twigs or building dams and catching gilgies, and coming to a halt finally at the little cottage, the last dwelling before the fields took over, where her grandparents had lived and died.

It looked for all the world as though no changes had been made to it for fifty years, as though someone else’s granny was here, cultivating those fragile and old-fashioned pastel-coloured flowers that only grannies have ever known how to grow. What distressed Ros more than anything was that the old garden shed, falling down in 1948, still stood.

We drove a little way down the adjoining farm road, and parked with our windows open. Crickets and grasshoppers flicked about in the heat. A bull pawed the dust. Ros pointed to the highest hill, surmounted by a clump of stones. It was there that she had gone as a young woman to think about her first engagement. ‘I sat there all afternoon and summoned up what little knowledge and experience I possessed. When I came back down I knew I didn’t want to be engaged.’

Even without the colouring of early memories Donnybrook seemed to me to be a place of near intolerable sadness. It was the archetypal pastoral village of the imagination; the happy, enclosed and sheltered valley of childhood. It had always been in the past, had never and would never speak of any other time. I felt as if I’d been a child here at some time myself. The high, bleached gums, the little river, the smooth hills, the long rising roads going everywhere and nowhere, the modest row of wooden cottages, of which her grandmother’s was the last, all suggested the unending, hopeful, hopeless, summer of everyone’s early youth.