So, after my usually greasy meal, a cut of meat, beans, a salad and, as offered, a bit of cheese, I’d go off back to Jericho and open up the house, make lists, pull up the bamboo wig-wams, the dead sunflowers, and walk my boundaries. Beyond the wall which surrounded the property, obviously a safety barrier for Thomas if nothing else, there was the orchard and the little rough-grass paddock, yellow now with great swaths of cowslips mixed in with the wild white narcissi, and then that petered out into tussocky grass, boulders, shale, bushes of camphor and myrtle and the little stream, winding like a silver chain, between whippy crimson dogwood and clumps of marsh marigolds.

I was extremely pleased with myself that I, a city fellow if there ever was one, could place all these pleasures with accuracy because I had known them all, years and years before, as a child with Elpie in the fields and meadows between Faringdon and Lechlade. The days before James. The happy decade.

Up by the stream there was a little pond which the waters had carved out of the scrubby land, a kind of lung of stillness in which the old toad of yesterday gyrated slowly, grasped tightly by her lovers. Trust her to know the best place for mating. Never in running water, only ever in still. I was immensely pleased with myself for remembering all this. I’d bring Thomas up one day … perhaps. And, certainly, fence it off. Just in case.

I walked back to the house well pleased with myself and in the big room wrote to my editor telling him of my plans, but to write to me in Parsons Green until I returned to England.

The light was starting to fade as I walked back up to the little shed by the far wall, carrying a pioche, a fork and a battered rake which I had found there. Neatly stacked. Clean.

An agriculturalist. I felt amazingly free almost to the point of being a bit light-headed. Closing up the shed, I heard myself whistling, tunelessly. A sound which came from a contented heart.

I drove back to Madame Mazine, the kittens and goldfish, and the haven of the Maison Blanche, singing, very loudly, ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning!’ Apart from getting the time of day wrong, I got the mood absolutely right.