I had parked beyond the lodge on a paved area obviously intended as the Visitors’ Parking Area. There was a small shed beyond, with her own car neatly lodged.

‘And now that you are here I’ll call the house. And you walk. Right? It’s no great deal. A gentle slope only. You won’t even be breathless when you arrive. Leaving, however, may find you distinctly short of breath. I myself seldom make the trip. Okay?’ She went into the lodge and I began my walk.

It was not a ‘big deal’, as she said. The air was soft, warm. Sunlight danced under the trees on drifts of narcissi and scatters of scarlet anemones which studded the brilliant new grass like gouts of blood. All along the verges, thick and tall (hedges almost), something very like Queen Anne’s lace frilled and tossed, and bees and bugs droned, drifting languorously through the evening air.

What I had thought to be gloomy, dark trees the first time I had seen them turned out to be giant olives, their dark-green leaves, silvered on the underside, stuck about all over with tight bunches of cream blossom which, as I walked, were scattering petals like wedding confetti.

Suddenly, almost as a surprise, the house was before me, set behind a long balustrade, a terrace, pepper-pot towers at each corner, high mournful windows, a wide flight of steps leading up from a surprisingly trim sloping lawn.

It was an Edwardian monster, not, as I had for some reason imagined, a Provençal building, rough stone walls and sun-baked tiles on the roof. The drive did a kind of left turn and went off behind the terrace to be lost somewhere behind the house. The towers had ugly pencil-pointed roofs, crowned with rusty iron letters. In this case S and W. Probably the other towers, for there had to be four, one at each corner, would be N and E. They were tiled with ugly blue and yellow glazed tiles set in stripes. In the centre of the building, high on the roof, a huge clock stared blindly down over the landscape. It stood in an agonized riot of rusted iron vegetation, the filigreed hands pointing out, for all the world to see, that time had been abandoned at twelve-twenty exactly. The elegant Roman numerals bled rust down the cracked enamel face.