On the terrace, some chairs, the cheap slatted metal ones you find in public parks. They stood around like waiting, or abandoned, insects, and gave me the impression that no form of conversation or discussion had ever taken place there among them. Generally there was a distinct air of neglect, of carelessness, of impermanence. I don’t know why I was surprised by this. Perhaps because I knew that the owner was exceedingly rich, one of the most successful writers of the day, and must therefore, in my Parsons Green blinkered mind, be rolling in riches and deep luxury. Perhaps he was vastly rich, perhaps he had wealth which was uncountable, but none of this drifted out on to his terrace. No jolly sun-umbrellas, no fat, wheeled, cushioned chairs for lying in the sun and sipping chinking glasses of wine or whisky. All was tidy, that was clear, well tended; the lawns, gently sloping to the bend in the drive, were mown like velvet, the gravel, the scattered stones I had just seen flying, were here immaculately raked. All was serene. Daniel?

Perhaps, in this house, it was all work and no play? A writer who dealt with books thicker than bricks probably had not the time for any form of slothfulness like sitting about on terraces sipping champagne.

Turning and looking back at the top of the steps, down over the trim lawns and the curving drive up which I had just walked, comfortably, I caught my breath. The view was, it had to be confessed, extraordinary. Beyond the drive, and the little lodge looking like a cuckoo clock set in the valley below, there was an infinity of green. Olives and cork, after them row upon row of vines stretching as far as vision, until everything softened into a lavender blue, a haze of distance and, rising serene, shimmering in the late-afternoon sunlight, a great range of mountains, the Pre-Alps, their jagged edges tipped and fringed with scars of snow, pink now in the late sun.

A breathtaking view. Perfectly simple, nothing of immense grandeur, merely nature normal, unbrutalized by house or even spire, pylon or chimney. Silent. Still. Eternal. So one wished and prayed; a strange contrast to the ugly Edwardian château and the deserted, unwelcoming terrace. With all this beauty, did no one ever look at it?

‘It’s inspiring, isn’t it? I mean, truly inspiring. It is God’s work, and doesn’t it make you believe in Him? Don’t you want to shout Glory Hallelujah! Don’t you just?’