The St. Clair mansion stood north of Harling Crescent with the St. Clair Folly on the crest of the hill above it. It was still a plea­sure to look at, its propositions of balance and order and sim­plicity were still acceptable to me; and there had been a time when the fact of my mother-in-law being a St. Clair had given me a feeling of part ownership of the place; because the St. Clairs were my children’s ancestors they were mine too. If anything I did the family credit; among the more notable St. Clairs were at least two known murderers, three convicted traitors, and one par­ticularly ambitious gentleman who was rumoured both to have procured his fifteen-year-old son for Edward II and to have helped to arrange Edward’s murder at Berkeley. Heiress-hunting and robbery of one kind or another they all seemed to have taken for granted; Peregrine, who built the Folly in 1810, went through two wives’ fortunes and then made another as colonel of a regiment. He even was supposed to have taken a rake-off on the teeth which the denture-makers of the time extracted from the dead on the field of battle; I came across this titbit in an anony­mous Chartist pamphlet which Reggie Scurrah showed me – surreptitiously as a Port Said photograph – at the Library.

Reggie had expected me to be shocked; instead I was mildly titillated. That had been some seven years ago; now the St. Clairs had lost their glamour as far as I was concerned. True, when away from Warley I always managed to bring my wife’s ancestors into the conversation; I had never disliked an association with a name which – all the more so for the family being extinct – was a symbol of doomed aristocracy, pennons against the sunset, trumpets at Roncevalles and all the rest of it. But now I used this social gambit only when I remembered to.

My heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t remember exactly when I dis­covered that they were really dead; all I knew was that I no longer looked northwards as often as I did. The three turrets of the Folly, swart against the skyline, deliberately and successfully spectacular, the way in which the great bulk of the mansion seemed to be suspended from the sky instead of pressing down into the earth – this still gave me pleasure, but not pleasure of an important kind.

I looked southwards to Squirrel Gorge now, but not towards the town, not towards Snow Park, on the river bank, not even towards Warley Forest on the far side of Snow Park. I had seen all these before; but until Barbara had discovered it I hadn’t seen Sindram Grange. I tried to look at it through her eyes, inhabit a world of giants and rescues and enchantments. It didn’t come off; I kept thinking about old Sindram. Still, it was a fair enough replica of a castle, right down to the now dried-up moat and the big courtyard and the arrow slits in the turrets; looking at it I began to nourish fantasies of my own, wilder in their way than Barbara’s.