One thing was certain, I reflected: my own house would never nourish any child’s fantasies. It was, when I came to think of it, just the sort of house which a sensible child, given enough roof tiling, reconstituted stone blocks, and cedar boarding would have built for himself. A child would have seen the necessity of vary­ing the grey stone blocks with a selection of red cedar boarding, and of having the garage jut out from the side of the house to break up the roof line. And I suppose that a child would have seen the advantages of oil-fired central heating, a double garage and all the rest of it. It was a good house, and worth every penny of the four thousand five hundred which had been paid for it; and it was a capital asset which, my father-in-law never lost the opportunity of informing me, was increasing its value almost daily. But it still wasn’t a really grown-up house; no child living in Sparrow Gorge would look across at it this morning and see princesses and dragons and warm giants. And somehow – and not entirely be­cause it was in Susan’s name – living in it had dim­inished my stature as a man. I’d lost something by coming to live there; and perhaps Barbara had, too.

I looked round the garden to release myself from the gloom that had come over me, indisputably and for no good reason on a fine Spring morning. There was plenty to do this afternoon and God knows I needed the exercise. My spirits lightened; I’d have a Spring bonfire. And then, unbidden, anarchistic, the thought came to me: there was more than garden rubbish that I wanted to burn. I felt weighed down by things, all the material possessions which had accumulated during ten years of mar­riage, some two thousand seven hundred pounds worth, not count­ing my Zephyr and Susan’s Morris 1000. To make the inventory afresh every year instead of merely adding on the value of our new possessions had, up till now, been a ritual which gave me a sober but keen satisfaction. Up till now, up till now; and now I wanted some kind of fresh start.

Barbara came running out of the house towards me, “Daddy, it’s nearly time for church!” As always, she spoke as if there were some dire emergency threatening us all; I picked her up and held her in my arms for a moment, speaking gently. “There’s lots of time, my darling, oceans of time.” But she wriggled out of my arms and tried to drag me by the hand to the garage. “We’ll be late, Daddy, we’ll be terrible late—” She started to weep.

Harry came to the door. His hair was ruffled and there was a black smudge on his forehead. He watched us with a faint smile on his face. That smile had been the more or less permanent ten­ant of his face since he’d gone to prep school last year; stretching a point, it might have been called inscrutable, but I had my own definition of it. I called it Carruthers; behind it a sahib was watch­­ing the natives at work and play – rum customers, these wogs, almost human in their way . . . That’s what Carruthers seemed to be saying, not directly to me, but to some invisible compan­ion, some chap of his own totem.