She goes down to the kitchen to make the supper. She’s a very neat cook. In the old house there was always a chef, but Kimberly doesn’t want someone else doing the cooking, except when they have lots of guests. Particularly she doesn’t want some tyrant in her kitchen, cooking up the fatty recipes of Old Europe. She doesn’t recognise – as his father once pointed out – the difference between servants and friends. And now the old boy is silent and his sarcasm and disapproval are locked away with him. Kim calls him from somewhere below on the stairs. This house, the trees outside in the gardens coming to life – there’s still some timid light in the sky – the children tucked up in their Neverland, their night lights decorated with revolving fairies and toadstools, casting a softly curdled light on their sleeping faces – reassures him after his anxious, guilty journey. In the morning – it’s Saturday – he will be playing tennis in the gardens. He’s on the garden committee and they are debating some big changes, a new play area for children and a replacement for the fountain which was vandalised. There are foxes in the garden and at night they moan and scream. Nobody on the garden committee is worth less than ten or fifteen million, except for Mrs Purkiss, eighty-seven, who lives in a deep basement and is a protected tenant on a tiny pension, yet they all defer to her because they recognise the attachment to the past which she represents. Maybe we are silently aware that she is the better for having very little connection to the world that has made us rich. She has wild hair and wears a filthy green Barbour in winter and a plum-coloured Barbour waistcoat, equally dirty, in summer. She’s an expert on shrubs and herbaceous plants. Her husband died in the last days of the campaign in North Africa and she has no family: the garden is her life. When she comes to garden meetings she drinks too much and takes supplies of canapés home in the waterproof pocket designed to transport recently caught trout. Her first name is Esmé and she says ‘top hole’ to indicate approval.