‘What did you think about the Chagall exercise?’ Christopher had asked Morwenna as an opening gambit at supper as she tucked into her piled plateful of poached sea-trout with watercress sauce and new potatoes. She let out a despairing moan.

‘I had no idea what it meant at all and afterwards I was amazed at what other people found to say about it. I could only describe what I saw and I felt totally baffled by it – that huge, weird green face of someone wearing a hat and a crucifix and holding a little tree in his hand gazing, nose to nose, at a sheep which appeared to have someone milking a cow inside its head . . . incomprehensible! A nightmare.’ Morwenna shook her head. ‘I felt so envious because most of you seemed to be having such fun with your ideas, but I’ve never had any imagination myself.’ She let out a sigh. ‘When I was a child I was always the odd one out,’ she told him. ‘Other little girls seemed able to play any role at the blink of an eye, switching from wicked witch to beautiful princess as though they had an invisible script to read from, but I never had the slightest idea what I was meant to be doing let alone what I was expected to say, so I was always cast as a dumb animal or a servant, neither of which were required to speak and could be bossed around accordingly.’ She shrugged her shoulders hopelessly.

‘But I thought you already wrote a column for a newspaper? That’s way ahead of what most of the rest of us here have achieved,’ said Christopher, hoping to cheer her up.

‘Oh, I can write about facts. I can tell you when to mulch your border, how to divide the rhizomes of your irises and what plants are least likely to die in your soil – but apparently that’s not enough for our new editor. He talks about fresh approaches, firing the hearts of our readers with inspirational ideas and using more poetic imagery in our writing. Making the magazine challenging, he says. I don’t really know what he means. I think it’s quite challenging enough to get the planting times right and decide what shrubs will benefit from pruning without playing literary guessing games. It is a gardening magazine, after all.’

‘Perhaps he’d like you to say your love is like a red, red rose, but you feel safer doing a Gertrude Stein and saying a rose is a rose is a rose?’ suggested Christopher.