Even the wall itself looked promising: the brick was a pale overgrown red, and it glowed with varying inner shades in the fading light. We got out, and I followed him to the gates. I was wearing high-heeled shoes, and they sank into the grass and mud at every step. At the end of the wall, just before the gate, there was a For Sale notice: The Residence known as Binneford House, it said, situated at Binneford, formerly the property of Miss Marjorie Farrar, will be put up for auction on June 16, together with the gardener’s cottage and twelve acres of land. I stopped to read the description of the central heating and the reception rooms while Wyndham went on alone. When I finally followed him and rounded the corner of the drive, I saw him standing there, and behind him this extraordinary house. It was huge, and so beautiful that I was stunned: a large, early eighteenth-century house of a massive, delicate elegance, the stone pink and grey, the paintwork white on the doors and the innumerable leaded and perfectly proportioned windows and the whole thing overgrown with the most ordered profusion of climbing plants. We must have been two hundred yards away at that first view, and we could take it in as it had been built, as it had been designed, controlled by the architect’s intention.

I took Wyndham’s arm, and we started to walk slowly up the pebbled drive towards it. There was a lawn on one side of us, and on the other a shrubbery full of trees and flowers, daffodils and narcissis, all faintly gleaming and exhaling in the quickly gathering darkness. When we reached the front door, Wyndham said:

“I haven’t got a key, there’s nobody here, I hope you don’t mind if we don’t go in.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

I wanted him to tell me about it, but I was afraid to ask him, for he seemed moody and removed, as though he were thinking, and not about me. We wandered round to the back of the house, peering through the windows at the dust sheets and the marble fireplaces: the garden stretched away downhill on the far side, through a jumble of scrub and bushes, and Wyndham waved a hand in that direction and said:

“That’s the river, down there.”

“What river?” I said.

“What river do you think? The Wye. The River Wye. Do you want to go and have a look? It’s probably very muddy down there, and as far as I can remember, it’s all covered with nettles. You’d ruin your stockings.”

“I don’t mind about my stockings.”