“Don’t you? Let’s go and see then.” So I scrambled down the steep bank after him. The garden just fell away in a tangle of nothingness towards the river’s edge. When we got to the bottom, we stood there in the thick wet grass staring at the swirling water. The river was very full from the continual rain of spring, and it was rushing over the roots of the trees in a solid, eddying mass. As we stood there and watched it, I began to feel cold, and then to feel frightened: it was quite dark by now, although our eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and the silent insect-filled damp of the evening was quite foreign to me, quite beyond my control. There was nothing within reach that I understood. Here I was, in the midst of all the greenery that I had mocked at with my friends in London, and I was unnerved by it. It seemed more real than London, the river and the trees and the grass, so much profusion, so much of everything, and not a human being in reach, not a person to watch it. I shivered so that Wyndham would notice, and he said:

“It is cold, isn’t it? Come on, let’s go.” He pulled me after him back up the bank and into the cultivated part of the garden.

On the way I stumbled on something soft and brown and frightful, which felt like a dead mouse, but when I bent down to see what it was I found it was only an apple, a wet and rotten apple that had lain there since the autumn before. It occurred to me that this was the course of nature, for apples to fall off trees and lie and rot in the grass, and that the other thing, the thing with which I was familiar, the picking and the eating and the selling was a much later development. When we got back into the car, Wyndham said:

“Well, I suppose that’ll be the last time I’ll go there. I used to come here when I was a boy, to stay with her.”

“I’m cold,” I said. “Give me a cigarette.”

“Didn’t you like it, Emma?”

“Of course I liked it. It’s just so odd, to think of all this lying around out here and not a soul to look at it, and in London every blade of grass has to struggle to survive. Every tree has to win a battle against the County Council.”

“Don’t you like this better?”

“Not really. I think I like London better. I feel out of place here.”

“I used to like it here when I was a child.”

“It must be different now.”