“I was a grammar-school boy, you see, there on a county scholarship. Difficult for you to understand. Things may be different now, although I doubt it. Not that different. I wasn’t mocked or despised or made to feel different, I just was different. I never felt I belonged there—and, of course, I didn’t. I knew from the first that I had no right to be there, that something in the air of those quads rejected me. I wasn’t the only one to feel that, of course. There were boys not from grammar schools but from the less prestigious public schools, places they tried not to mention. I could see it. They were the ones avid to be admitted to that golden group of the privileged upper class. I used to imagine them, edging their way with brains and talent into the Boars Hill academic dinner parties, performing like court jesters at the country weekend parties, offering their pathetic verses, their wit and their cleverness to buy their way in. I hadn’t any talent except intelligence. I despised them, but I knew what they respected, all of them. Money, my boy, that’s what mattered. Breeding was important, but breeding with money was better. And I made money. It will come to you in time, what’s left after a rapacious government has extracted its loot. Make good use of it.”

Herbert’s hobby was visiting stately homes open to the public, motoring to them by carefully devised circuitous routes with the aid of unreliable maps, driving his immaculate Rolls-Royce, as upright as the Victorian general he resembled. He travelled magisterially down country roads and little-used lanes, George at his side reading aloud from the guidebook. He thought it strange that a man so responsive to Georgian elegance and Tudor solidity should live in a penthouse in Bournemouth, even if the sea view was spectacular. In time he came to understand why. His grandfather, approaching old age, had simplified his life. He was looked after by a generously paid cook, housekeeper and general cleaner who came in by the day, did their work efficiently and quietly and left. His furniture was expensive but minimal. He neither collected nor coveted the artefacts which were his enthusiasm. He could admire without wanting to possess. George from an early age knew himself to be a possessor.

And the first time they visited Cheverell Manor he knew that this was the house he wanted. It lay before him in the mellow sunshine of an early-autumn day when the shadows were beginning to lengthen and trees, lawns and stone took on a richer intensity of colour from the dying sun, so that there seemed only a moment in which everything—the house, gardens, the great wrought-iron gates—was held in a calm, almost unearthly perfection of light, form and colours which caught at his heart. At the end of their visit, turning to take a last look, he said, “I want to buy that house.”

“Well, one day, George, perhaps you will.”