Rhoda Gradwyn had been young, of course, younger than she, Lettie, who at sixty knew that she looked older. But she might have twenty relatively active years ahead. Was it time to settle for the safety and comfort of the Manor? She contemplated what that life would be. A cottage she could call her own, decorated as she chose, a garden that she could make and cherish, a useful job that she could do without strain with people she respected, her books and music, the library at the Manor available to her, daily to breathe English air in one of the loveliest of counties, perhaps the pleasure of seeing a child of Helena’s growing up. And what of the remote future? Twenty years perhaps of useful and relatively independent life before she began to become a liability, in her eyes and perhaps in Helena’s. But they would be good years.

She knew that already she had become used to viewing the wider world beyond the Manor as essentially hostile and alien: an England she could no longer recognise, the earth itself a dying planet where millions of people were constantly moving like a black stain of human locusts, invading, consuming, corrupting, destroying the air of once remote and beautiful places now rancid with human breath. But it was still her world, the one she had been born into. She was part of its corruption as she was part of its splendours and its joys. How much of it had she ever experienced in those years of living behind the mock-Gothic walls of the prestigious girls’ school at which she had taught? How many people had she really engaged with other than her own kind, her own class, people who shared her own values and prejudices, who spoke the same language?

But it wasn’t too late. A different world, different faces, different voices were out there to be discovered. There were still places rarely visited, paths not hardened by millions of pounding feet, fabled cities which were at peace in those quiet hours before the first light and the visitors swarmed out of their hotels. She would travel by boat, train, bus and on foot, leaving the shallowest of carbon footprints. She had saved enough to spend three years away and still have enough to buy a remote cottage somewhere in England. And she was strong and well qualified. In Asia, Africa and South America there could be useful work for her. For years, travelling with a colleague, she had had to journey in the school holidays, the worst and busiest time. This journey, taken on her own, would be different. She would have called it a voyage of self-discovery, but rejected the words as more pretentious than true. After sixty years she knew who and what she was. This would be a voyage, not of self-confirmation, but of change.

Finally, she turned at the stones and walked briskly back to the Manor.

•                  •                  •