“The sun doesn’t preside here. Its vitality is essential for the roses; but even at midsummer, when the smell is overpowering, my mother would bring me out long after the shade had deepened to prove that the scent was strongest, most alluring, in the evening. All the flowers are night-scented. Under the moon’s light the white roses are luminous, almost palpably so. The moon dial makes it midday at midnight. The fountain reflects down the stars: a fragment of heaven on earth. The spirit of this garden is female. My mother created this space to express another view of the world, and subvert the norm. The sun is consort, and a vital partner, but not the sovereign lord. It wasn’t enough for us to understand it cerebrally: she needed us to witness it.” He turned to Lucy. “Maybe because hers was a house of men.”

“She seems to have held her own.”

“Yes. But it was something she cared about. From prehistory, before the male role in procreation was understood properly, women were the bearers of the secrets of life and death—because they could bring forth life without any properly explained male contribution. They were understood to have an innate knowledge of the mysteries of the gods, to be the initiates of divine wisdom. Then there was a shift toward a more male, Apollonian, rational view of the world, downplaying mystery and the dreamy, lunar, female aspects of religion. The sun god, Apollo, brought clarity and an appreciation of what was knowable rather than inexplicable. Dionysus was the god of ecstatic visions and the rite of the moon.”

“You and Will,” Lucy suggested.

Alex laughed. “In some ways. But Mum hoped that a marriage of clarity with mystery was not incompatible, and that the best understanding of the world would come from it. Possibly she thought that she and my father—in some respects—embodied this.”

Alex said no more, but Lucy understood it all, and she walked over and took his hand. “If I could choose a mother, yours would be my choice,” she said with feeling; and Alex was touched. She looked up at the talon from the clock pointing back at Venus’s watery haven, noticed it was showing a time, by chance, of between three and four o’clock, when it should have been at least an hour earlier.

Alex followed her gaze. “Much more than forty-eight minutes out now.”

Lucy thought about Alex’s mother in the light of this garden. “Did you know that Botticelli painted the Primavera, and the panel of Venus and Mars, to draw down the magic of an exact aspect from the planets, to breathe the harmony of the heavens into the onlooker? Your mother must have known that the individual human being, as microcosm of the universe, was believed to express the whole of creation and the whole of the divine.”