Beyond the wall Mrs. Bagot and Mrs. Finn shared, a row of identical walls stretched off into the distance. All the gardens were attached, like all the houses. A grove of trees, forty diminishing walls away, completed the view to the sky. It was a narrow side street, a dead end, in the suburbs of Dublin. There were shops around the corner, on the main road, but none on the street itself. Schoolteachers, shopkeepers, and minor civil servants lived on the street, and a policeman had recently moved into one of the houses with his family. Because it was a dead end the street was safe for the children to play in, although Mrs. Bagot was not yet willing to let her two daughters outside their front garden, they were so small. Lily was six and Margaret was four. They were in the front garden now, sitting on a rug she had laid down on the patch of grass there. She had looped a piece of chain around the spikes of the gate and the railing so that they could not unlatch the gate and walk out and away.

The end wall of Mrs. Bagot’s garden was raised too far beyond its normal height by the back of the big garage that had been built along there to the length of five houses. Mrs. Bagot hated the garage when it was first put up, because it cut off her view of the open fields, but she had got used to the high end wall now and in any case the fields had been made into tennis courts. It was impossible not to admire the orderly appearance of the courts, and the neat way they were cut out, and the care that was given them to keep them exactly right, but she missed the peace and simplicity of the fields. There was a sense now of being shut in. To her right and left there were the neighbors’ houses, and their gardens. At her end wall there were the garage and the courts, and in front of the house there was the street, with the row of houses opposite. Sometimes in the evening they heard music — dance music from the tennis clubhouse, which everybody called the Pavilion. There was no music at this hour in the afternoon, but she could hear voices from the courts, and the sound of the game.