Derek and Monica had shared his view and followed us here. Certainly you had to be well-off to be able to afford the absurd buildings that rose like apparitions on either side of the private road. Manifestations of architectural fantasy appeal to those who know no better. I never said this to Jack. There would have been no point. I was undoubtedly a snob in some matters but I kept silence. Jack had been dismayed by my uncle’s farmhouse. I had (only to give him the benefit of the doubt) taken him there once when we were first married and its charm had escaped him. He was town-bred, the son of a cotton broker, and his aspirations were formed by the views of his father and his father’s contemporaries. ‘I don’t know much about art but I know what I like and I’ve got t’brass to pay for it’ was their attitude. I was never an aesthete, but I did not care for pastiche. The house in which I would end my days stood amongst a medley of wildly assorted historical and geographical styles, and I missed the assurance of roots, of houses built of local stone, of people speaking in the accents of the district. I had been homesick for most of my life. Inevitably I would have little in common with the others who had chosen to live here. I was a fish out of water. When Derek came back from Egypt bringing Monica and the baby I was not enthralled. He was some sort of distant cousin of Jack’s, although much younger, and worked for the same shipping firm. There was a tendency in the North for relations to work in the same firm. They liked each other no more than relations anywhere but they stuck together. I used to think it was a kind of tribal imperative in face of threat from the South. Jack, who, to be fair, was not entirely stupid, said once that they would be company for me, friends from our days in Liverpool, but he didn’t repeat it. Derek was cast in much the same mould as Jack, so he was the wrong sort of Northerner for me. I wondered whether North and South married more easily than Town and Country, yet that was absurd, for I had left the country when I went to the college and I had never been a rustic. Perhaps it was really very simple: I didn’t love my husband, so I didn’t like his house.

I sneezed, startling the dog who was hoping something might drop from the pantry shelf into his waiting mouth. The sneeze jarred me and I said ‘Ouch’.

The dog sat looking at me and I felt foolish for speaking aloud to myself.