‘It was designed like that,’ said my mother, ‘on purpose.’

‘But why?’ asked Lili.

‘I don’t know why,’ said my mother. ‘It must have been some idea the architect had. Does it matter?’

‘No, it doesn’t matter,’ said Lili. ‘It just seems so peculiar.’

‘It’s no more peculiar than the other houses on the drive,’ argued my mother, and she was right. Ours was glancingly Tudorbethan and called ‘The Oaks’; others had clearly been inspired by visits to Spain and were called ‘Casa-something-or-other’; one or two bore hints of castellation and crenellation and were appropriately named after some of the statelier English homes; while Syl’s house had been conceived in a dour Regency style by a less fertile imagination and its grey dressed stones were covered by a great pelt of ivy. It was the only house on the drive that I could imagine Syl’s mother living in. The haciendas, the castles and the oast-houses would not have suited her at all.

‘I wonder what it’s worth now?’ mused Lili, scandalizing my mother. ‘It’s much too big for you. Why don’t you sell it?’

‘It’s my home,’ said my mother stiffly.

‘Oh silly,’ said Lili. ‘You sound as though your family had lived here since Sir Eggleswyke slew the great eel.’

‘I came here as a bride,’ said my mother, and Lili giggled.

My mother insisted when my father left that she should keep the house, and all its contents, and continue to receive a major part of his income. I felt guilty about sharing in this bounty, for my stepmother and her children could clearly have benefited from some of it.

‘And I couldn’t now adapt,’ said my mother, sounding grand, ‘to a smaller house.’

Nor could she then justify employing a cleaner and the odd-job man who kept all the local gardens more or less under control. Nothing would persuade my mother to lower her standards, for that might ease my father’s lot.

‘Well, the place certainly suits you,’ said Lili—I thought ambiguously, but my mother looked gratified.

‘It would be foolish to sell now,’ said Syl judiciously, and I thought that apart from wanting young girls he wanted to inherit another big house, and I wondered how on earth I could be going to marry someone whom I detested so much.

‘Why did you disappear like that?’ he asked.

I had left the room without speaking and gone into the garden. Now he stood behind me, so that I could feel the warmth of his body, but I was facing the box hedge, so close to it that I couldn’t turn.

‘I won’t marry you,’ I said. My voice was high and it shook and I didn’t convince even myself.

‘Yes, you will,’ said Syl.

He sounded like my mother at that moment and I was surprised, for I had thought him weak. I saw that I was intended to be subject to people like these two, was doomed to marry Syl as surely as I had been born of my mother.