He kissed her cheek. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know about that. Fact is that the water at the top, so to speak, was so delicious, I didn’t really need to. Will that do?’

‘Thank you. Prettily put, but I expect that you fear the water at the bottom of a well might be rather …’ she looked up into his clear blue eyes ‘… muddy?’

He laughed, and disengaged himself. ‘You are a dotty one. No. I never cared for mud.’ He wandered up to the fountain as Bruna came on to the terrace and started to clear the tray.

‘Enough?’ she said.

‘Quite enough, Bruna dear, delicious. If there is one glass of wine left I’ll take it up to my room, I’m going to have a little rest.’

‘And for supper? Just the two of you?’ She poured the last of the wine, and offered the glass. ‘Here you are. Lamb with new peas, a salad. If that will do.’

‘It will do admirably.’ She took the glass and followed Bruna into the house. ‘It all looks so pretty and fresh. Flowers. You are good, Bruna.’

Bruna shrugged her shoulders. ‘It is always the same. I don’t alter things, it is routine. There is some mail for you. In your room, and three messages, none are important, they will call back. I wrote the names.’

The drawing-room was cool, lofty. White on white, which had been so fashionable when it was first designed, and still was, she thought. White walls, white chintzes, a great white rug on the honey-coloured parquet floor, polished like an ice rink. Bowls of flowers, photographs in silver frames, her John portrait over the fireplace, the Sickerts, the Magrittes which had seemed so daring, the little Bonnard of lilac in a jug. A catholic collection, someone had said; all of it rather ‘lapsed’, but far better than the family-portraits and the Dutch still-lifes which Archie’s father had hammered to the walls and which she had removed almost as soon as his coffin had been trundled aboard the train for Calais and the family mausoleum outside Marlborough. Archie had fussed, of course, but what the eye can’t see the heart won’t grieve for, and his father’s corpse, rattling along through the English countryside, in which he had not set a foot for many years, was just that, and could no longer raise objections. Could no longer raise. For death, she thought, turning away from the cool white room and crossing the marble-floored hall to the wide stairs, was dauntingly final. As she reached the gallery Archie’s voice came echoing up under the vaulted ceiling.

‘You off then?’

‘A little rest … look at my letters. I suddenly feel quite weary.’

‘You do that. Good idea. I may get Angelo to run me into Beaulieu, I’m short of very large envelopes.’

His voice faded slightly as she walked along to her room at the end of the long corridor. She called back over her shoulder. ‘I’ll see you later, darling’, and opened the polished walnut door into her room.