She reached the crumbling urn, automatically deadheaded some geraniums only half looking at them, half looking down at the sea and the ragged line of rocks which ran along the side of the Cap winding away to her left. She threw the faded blooms vaguely over the wall, a listless gesture which scattered them among the myrtle below. On her right, across the bay, the scabby heights of Mont Boron and the old Fort on top, at this time of day soft with blue shadow. That’s the trouble with the other side of the bay, no sun in the late afternoon: it was one of the very first things which Archie’s father had fussed about from the beginning, when he had first seen the site in the Twenties. Where did the sun rise, where did it set? No point, he had said, in building a house in the South of France which didn’t receive the sun at every moment of the day. A senseless thing to do. Since the whole ten acres was, at that time, just one large pine-wood set among great rocks it was difficult to tell immediately, but with maps and compass and carefully planned visits at all times of the day from dawn to dusk over a period of weeks, he had determined that though they would not get the first morning sun, because of the bulk of the Cap behind them, they would have it from about 10 a.m. right through until the last moments of the day.

And I the child-bride. I really didn’t give a damn where the sun rose or where it set just as long as it shone and I was in it. I left all the fussing to the others. Fussing is fatiguing. Archie and his father liked fussing: a family trait. So I left it to them. Always have. Did. I’m not a fusser. Not even now.

She turned slowly, looking back the way she had come, wide shaded lawns running up towards the house through a tunnel of tall pines; the few which had remained after the weeks of wrenching, hauling and carting which had gone on for many months in order to secure a level site for the house and its gardens.

Dottie Wrotham said it was like a tiny Blenheim when she saw it first, which was as absurd a remark as Benjie Westlake’s when he said that it reminded him of Alcatraz; to which, as far as she knew, he had never been.