Calderbury was a pleasant town in those days. I always thought it the right kind of place for civilized living — small enough to be walked through in half an hour, yet of a dignity and importance beyond mere size. Its Cathedral was good fourteenth-century Gothic with later accretions, and the only building of any rival conspicuousness was the massive stone jail, built in the thirties by an architect who took an evidently depressing view of the extent and permanence of Calderbury’s criminality. The town itself, though you had heard of it, was probably one that you missed visiting thirty years ago, if only because the railway had sent it no more than the branch line of a branch line. Yet this was perhaps a lucky chance, for after half a century this line had come to easy terms with the town’s prevalent mood, so that the time-table could conveniently dismiss the inquirer with a sentence: “See trains to Marsland and thence about five times daily.”

Behind the streets rose the Knoll, a wooded hill surmounted by a stone obelisk; the best way to climb it was by the footpath from the steep part of Shawgate, beyond a row of Georgian houses. The little doctor lived in one of these. It was well-built and elegantly proportioned, but rather dark, owing to a cedar tree in the back garden and close-mesh curtains which, for front windows right on the street, were a needed barrier to the inquisitive. Calderbury folk were not more than normally curious, but the doctor’s house stood halfway up the hill and most people climbed slowly, with halts to stare at shop windows, dogs in the gutter, or the butcher’s boy freewheeling dangerously down. Assuredly the interior of Jessica’s drawing-room, if visible, would have added to these attractions. It was very prim and chintzy, with water colors and illuminated mottoes and a model of a church, carved in sandalwood, which a missionary uncle had brought back from Ceylon.

Along the side of the house ran a narrow alley, flanked by rows of white shells, spoils from some unidentifiable seashore. These pointed the way to the doctor’s surgery, which, at some earlier period of its existence, had been a lean-to greenhouse, so that a faintly horticultural atmosphere still clung to its shelving and glass roof, even though the former was crowded with bottles and the latter covered by adjustable paper blinds. It was, if you came to think about it, an exceedingly cramped, unsuitable, and ill-arranged structure, but it had, for David, the incomparable advantage of being a place apart.