It had not been easy to find, for it stood amidst a tangle of lanes, and all the signposts had already been removed as a measure of defence. Finding it, he realized with an agonizing cleavage of mind that it was the house of all houses that he wanted to live in for the rest of his days, and that it was a house he must certainly recommend for requisitioning. Embarrassed by the noise of his boots, the creaking of his belt, the flashes of light darting from his buttons, he inspected it under the guidance of an intimidating Miss Parminter, noting simultaneously that the drawing-room had a coffered ceiling and would sleep a dozen men, that the fig-trees were as fruitful as the patriarchs, and grew 247where the latrines could most conveniently be sited, and hearing between his inquiries and the fatally satisfactory replies, the quiet thunder of the sea. If there had been even the smallest loophole for evading a plain duty, the presence of Miss Parminter would have closed it. Thoughts of trickery could no more be entertained in this presence than azaleas could take root in a limestone soil. She had been the family governess, she informed him, and was now Mrs Gauntlett’s secretary. As for Mrs Gauntlett, who did not appear, he gathered that she was widowed, and that the war had already made her childless.

Now, seven years later, he saw Batshanger again. This time, it was not so hard to find. He drove along a widened road. Under the oak trees groups of Nissen huts brooded, melancholy as yaks, exuding a false sentiment of domesticity. All the seclusion and free wildness through which he had driven before seemed to have gone for shelter behind the iron gates of Batshanger. The gates were locked. Looking through the ironwork he saw, where there had been a winding drive, nothing but tall feathery grasses and pale feverfew; it was not till he looked more attentively that he saw the barbed-wire tangles through which this vegetation had grown up. Remembering that there had been a back-drive, he presently walked round to it. Its gates were off their hinges, and the rutted gravel had recent footmarks on it. He walked up, wondering who came here now—birds-nesting children, perhaps, tramps, or courting couples, with their freehold tenacy of what’s disinhabited. Drifts of nettles had sprung up among the laurels, the moss-hut had fallen to bits, and 248he saw swallows flying in and out of the pillboxes. Then he caught sight of the house. In a quieter, more fatal, way it was as much a ruin as any dwelling he had seen in Europe. It had kept most of its roof, and some of the windows were unbroken. But the walls were cracked, and slabs of their plaster had fallen away. The paint was shrivelled, and the exposed woodwork had rotted. The steps and the balustrading were broken, the vine, its stem hacked through, hung on the porch like a black cobweb, and mounds of rusty tins and mounds of clinkers were heaped in a methodical alternation against the fruit-wall.