Some houses die a violent death in war, and some a slow death. Batshanger had died a slow death, dying of maltreatment like a labour-slave.

He seemed to have been standing there for a lifetime, feeling the sun on his back, hearing the distant sighing explosions of the waves. But because one is never satisfied with a sorrow, he thought he would walk round and examine Batshanger from the garden side.

In 1940 there had been, he remembered, a grumpy gardener, so grumpy that he had not deigned to be pleased when Roger promised to arrange that the kitchen garden should be made out of bounds for the men. And some sort of cultivation must have been kept up, for the fruit and vegetable plots were still in a discouraged sort of order. Roger stood thinking of the grumpy gardener and rubbing a sprig of southernwood between his fingers when a woman’s voice floated into the garden, calling, ‘Ethel!’; and immediately Miss Parminter rose up from among the gooseberry bushes.249

She gave him a little nod, and said, ‘Stay where you are. I’ll be back in a moment.’ Then she went up the path between the apple-cordons. Nothing would have been simpler than to go away, and there was nothing he more impetuously wished to do. But he was in a false position, a trespasser, so there was nothing for it but to remain. Presently Miss Parminter returned, looking exactly as he now remembered her to have looked seven years earlier—tall and large-boned, with the sun shining on her unadorned face and sandy-grey hair. Standing perfectly still, her hands reposefully folded, she listened while he went through with his apologies and his explanations.

‘I remember you perfectly well,’ she said (along with the Kings of England, the rules governing the dative, the collects for the Sundays after Trinity, no doubt). ‘Your name is Tilney, and you came here on the twentieth of August 1940, about requisitioning.’

He muttered, ‘I feel like a murderer.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Miss Parminter briskly. ‘The place was bound to be requisitioned, and somebody had to come here and say so. That somebody happened to be you.’

‘I can’t see it quite so straightforwardly.’

‘Then you are sinning your mercies. Surely, it is one of the compensations of war that doing one’s duty is made elementary and straightforward.’

He looked towards the house and then towards the neat construction in concrete which had replaced the gazebo.

‘What happened afterwards was no fault of yours. Shut up a lot of young men in an old house, give them far too 250much food badly cooked, train them for war and give them no opportunity to fight … What else can you expect? You don’t look in the least like a murderer. Are you still in the Army?’

‘No!’ he replied, and left it at that.

‘Do you like gooseberries?’ She picked up a half-filled basket, and moved towards the place whence she had arisen at the cry of ‘Ethel!’ ‘You’ll find the best ones on that bush. Personally, I wouldn’t give a thank-you for a gooseberry that I didn’t eat off the bush. They lose their flavour from the moment they are gathered. So do potatoes from the moment they are dug. But people are either too rich or too poor to have palates.’ She seated herself on the ground and began to pick.