‘May I help you?’

The words were out of his mouth before he could examine them.

‘Thank you. That will be very kind. You’d better sit down to it, and you won’t get so scratched. Not there. You’re on an ants’ nest.’

When he was seated to Miss Parminter’s satisfaction, they had the bush between them. It was large and branchy and very old, the sleek berries dangled from grey-mossed twigs. Miss Parminter’s hands, square-fingered and the colour of brown holland, moved through the bush with amazing rapidity and never got scratched.

‘All these will be jammed by the Women’s Institute,’ she presently remarked. ‘And this year, I rejoice to say, we have plenty of jam pots.’251

‘Is that thanks to the Ministry of Supply?’

‘Good gracious, no! I secured them after old Mrs Cutler died. She had nine dozen stored away under her bed.’

He had a vision of an old Mrs Cutler, narrowed by death, lying in a wide bed with brass knobs while Miss Parminter competently explored beneath it. Meanwhile Miss Parminter was explaining where, in her opinion, the dividing-line between foresight and hoarding should be drawn. Her hand, sweeping unscratched among the branches, came into contact with his. It was a cool, strong hand, and he felt an incomprehensible impulse to cling to it.

‘What became of that rather severe gardener?’

‘Gulliver? He went into the Observer Corps and saw the first rocket. Now he’s hoping to find a Colorado Beetle. Invasions have gone to his head, poor fellow! But he still gardens very well. I think we have finished this bush. It’s really very kind of you to help me.’

She might be dismissing him, at any rate she was affording him an opportunity to go. But they wriggled themselves along to the next bush.

‘It has steadied Gulliver to have us back. We have been living here since the fifth of April, Mrs Gauntlett and I.’

‘Living? I did not think the house was lived in.’

‘Of course you didn’t. I saw that when I noticed you standing there. You looked so pale that I wondered if I should bring you out a cup of tea. But I decided it is always better to be left alone with a shock. So I left you with yours and came to pick gooseberries.’

‘I can’t imagine how you live in it.’252

‘There are four quite habitable rooms. And the War Office has given us twelve shower-baths—though it only troubled to fix seven of them. We manage.’

… The plaster-work falling from the coffered ceiling, the silence of the windless days and the long lament of the wind, the leaves blown in through the broken windows and whispering in corners, the sunlight traversing the empty rooms, the muteness, past reproach, of the done-to-death …

‘And now tell me about yourself, Mr Tilney.’

He realized with the tranquillity of the lost, that he was going to take her at her word. Everything rose up in order, unfussed and unfalsified: the childhood smothered in sweetness and whimsicality (Roger says there is a dear little blue-eyed bogey under the stairs), the careworn pilgrimaging adolescence (Well, Tilney, and what is engaging your attention this term? Cricket, or the Byzantines?), the aficionada who was sick at a bullfight, the disdainful warrior decorated for an outburst of schoolboy exhibitionism, the cultivated snob who had supposed he could live at Batshanger. He could tell all this to Miss Parminter, and not be thought pathetic, or charming, or a perfectly simple case of schizophrenia. He had only to dive into her silence, and he would find that he could swim.