Such daughters are usually scorned by their mothers. Soon after my reclassification by Martin (the new chauffeur was called Martin), the children’s grandmother broke her severe 33procedure and was rude to me. We were bound on one of her errands of mercy, and Martin, who piqued himself on already knowing his way everywhere, was settling us in the car. ‘High Grange,’ he said confidently. ‘That’s through St Keul, and then left?’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘You turn left at the crossroads, and then—’

Her voice cut through mine. ‘Idiot!’ she exclaimed. ‘Woolgathering as usual! Martin is perfectly right. Drive through St Keul, Martin.’

There is a moment when, still conscious under the anaesthetic, one crosses a frontier between a known and an incalculable world. That is how I felt when the car held on over the crossroads and I saw a landscape typically familiar but in fact strange, unassimilated, and raw; and because St Keul did not immediately start up before us, like some conjurer’s castle, I had the impression that we were endlessly going nowhere, or perhaps were dead. Martin, his ears still scarlet with embarrassment, was driving faster than she approved, but she made no move to check him. She sat upright and silent in an Egyptian gravity, clad in her smooth, dark tweed as though in basalt, her hands laid in rigid composure along her thighs. Only an occasional flick of her fingers, disquieting as the undulation that brings the heather root to life as a snake, escaped her self-control.

She had gratuitously insulted me, I had failed to defend myself, and now I was falling back on the private retaliation of pity—pitying her for being so old, and for the barren stubbornness that was forcing her to flout a superstition of 34so many years’ observance. The watery sunlight lit up some slate roofs clotted about a narrow church with a slated belfry. I saw her hands relax. Very softly, she began to whistle. It was a jiggling little tune of a few notes, the sort of tune one learns in the nursery; and Victor, my younger son, would whistle in just the same manner on the way back from the dentist. Absorbed in the whistling soliloquy, she was driven through St Keul. The infection of her odd merriment gained on me, and I began to feel meaninglessly merry myself.

‘There!’ she exclaimed as we left it behind us. ‘So much for St Keul!’

Recklessly, dancing to the tune of her whistling, I asked, ‘But what was the fever at St Keul? What kind of fever?’

‘Only young children died of it,’ she replied. ‘I don’t give a rap for it now. Yours have outgrown the danger. You really need not fuss about it any longer.’

I did not say that it was she, not I, who had laid the ban on St Keul. I was thinking of a different peril. It seemed to me that the passage of our unmistakable Daimler had roused unfavourable attention in the slighted village, and that on our return we should very probably be stoned. But at High Grange she learned that two sons of a fisherman’s family had been drowned, and after visiting the bereaved household we went home by a different route.