‘Did they bury the dogs in the garden?’ he inquired.

‘Yes. But I wouldn’t call it a garden. It’s just a patch of rough ground, with horse-radish all over it.’

‘Horse-radish is practically ineradicable. I like the horse-radish.’

She had mentioned the horse-radish and the deaths of the dogs on the established principle of mentioning the disagreeables first, in order to get them over and wipe them out with the subsequent agreeables; and also because honesty is best. She had been with Matthew Bateman for twenty years, at first as secretary and housekeeper, then, as time went on and times worsened, as cook and partially laundress and sometimes nurse. Statistically and clinically, she knew him thoroughly, and if she had been less conscientious, she might have known him humanly. But devotion to duty browbeat her intuitions and imprisoned her in a state of cautious astonishment. Intuition now told her that she could not hope to improve on the dogs and the horseradish, but to herself she only said that Mr Bateman had a sense of humour, and that with a sense of humour one can overcome anything—so she could go off with a quiet mind and buy him winter underclothes.

On the day they moved in, seeing him get out of the hired car and walk resolvedly unnoticing towards what would now be his front door, she was thankful that she had bought them thick. The wind of the autumn equinox plied the macrocarpus hedge that sheltered High Hope from its 123total absence of neighbours, and the lean sinewy branches bowed as if in a grotesque homage to the new owner. A plane flew over. The cloud hid it, but the gusty wind carried its noise like an intermittent shouting. As they entered the house, they heard the first spikes of rain hit the windows.

‘It won’t take me a minute to get tea,’ she said. He did not answer. He had walked towards a bookshelf, and stood staring at it. When she came back with the tea-tray, he was standing in the same place, a book in his hand.

In her first visit of inspection she barely glanced at the books, only noticing that they were battered, miscellaneous and not Mr Bateman’s kind of book. Mr Bateman’s kind of book would have to come from the London Library, wrapped in the darkest and toughest brown paper. How nice it would be if Mr Bateman, nourished by the London Library, should spend the winter comfortably making extracts about astrologers, complying with Mr Crocker the publisher’s wish for a companion volume to the book about almanack-makers which had sold so well during the war. Mr Bateman had called it a potboiler; but as far as she could see, it had cost him quite as much pains and needed retyping quite as often as the books that were all out of his head. And it had sold much better. Meanwhile Mr Bateman, book in hand, had sat down to let his tea get cold; and only his surroundings, and the social category of the tea-cup, and the nature of the book divorced him from the process of letting his tea get cold at Kenton Mill-House.