It was surprisingly creditable (she was sufficiently conscious of the creditability to be surprised) that she could walk about in St Prew with no other emotion than a Londoner’s response to an April evening in country air. She went down to the harbour, where the boats were gently waggling at their moorings. Their shadows plunged into the water that the reflected sunset had strewn with petals of tea-rose pink, and a gull was perched on every mast. She walked on the drying-ground, snuffing up the tar and the brine of the nets. She saw again the bust of Queen Victoria gazing seaward from the bayed front of The Fisherman’s Friend, and it was still painted heliotrope. Fighting resolutely for breath, she climbed the flight of steps that was the short-cut to Prospect Terrace, where a half-circle of cottages, turning their backs to the sea, had concentrated the regard of their front windows, their lace curtains and geraniums, on the public urinal. But now the urinal had been replaced by a telephone kiosk, and the cottages had become self-consciously simple, with windows wide open and mugs of daffodils. From here, past pigsties and orchards, a lane had run, joining the main road just short of the bungalow where she and Ludovick had lived. It had a metalled surface now, and a perspective of trim little holiday cottages. She looked at the rise of moorland beyond and turned away. Why should she go walking on for another look at the bungalow? It was still there, for what it was worth. It was still there, and she wasn’t. Let that be enough!

So the walk round St Prew did not take quite so long as 17Mrs Vincent had intended, and to fill up the gap of time before dinner she ordered a glass of sherry to be brought to her in the lounge. Automatically, she sat down at the same table where she had had tea. L. Dodge, she read. July, 1921. That hot summer—the historically hot summer of 1921. How strange the colours of the parched landscape had been, at once violent and pale, and how strongly everything had smelled: the mown field where they had taken their supper one evening, and everything they ate tasted of warm stewed figs because of the intense, figlike sweetness of the cut clover, cooked all day in the blazing heat; the gorse along the cliffs, smelling as though a mad baker had been taking coconut bread out of the fiery oven’s mouth; the drains in St Prew; and in the bungalow, oil paints and paraffin and fennel and the sea.

L. Dodge. July, 1921.

‘Everyone is struck by that picture,’ the waiter said, calling her attention to the glass of sherry he had set down. ‘It was painted here, in St Prew. Sea Anemones, by Ludovick Dodge. Of course, this is only a copy. The original is in a London gallery, I believe. Bought for the nation.’

‘Yes. I have seen it,’ she said.

‘Have you, now? Well, it was painted down here, in St Prew. He lived here for several years. Put St Prew on the map, you might say. People have been coming to see the place ever since. Of course, it was all a long time ago. Ninteen twenty-one.’