“It would be so much better for us in the long run to buy a place like Lacan,” Sylvia says. “I don’t want to travel with two babies. I’ll never get anything done; I’ll be chasing after one or the other of them all the time. What we really need is a house. Something big and old that we can fix up, a place we can remake to suit ourselves. I want a study just like that sunroom off Bill and Dido’s terrace.”

Ted is watching the road, silent, his eyes on a flock of sheep flowing down the incline ahead and around them, toward the streambed and the oak shade down the hill. He slows the car to a crawl. The sheep skitter and bound in confusion, climbing each other’s matted backs to get out of the way, their nostrils flaring. At the sight of the car in the road, the shepherd leans on his wooden staff and bends over to pick up a rock, which he throws toward the sheep on the downhill side of the lane, showing his dog the direction he wants the flock to move.

“I have to hand it to Dido,” Sylvia continues idly. She bites the bitter skin from an olive, tasting its salt. “She’s so lifelike.”

The shepherd hunkers his way down the slope in his black felt hat, gathering more rocks and hurling them down the embankment past the car. Ted lets the Morris idle, waiting for the last of the sheep to pass. They scatter down the stony hillside, fat and wooly on their matchstick legs, and disappear, revealing a gap in the tree-lined vista where the implacable sprawling ramparts of the Bretenoux castle appear, perched on their distant cliff over the filmy river valley, the sky pouring blue into the hole. The silly clonking of the bellwether echoes down the steeply sloping road long after the flock has moved on.

25. “Gulliver”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Gulliver”

DECEMBER 21, 1962

LONDON