*I'll bring you some more. There's any amount of beef.'

*It's a fine life we lead, isn't it, Catherine?' His laughter cracked out. 'Any amount of beef! Wait till that fool of a brother of yours gets to Canada. He'll be begging for beef in his sleep. Kate will be all right. She's not soft like him. She wasn't brought up between sheets.'

*I think she was, Grandfather. She brought her own when she came.'

*You know what I mean. Get those sandwiches and I'll tell you something.'

The kitchen was empty and clean, with the bleached dishcloths hung up to dry above the stove. Mrs Blazer would be sleeping. Without her afternoon sleep she was a dead thing by dinnertime. I cut the beef myself; the yellow fat and the rosy, marbled flesh. I made a plateful of sandwiches and a big pot of strong tea and took it up to him.

*You forgot the mustard. Beef's no good without mustard.'

*There was no mustard in the ones you ate before. But I'll fetch it if you like.'

*Never mind.'

Outside Grandfather's window there was a laurel tree which had grown up to hide half the window. He would not have it cut back. He seemed to like its dim, leathery leaves feeling at the glass, but to me they weren't like living things at all. I would have chosen something supple and tender to look at every day, like a birch or a beech. I said so.

*Don't be a fool, Catherine, you can't have a beech growing so close to the house.'

*Or wistaria.'

*That wouldn't live out of the sun. What's wrong with my laurel?'

*It's so stiff. The sun doesn't come through it. And it doesn't shake and make shadows when the breeze turns the leaves. That's what I like.'

I'd never talked to him like this before. Perhaps it was because he was lying down, or because I'd never spent so long in one room with him in my life.

He turned sharply on his pillow, raised himself on one elbow and said, *That's what you like, is it?'

There was too much in his voice for the small conversation we were having. *Yes,' I said, surprised. *I like to look up at the sky through the leaves.'

He pushed the sandwiches aside and was silent for a long time while I looked out of the window. I thought he was falling asleep again, but then he said, *She liked to look up at the leaves.'

*Who?'

*Cynthia.' Not *your mother', not *Cincie', not *my daughter'. I'd never heard him call her by any name since she'd gone. I didn't know what to say so I said nothing, and in a while he went on.

*It's hard for a man to rear a child. He hasn't the feeling for it. She wanted soft things. Even when I was holding her she was wanting to crib herself round into something soft that wasn't there. The way a man's body is made, it's like a rack of ribs. It doesn't fit to a child.'

He was quiet again and I thought he'd finished. There was so much I wanted to know but I didn't dare question him. He was talking as freely as if I weren't there and he was alone inside his head.

*I had her from ten days old. Her mother seemed to be better. She sat up in bed and drank a bowl of milk with the baby folded into a shawl at her side. But the next day the rash started on her throat, then lower down and all over her body. She wouldn't let anyone see it until she was too weak to stop them. She put out both hands to push me off, and I let her. She talked all the time for two nights and then she was quiet. She'd forgotten that she had the baby. It didn't cry like a baby a it sounded like the door creaking, to and fro.'

He looked at the laurel leaves. *The smell of her was terrible,' he said. *It hit you as you came over the threshold.'

I thought of the baby: my mother. I knew he had brought her here alone, and no one knew anything about her mother, except that she'd died.

*She was the first to go,' said my grandfather. *I couldn't keep her. But I kept Cynthia though there were women waiting to take her, thinking they knew more than I did. She was my flesh and blood. I gave her goat's milk. You've no idea what it is to sit up all night with a child, dipping your hand in goat's milk so she'll suck it off your fingers. Then I found she liked sweet things and if I let her taste a little honey first she'd swallow the milk. I could hold her in one hand with two fingers behind her neck to steady it. She would never sleep in her cradle. She wanted a body round her, so I had to sleep with her curled inside one arm and I'd wake to find she'd crept up close and her face was crumpled against me. I was afraid I'd crush her in my sleep, but I never did. Later, when she learned to smile, that was the first thing I saw: her face beside me looking like half the world because it was so close, and her smile.'

He stopped talking. I poured the tea and handed it to him. It was as dark as he liked it. He swallowed and said, *If you ever have a child that won't sleep, Catherine, though you won't if you go on the way you're going, take it out under the trees. When she cried I'd hold her in my arms and walk her under the leaves so she could see them spread out against the sky and moving. It always quieted her. She'd put her head back on my arm and open her eyes wide and I could walk her there for an hour or more without another sound from her. It was nothing much when I looked up to see what she saw, but it pleased her. Just the leaves. I suppose the sound of them quieted her too. She liked birches best, and then the horse-chestnuts.'

There was a sound in his voice I'd never heard before.

*Did you ever take us out under the trees when we were babies?' I asked.

*You! No. There was no call for it. You had your mother.'

He drank down the tea, his fingers agitated on the cup. *And once was enough,' he said. *It was enough.'

*Yes, I think he'd like to see you,' I said to Mr Bullivant.

*Good. I'll come.'

We walked on. There were weeds sprawling in the gravel and the grass was overgrown. Everything grew too fast: weeds, damp patches on walls and ceilings, the holes in the roof, the brambles in the woods, the debts that nobody mentioned. None of this would be Rob's now. There was no way of asking if it would be mine, but already I felt that it was. It was mine to work on.

*You must be very much alone,' said Mr Bullivant.

*Yes. Look, let's go this way.' The magnolia's buds were fat. I picked one off and sliced it through with my fingernail, to where the flower crouched, crumpled. I dropped it and pulled off another.

*Don't do that.'

*Look, this one's a bit pink. They're just as they will be.'

The exposed petals turned brown almost at once where they had been torn.

*It's getting old, this magnolia,' I said. *That branch is coming down. It'll go in the next storm.'

*You must miss them. Kate too.'

They were suddenly as close as if they'd been standing on the path in front of us. Kate in her dark-blue work dress and apron, her arms folded, looking at me with the beginning of a laugh in the corner of her mouth, and the same laugh sliding into her eyes. There was Rob, stopped in mid-stride, his gun over his shoulder and his bright brown hair crushed down under his cap. He glanced back over his shoulder and walked on. They were like a great wind tearing at the sides of the house, like the storm four years ago when the windows had bent as if they were sucking in breath. Grandfather had jammed the big drawing-room window shut with a doorstopper and the wind hadn't got in. I forced my mind shut. As if the wind had dropped they hung suddenly still, shimmering a little, then vanished.

*If they were in the house now they wouldn't be any more with me than they are,' I said.

*How do you mean?'

*I wonder sometimes, if it's the people themselves who keep you company, or the idea of them. The idea you have of them.'

*I think that's true.'

*I know it is, for me.'

*So they're still with you.'

*Or still not with me. Perhaps they were not with me all the time, when I thought they were.'

*Because they kept things secret from you? You didn't know?'

*I don't know that there was anything to keep secret.'

*There must have been.'

*People do things suddenly sometimes. Out of nowhere.'

*Am I just an idea in your mind, then, Catherine?'

He was facing me. Although it was so early in the year he was already tanned. The sun had got into him in Italy and it was always half there, ready to be brought out again even here in April. He looked at me carefully as he always did, as if I were as much worth looking at as a painting. A bright spring wind blew clouds across the sun and away again, so their shadows flickered over us. *You've got some colour,' he said.

*I was out all morning. There's so much to do. This place is falling to pieces.'

*Will it be yours? Is that what you want?'

*I don't know,' I said.

*I'm going away.'

*When?'

*Quite soon.'

*To Italy?'

*Yes, but to France first.'

*Are you coming back?'

*I don't know.'

*You can't just leave it. All that building. And the new orchard a your fountain a'

*It isn't going as I wanted it to,' he said slowly. *I don't know why. If I were a painter I'd say I was overpainting a do you know what I mean? Stubbing out what was good in the sketches. But I'm not a painter. It was a wonderful idea but now it feels like moving things around for no reason. Soil and trees and furniture.'

*But it's going to be beautiful.'

*Very likely. But that wasn't the point.'

*I thought it was.'

*Part of it, perhaps. I wanted to explore, to find something that might have existed, to feel along the thread like a spider. Perhaps discover a landscape I could live in.'

*And you can't?'

*No,' he said. *No, I don't think I can. I wanted to.'

*So you're going away.'

*I think so.'

*You'll sell up.'

*No. Not yet. Listen, Catherine. You could come too.'

The wind was loosening my hair and blowing strands across my face. The sharp sunlight scrubbed at my eyes. Down below us the tops of the woods were moving, ready to come to life like great arms that lifted me and held me in. The woods. The place of the hare. He knew nothing about me.

*No,' I said, *I can't leave here. It's my place.'

*You'll never be able to keep it on, just you and your grandfather.'

*I can work. Besides, I can't leave him. Everyone else has gone, and if I left then he would have to leave too. I've had a look at the books while he's been in his room. We shan't be able to pay wages if things don't change soon.'

*He'll stay till the house falls in around him. He made it. It's his. He won't leave it.'

*Nor shall I.'

Our hands lay quite close on warm grey stone. We had drifted across to the terrace wall, looking out at layers of grey and green, stubby with buds and the raw, hurting sense of spring.

*You really are very like your mother,' he said, and touched my hand lightly, as if he were pointing something out.

*She never sent another letter, did she?'

*I could take you to see her.'

*No. Not yet. Have you ever been to Canada?'

*As it happens, yes. I seem to be haunted by your family wherever I go, Catherine.'

*What's it like really?'

*The part I went to was mostly forest. Wild, but not as things are wild here. Anything might happen. If you walk into the trees and turn around with your eyes shut you might lose yourself for ever.'

*It'll be like that here soon. Why were you there?'

*Oh, business. Railways. There's a lot of money to be made in an empty country.'

Twin steel lines glittered like fish as they disappeared into the forest. The train rounded the bend with a long plaintive whistle that there was no one within a hundred miles to hear. Its freight was money.

*I'd like to go there,' I said, *but not yet.'

*Time might run out.'

*Why?'

*Things don't go on for ever, waiting till you want them. And the world's changing fast. All the things we're so sure about can vanish just like that.'

*I'm not sure about anything.'

*Except that you'll stay here.'

*Yes.'