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himself together as if he were going to leap on them. It was his voice that leaped. “I loathe you!”
    They walked away, careful not to hurry, trying not to stumble over the brambles. A voice from Ullapool cried “Tea” on a falling third. They ran. A door closed.
    The boy stared down into the lost paradise, the succouring shelter from which he was driven out. The bough began to quiver with the vehemence of his dry sobbing. Tomorrow he would buy a slingshot.

Flora
    A FOOTPATH BRANCHED off the track across the heath and vanished like a wild animal among the bushes. One would not have supposed it led to a dwelling – one might not have noticed it at all, if one’s attention had not been arrested by a white plastic rubbish bin. This assertion of civilisation made the surrounding landscape more emphatically waste and solitary. But the footpath, twisting past thorn brakes and skirting boggy hollows, led to a house – the residence of Hugo Tilbury, D.Litt., F.R.S.L., named by him Ortygia. Edward, who knew the way, walked ahead. It seemed a never-ending way; I had plenty of time to muse on the donnish associations of the name and why it carried overtones of retirement, but it was too late to ask. Edward disliked conversation on country walks, alleging that one cultivated voice would scare every bird, beast, and butterfly within hearing.
    He came to a pause under a group of tattered conifers and said, “There it is.” Before us was a neat red brick cottage with a single chimney and a water butt. In front of it was a plot of dug ground, with some cabbages growing unwillingly in the peaty soil, fenced with wire netting against rabbits. The cottage looked unwilling, too – as if, being so up to date and rectangular, it felt demeaned by its situation and wanted neighbours.
    Ortygia’s door was open. Edward knocked on it, and areedy voice said, “Come in.” We entered a room containing a bicycle, some gardening tools, several pairs of gum boots, a pile of neatly folded sacks, two pictures standing face to the wall, a narrow, painted wardrobe with a mirrored door, and a fish kettle. Everything was clean and orderly, as though it had been made ready for an auction. From this strange anteroom we went into a sitting room, where Mr Tilbury rose from a wooden armchair and said, “Ah, Edward!” He was a short, sturdy old man with bushy eyebrows and a trimmed beard. Turning a bright, unseeing glance on me, he took my hand in a firm grip and remarked that Edward had brought me, and that I was Flora – or was I Dora? He hoped the walk had not tired me. I praised the surrounding expanse of heath. “A protective custody,” he said.
    Motioning me to an armless wooden chair, he began to talk to Edward. They talked. I sat. Their talk had the embowering intimacy of two experts, so I felt free to study the room. It was clean and bare as an empty snail shell – Mr Tilbury’s shell. There was a fireplace filled with fir cones. Each of the walls had a door. As two of the doors were above floor level, I supposed they were cupboard doors. A highly polished sham-antique oak table was planted on a central mat, brushed and threadbare. A fairground vase, assertively pink, stood on the windowsill with some heather in it.
    I was sufficiently tired by my walk to feel chilled, and, from feeling chilled, to feel intimidated. To rouse my spirits, I began to nurse rebellious thoughts. Mr Tilbury, so perfectionist in clean, bare surfaces, probably ate his dinner off the floor – if he ever dined. There was no whiff of nourishment in the air, and the chimney pot, as I now recalled, had no smoke coming from it. Perhaps he was an exquisite epicure, and behind those cupboard doors kept caviar, foie gras, artichoke hearts, ranks of potted delicacies from Fortnum & Mason. This was too muchto suppose: I decided that what he kept in his cupboards was skeletons – skeletons on strings; that