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He glanced in the dressing-table mirror. Odd to think it had reflected his face for nearly fifty years. He couldn’t remember how he had looked as a young man, couldn’t go back further than, say, his early forties when he’d looked much as Robert did now. Though he’d never been handsome, as Robert was, and always much heavier.
    Strange that he should be so unlike George, when he felt so much closer to George than to Robert. George was like his mother, the same eyes and that wonderful smile.
    The thought of meeting George for lunch caused him to survey the rest of the house briskly. Hugh’s room, Prue’s room, the big room used by Robert and June… but they were all big rooms in his good, solid house. Downstairs the sitting rooms were still fairly full of furniture, his furniture. He’d offered it to June but she’d said it would be too big. She’d taken all the stuff she and Robert had first set up house with, small, inexpensive things; they’d had only a tiny house. Baggy liked to think how much more comfortable they’d been since coming to live with him.
    Well, that was that. He closed the front door and tested that it was closed. He felt slightly uneasy about leaving the house all on its own but it was fully insured and the police had been notified.
    A pity it looked like rain. June had so hoped to have a fine day for the move.
     
    May, scurrying into the Dower House porch, said, ‘Have we ever come down here when it wasn’t raining?’
    ‘It wasn’t that first day,’ said June.
    ‘The sun wasn’t shining. Still, if we’ve liked the place on dreary days it’s a good test.’ She unlocked the front door and said happily, ‘Almost too warm, isn’t it?’
    The taxi driver followed them in, carrying two suitcases of food. Sarah Strange had undertaken to get in bread and dairy products but May was taking no chances on such things as meat, and had come prepared to feed her family, and June’s, until she could get the hang of local shopping. It was the same taxi driver who had first brought them to the house and he said this was a good omen. May, as she overpaid him, heartily agreed. ‘Though why it should be, I can’t think,’ she remarked to June, as he went.
    They unpacked the food in the kitchen and Long Room (now its official name) and then awaited the removal van. May’s ‘line’ on the Long Room had come off handsomely. She had happened to mention to Sarah that she wanted a long, scrubbed pine table, whereupon Sarah had offered one from a disused kitchen at the Hall. Smuggled in to see this, May had also collected a dozen kitchen chairs, a low dresser to use as a carving table, and four red leather armchairs from an Edwardian smoke-room unsmoked in for a good forty years. (Sarah had shown May this room and others but allowed no glimpse of old Mr Strange.) Thus equipped May had only had to buy curtains (handwoven, beige and white) and some heavy rush matting, and might have found such economy thwarting had she not gone to town on new furniture for all the bedrooms – which, as she pointed out, was necessary as she could not denude the flat.
    All the new furniture had already been delivered so the bedrooms, as well as the Long Room, were in good order. The removal van would mainly be bringing June’s belongings – and, of course, Baggy’s mammoth bedroom suite.
    The van did not arrive until May was cutting sandwiches for lunch. She fed the removal men before breaking the news to them that all the furniture for the cottage would have to be carried there, as there was no road and the van could not be driven across the waterlogged grass of the park. The rain had stopped, but there was every indication that it would shortly start again, so there was a rush to do the job quickly. Luckily Sarah arrived and worked quite as hard as the men, and May and June carried what they could.
    It was gruelling work but it was finished eventually, just as the rain began again. May then went back to the Dower