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dark-blue shadows under her eyes and a buzzing noise in her head.
    She takes off her apron, rubs her back again and moves dreamily towards the open doorway. Leaning against the doorpost she reaches out a hand towards her daughter, Ada, and gently strokes her hair. Ada shakes her head as if a fly had landed on it – she hates being touched – and resumes her tuneless lullaby to the doll-baby while the true baby, Nell, begins to thump Alice from the inside. Alice rests her unfocused eyes on the marigolds by the back door. And then – and this is the really interesting bit of my great-grandmother’s story – something strange begins to happen to Alice. She’s about to enter her own private wonderland for she suddenly feels herself being pulled towards the marigolds on a straight, fast trajectory; it is automatic and entirely beyond her control and she has no time to think as she is sucked on her giddy journey towards the heart of a flower that looks like the sun. As she accelerates closer and closer to it, every detail of the flower becomes clear – the layers of elongated oval petals, the maroon pincushion of the central stamens, the rough, hairy green of the stems – all speed towards her and then engulf her so that she can actually feel the surprisingly velvet texture of the petals on her skin and smell the acidic perfume of the sap.
    But then just as the whole world begins to fizz and hum alarmingly, the floral nightmare ends. Alice experiences a cool rush of air on her face and when, with an effort, she opens her eyes, she finds herself floating in a forget-me-not blue sky, some thirty feet above the cottage.
    The oddest thing is the silence – she can see Lawrence and Tom shouting at each other from opposite corners of the field, but no noise rises towards her. She can see Ada singing to her doll, but no tune falls from Ada’s lips and, most peculiar of all, she can see herself – still by the cottage door – speaking to Ada, but although her mouth is clearly forming words, no sound issues from it. The birds – swallows and swifts, a skylark, two woodpigeons, a sparrow-hawk – are equally voiceless. The cows below are dumb, as are the sheep sprinkled on the fields. The air is visibly alive with insects of every kind yet their wings remain silent.
    What the world has lost in sound, it has gained in texture and Alice floats through a shimmering, vibrating landscape where the colours that were previ-ously washed out by the sun have been restored with a vivid, almost unnatural depth. The fields below are a plush quilt of emeralds and golds and the hedgerows between them are shooting with dog roses, yarrow, nettles, honeysuckle – the perfume mingling and rising until the heady scent reaches Alice and sends her reeling off in the direction of a river that flows like silver between a dark-green border of trees.
    Alice is enjoying herself, floating like thistledown on the wind, wafted from one place to another – one minute wreathed in the smoke from her own cottage, the next hovering over the home farm and marvelling at the chestnut-bronze plumage of the rooster. Every-where she looks, the world is opening out and un-folding. Alice experiences a huge fullness of the heart. Looking at the corporeal Alice she has abandoned down below, a thought shapes in her mind –
    ‘Why,’ thinks my floating great-grandmother, ‘I have been living the wrong life!’
    With these magic words she accelerates again, away from the ground, upwards into the thin brilliant air towards where it is darkening into indigo.
    Then, suddenly, sound returns to the world. A noise imposes itself on Alice’s consciousness. It’s the steady creak-creak of an old cart’s suspension and the sound of horses’ hooves moving slowly on a dry track. After a few seconds the source of this noise becomes visible and a horse and cart, loaded with mysteriously-shaped objects, moves slowly across the edge of Alice’s visionary landscape. The cart makes