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brasses; the high, narrow brow with hair receding from the sides, the deep-set eyes, the strongly-marked nose. Beside Neville’s flamboyance, he seemed shadowy, though this was a phenomenon she had noted before, as if earning a living on stage gave actors a larger-than-life-size quality in everyday existence.
    In any case, Neville was, in nursery parlance, getting above himself, greeting each fresh Victorian atrocity with exaggerated ecstasy.
    ‘ Helena, look at that absolutely glorious fireplace!’ It was oxblood and black marble, mottled with varicosed grey veins set in a patchwork of rising suns.
    Helena rebelled. ‘Neville, you can’t like it!’ Then, recollecting the silent man at her side, she bit her lip. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Radley.’
    His amusement seemed genuine. ‘I’m relieved you said it, Mrs Fielding. I’ve been feeling as if somehow I’ve been perpetrating a fraud. This place has always seemed to me uniquely hideous.’
    Neville gave his Bradman guffaw. ‘Hideous? But of course it is! That’s why it’s magnificent. Can’t stand all these sickly, chocolate-box places. Just look at the village — no tastefully-restored cottages, no Designers Guild fabrics at the windows and antique, frightfully-understated door furniture. No middle-class architectural watchdog society. Practically no middle-class at all, come to that, thank god. There’s nothing twee about Radnesfield. Give me reality every time.’
    ‘ Why,’ asked Helena bleakly, ‘is ugliness considered more “real” than beauty?’
    It was a rhetorical question, but Radley looked at her with interest. ‘People believe that, though, don’t you find? Loving beauty is seen as retreating from life and refusing to face up to things.’
    ‘Exactly.’ Neville, only half-listening as he explored a cupboard, gleaned the impression that his wife’s argument had been refuted. ‘The man who built this house certainly wasn’t interested in namby-pamby considerations like that.’
    ‘ I think the pathetic truth is that when my grandfather virtually bankrupted us to build this, he considered it the last word in elegance. Every tasteless embellishment was another step away from the harsh realities of his life.’
    ‘ But how sad!’ Helena exclaimed. ‘Don’t you feel a responsibility to love it, in that case?’
    Where another might have laughed at her, he smiled, and considered his reply, like a man unaccustomed to discussing his feelings.
    ‘ I was brought up to feel great responsibility towards the place itself, which goes back to the mists of time. There must have been a dozen houses on this site, and probably as many families — though we do have a conceit that Radley and Radnesfield both come from Raed , the Anglo-Saxon word for a council.’
    ‘ So you’ve been squires here for centuries?’ Neville put the question eagerly, twirling imaginary moustachios. ‘Droit de seigneur, and all that?’
    While Helena groaned inwardly, the other man looked uncomfortable.
    ‘ It’s not something I’ve ever considered, but they’re not at all feudally-minded here. The Radleys have never been socially much above their fellows. We’ve got the Home Farm, of course, but it’s been directly farmed, or managed as it is now, not put out to tenancy. And even before grandfather’s attack of folie de grandeur , we were gentleman farmers, but only just, with the emphasis on the second part of the description.’
    Neville, losing interest as the part of rural squire was denied him, wandered off rudely. Politeness dictated that Helena should linger; anyway, she was beginning to be intrigued by this quiet-spoken man. Where someone more sophisticated might have studied her covertly, he watched her when she spoke with meticulous attention, as if he might be planning to draw her face from memory after she left.
    ‘ Would it be very impertinent to ask if you mind selling?’
    ‘ Mind?’ He looked quizzically round the room. ‘This? I’d move to