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must have heard me coming because he looked at me from under his eyebrows, stretched, yawned massively, and ambled over to the front of the pen. I thought he was coming to say hello, but he didn’t, he just lay down again with his nose pressed right against the crack of the door as if he was pointing to it with his whole body. Then he sighed, and it sounded like, “You took your time, didn’t you?”
    They said I could take him for a walk to see if I liked him, but I already knew I’d be taking him home, because he had chosen me, and I wasn’t about to let him down. We were about halfway down the little track when he stopped and looked up at me with these huge, serious eyes, like Granddad. I don’t know what happens to your soul after you die, but if there is such a thing as reincarnation . . . the dates fit, anyway. That’s why I called him Eustace—Granddad’s middle name.
    Lenny bought this place a few months before he died. We were going to live here together. I’d been looking at houses while he was away in the States, making a film, and as soon as I saw Maynard’s Farm, I thought, that’s it . I should think it was quite something in its heyday, but the farmer who owned it was long retired. His wife had died about thirty years before, and he’d sold off most of the land and let the place fall to pieces around him—he’d even pulled up the floorboards in a couple of the upstairs rooms to use as firewood. But it was big—five bedrooms—and had a garden and a stableyard and ten acres of paddock. It was all pretty ramshackle, but like a dream come true—wisteria growing on the front, and the big oak staircase and the ivy on the stone walls in the garden and the beautiful old barn. I fell in love with it straightaway. I knew that Lenny would love it, too. He was still in the States, but I phoned him and as soon as I told him the name of the village—Duck End—he said, “We’ll take it.” It immediately became Duck’s Arse, then D.A. for short. The first weekend we were here was like camping because the place was a complete mess with puddles on the floor and lumps of plaster falling off the walls. The dining room . . . that’s in the front bit, which is Georgian, the rest is Tudor—it’s two houses stuck together, really—had its walls covered in brown hessian with all these little pins sticking out that they’d used to tack it on. When we pulled them out we discovered they were old gramophone needles, hundreds of them, and underneath was a beautiful wall-covering, china blue watermarked silk. It was very old—completely worn away in some places—but Lenny said, “It’s beautiful, let’s keep it,” so we took down all of the hessian and had dinner in there by candlelight. Lenny had a favourite toast he always used: “Champagne for your real friends, real pain for your sham friends.” He was so happy, he didn’t get drunk, for once. The usual pattern was that I’d come home from the club and find him passed out on the sofa.
    That night, I’d made up a bed on the sitting-room floor. There wasn’t any electricity so after dinner we took the big silver candleholder in there and lay on my mattress with all the windows open because it was warm—May, I think. We giggled and talked and made love, and I thought, I really did think, this is the beginning. I thought if we could live down here, away from London, Lenny would be happy and I could help him get better and— Well, I was a romantic. I believed in love. How stupid can you get? Because I had no excuse, not by then. The first time he’d promised to stop drinking was if I moved in with him. I believed it, but after a couple of months we were right back to square one. Then he said it was the flat, so we found a house. That didn’t work, so then he said it was living in London and he’d be fine if he got some peace and quiet. That’s why he wanted this place. . . . But it wasn’t only that. He blamed people as well. He used to keep a