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back. ‘They’ve just got a kid taking the tickets, and no guides or anything. And the rubbish in the museum – you wouldn’t believe it. There’s a sewing machine and a jar of caterpillars and something called a Hoggart.’
    ‘What’s a Hoggart?’ Lord Trembellow had asked.
    ‘I don’t know, my lord. It’s a thing like half a skinned Pekinese rolled into a sort of ball and it’s just labelled “The Clawstone Hoggart”.’
    Lord Trembellow turned to his son. ‘Get me one of those in London, will you? If they’ve got a Hoggart I’ll have one too. No, get me two Hoggarts.’
    ‘Why only two, Daddy?’ asked Olive. ‘Why not three . . . or five . . . ?’
    ‘Good idea, my little sugar plum. Make a note of it, Neville. Five Hoggarts.’
    Spread out on the desk in the study was an aerial photograph of the district. It had been taken from a helicopter and showed the grounds of Clawstone very clearly: the castle, the gardens – and the park surrounded by its high wall. If one looked carefully one could just make out the specks of the cattle.
    Neville and the builder were bending over it while Lord Trembellow told them his plans.
    ‘As soon as I’ve got old Percival out I’ll get it properly surveyed, but this shows enough. The park’s a perfect building site; the drainage is good and so’s the soil – no danger of flooding. There’s room for two hundred houses easily.’
    ‘Why just two hundred houses, Daddy?’ said Olive in her high, prim voice. ‘Why not three hundred? Or even four? People like that wouldn’t mind living close together. Then we’d get twice as much money.’
    ‘Well, maybe.’ He smiled fondly at his daughter. Some people’s children were a disappointment to them, but Olive was exactly the kind of daughter he had wished for.
    ‘We’d have to get round the planning people but I dare say it could be done. And then – in with the bulldozers, cut down the trees, lay concrete everywhere . . . make things tidy.’
    Lord Trembellow loved concrete. Grass and flowers and trees were so messy. Grass needed cutting, flowers could give you hay fever and trees blew down in the wind. But concrete . . . concrete was smooth and trouble-free, concrete gave you a level surface.
    When he thought of the countryside covered in giant cement mixers pouring out streams of the wonderful stuff, Lord Trembellow was a happy man.
    Lady Trembellow was quite different. She longed for a garden and she loved animals – again and again she asked her husband if they couldn’t get a dog. But his answer was always ‘No’, and when she tried to argue he changed the subject.
    ‘It’s time you went to London again and had something done about your nose,’ he would say. Or he would suggest that she had the cartilage in her ears cut so as to make them lie flatter against her head.
    And because she had been brought up to think that a wife must please her husband, Lady Trembellow said no more.

C HAPTER E IGHT
     
    T he children had come away from Cousin Howard feeling very discouraged.
    ‘I suppose we were silly to think he could do anything,’ said Madlyn. ‘He’s led such a sheltered life.’
    They didn’t try to see him again and he didn’t come out of his room. But three days after they had waylaid him in his library, something strange happened. The children didn’t see it – they were in bed and asleep – but Sir George saw it and it surprised him very much.
    Just as the clock struck midnight an old rusty bicycle with upright handlebars rode slowly out of the lumber room and crossed the courtyard. There was nobody on it, and nobody pushing it, but the pedals could be seen to move and the un-oiled wheels gave off an occasional tired squeak.
    Quite by itself, with only the slightest of wobbles, the riderless bicycle made its way towards the gateway, turned into the drive and was gone.
    ‘Well, well,’ said Sir George, moving away from the window. ‘Who would have thought it? It must be years since