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a stalk of rosemary
and lay back listening to the hypnotic buzzing of the wasps in their nest in
the old pear tree. The garden was the centre of the universe, and within its
walls lay the whole world, Edenesque. What else counted outside the dry stone
walls of Magna?
     
    I stared
at my fellow passengers and wondered if any of them had had as extraordinary an
afternoon as I had. I felt so restless, I had to sir on my hands for fear I
might burst with wanting to talk about everything. Aunt Clare, more than anyone
else I had met, seemed instinctively to understand how living in a house like
Magna was a double-edged sword. When you are just eighteen and desperate for
something to happen to you (and anything at all will do as long as it
involve a boy and some nice clothes) a house like Magna tends to give you a
reputation before you have even opened your mouth. But it isn’t just the age of
the place (most of the house was built by a faithful member of the royal
household called Sir John Wittersnake in 1462) but its size that gets
people’s eyes lit up. Glimpsed from the road, through a gap in the estate walls
or a break in the avenue of whispering lime, Magna sits like a sapphire among
the trees — part birthday cake, part ocean liner, part sculpture, part
skeleton: a magnificent, ostentatious chunk of history, immediately defining
those who have lived within its walls with the same adjectives.
     
    Even at a school like
mine, it was hard to make anyone believe that we were not rich. Alas, by the
time I was eight, anything of any value had gone the way of all things — to
Christies. People who came to stay could not believe that in the 1950s anyone
could live somewhere so giggle-makingly medieval. If you wanted grandeur, there
was the Great Hall, if you wanted ruins, there was the West Wing, if you wanted
ghosts… well, you just needed to live there. The largest room in the entire
house was boarded up, destitute, unused and full of spiders. Before the war,
there was a household of forty. Now there were two — a housekeeper and a
gardener. Yet nothing could dim the extravagance of the idea of Milton
Magna Hall. It was most frustrating.
     
    At Westbury, I jumped off
the train and looked out for Johns who was usually sent to meet me in the
beaten-up Ford, but much to my relief I found Inigo there instead, lounging
against the bonnet of the car smoking a cigarette and looking fed up. Inigo,
being just sixteen, dressed like a Teddy boy whenever he could, which was not
as often as he’d like as Mama had twenty fits when he combed his hair into the
notorious Duck’s Arse (DA we called it). Having just escaped from school for
the weekend, he was still sporting his school uniform, which would have
rendered any other boy desperately square. Not Inigo. Several girls on the
platform saw him and giggled and nudged each other, which he pretended not to
notice, but I knew that he had. He shouldn’t really have been at the wheel as
he hasn’t passed his test, but he’s actually the best driver I know.
    ‘Hurry
up!’ he muttered, leaping back into the car. ‘Grove Family.’
    Inigo
is addicted to the Grove Family, but we don’t have a television so he has
to go and watch it at Mrs Daunton’s house in the village. She talks through the
show and Inigo ignores her. It’s an arrangement that seems to suit both parties
rather well.
     
    We sped
off home, arriving back in the village in no more than seven minutes. My mind
drifted to Christopher and Aunt Clare’s perfectly accurate comment on his
ability to gossip. What on earth had happened between him and Aunt Clare in
Rome? I would be far too shy to ask him straight out. And wasn’t Aunt Clare
still married until last year? I was so deep in thought that I didn’t
even notice that Inigo had stopped the car at the bottom of the drive.
    ‘If you
whizz out here, I can still make the start of the programme,’ said Inigo. I
opened the passenger door.
    ‘How
kind. It’s such a mild