"You'd have to say, I think," said Gerald, "that it's the contents that make Hawkeswood. The house itself is something of a Victorian monstrosity."

"Mmm…" In Rachel's conversation a murmured "mmm" or drily drawn-out "I know..." could carry a note of surprising scepticism. Nick loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement; he longed to master it himself. It was so different from the bounding effort of Gerald's conversation that he sometimes wondered if Gerald himself understood her. He said,

"I think I'll like the house as well as the contents."

Rachel looked grateful, but remained vague about the whole thing, and Nick felt slightly snubbed. Perhaps it was impossible to describe a place one had known all one's life. She didn't disparage Nick's interest, but she showed she couldn't quite be expected to be interested herself. It had been her fortune not to describe but to enjoy. She said, "You know of course there's modern art, as well as the Rembrandts," with a brief smile at having retrieved a notable detail.

Hawkeswood had been built in the 1880s for the first Baron Kessler. It stood on an artificially flattened hilltop among the Buckinghamshire beech woods, which had since grown up to hide all but its topmost spirelets from outside view. The approach, after trailing through the long linked villages, entering past a lodge and a cattle grid and climbing the half-mile of drive among grazing deer, was a complex climax for Nick; as the flashing windows of the house came into view he found himself smiling widely while his eyes darted critically, admiringly-he didn't know what-over the steep slate roofs and stone walls the colour of French mustard. He had read the high-minded but humorous entry in Pevsner, which described a seventeenth-century chateau re-imagined in terms of luxurious modernity, with plate-glass windows, under-floor central heating, numerous bathrooms, and running hot water; but it had left him unprepared for the sheer staring presence of the place.