Cliff called out, “Sorry! I was helping this lady-,” as the woman said, “I’ve got myself completely lost,” with a laugh. She went on, “I’m awfully sorry. He offered…” She gestured with the map she was holding, as if to explain what was patently obvious: She’d somehow wandered from the public gardens to the administrative building, which Gordon was reroofing. “I’ve never actually seen someone thatch a roof before,” she added, perhaps in an effort to be friendly.

Gordon, however, wasn’t feeling friendly. He was feeling sharp, all edges and most of them needing to be smoothed. He had no time for tourists.

“She’s trying to get to Monet’s Pond,” Cliff called out.

“And I’m trying to get a bloody ridge put onto this roof,” was Gordon’s reply, although he made it in an undertone. He gestured northwest. “There’s a path up by the fountain. The nymphs and fauns fountain. You’re meant to turn left there. You turned right.”

“Did I?” the woman called back. “Well…that’s typical, I s’pose.” She stood there for a moment, as if anticipating further conversation. She was wearing dark glasses and it came to Gordon that the entire effect of her was as if she was a celebrity, a Marilyn Monroe type because she was shapely like Marilyn Monroe, not like the pin-thin girls one generally saw. Indeed, he actually thought at first that she might be a celebrity. She rather dressed like one, and her expectation that a man would be willing to stop what he was doing and eagerly converse with her suggested it as well. He replied briefly to the woman with, “You should find your way easy enough now.”

“Were that only the truth,” she said. She added, rather ridiculously, he thought, “There won’t be any…well, any horses up there, will there?”