She skirted the field and climbed a steep slope. Now she was out on the moors and here at last was the sealed road. She followed it up to where it divided the hills.

She was now high above Halberds, and looking down at it, saw it was shaped like an E without the middle stroke and splendidly proportioned. An eighteenth-century picture of it hung in the library. Remembering this, she was able to replace the desolation that surrounded the house with the terraces, walks, artificial hill, lake and vistas created, so Hilary had told her, by Capability Brown. She could make out her own room in the eastward façade with the hideous wreckage of conservatory beneath it. Smoke plumed up wildly from several of the chimneys and she caught a whiff of burning wood. In the foreground Vincent, a foreshortened pigmy, trundled his barrow. In the background a bulldozer slowly laid out preliminaries for Hilary’s restorations. Troy could see where a hillock, topped by a folly and later destroyed by a bomb, had once risen beyond an elegant little lake. That was what the bulldozer was up to: scooping out a new lake and heaping the spoil into what would become a hillock. And a “Hilary’s Folly” no doubt would ultimately crown the summit.

“And no doubt,” Troy thought, “it will be very, very beautiful but there’s an intrinsic difference between ‘Here it still is’ and ‘This is how it was,’ and all the monstrous accumulation of his super-scrap markets, high antiques and football pools won’t do the trick for him.”

She turned and took fifteen paces into the north wind.