Page 123 of The Mistress of Ashmore Castle

‘But he loves the music too. He wants to give her a big concert at the Queen’s Hall.’

‘I know.’

‘A Schumann concerto.’

‘Ha!’ Grandmère laughed mirthlessly. ‘He has never been able to play Schumann. He has not the subtlety. I have told him so for twenty years. What is this that you call it, when an old man gets a young creature to do what he cannot?’

‘Is there a word for it?’ Richard doubted.

‘If there is not, it ought to be invented,’ said Grandmère.

‘What are all these tomes and magazines I see you reading?’ Giles asked. He had passed the door of the Peacock Room on his way downstairs and saw his wife at the table with her head bent in study. So small and neat, with her soft curls and serious little face, she looked not like a mother of two but a good little girl at her schoolroom books.

Outside the autumn rain poured down with the air of never meaning to stop. Occasionally a gust of wind flung drops against the window with a noise like pebbles. Not a day for riding. There was a good fire in the grate, adding a mellow light to the greyness, and the room was cosy – so cosy that the dogs had found their way there. They apologetically beat their tails for him to say that they didn’t really want to go out, but if he insisted . . . An additional attraction for them was the presence of Alice who, in a chair by the fire, had a pad propped on her knees and was sketching Kitty. Tiger had his head resting possessively on her foot.

Kitty looked up, her face lighting for him as it always did. ‘They’re about gardening.’

‘I didn’t know there were so many books about it.’

‘Some are from our library, though they’re very old. And some are borrowed – Mrs Brinklow is very interested in gardens. Mrs Bannister, too. And there’s a magazine called The Garden – they had a lot of back issues at the rectory that they’ve let me borrow.’

Giles raised his eyebrows. ‘How much can there be to say about gardens?’ he said, in surprise. ‘A garden is just there.’

Kitty smiled. ‘But someone has to put it there in the first place.’

Alice looked up. ‘You obviously aren’t aware that there’s a tremendous row going on in the gardening world,’ she said severely, ‘between two schools of thought. There’s the classicists, who think gardens should be formal and geometrical, and the naturalists, who believe they should be flowing and wild.’

‘Hardly any point in having a garden if it’s wild, I should have thought.’

‘Well, not really wild, just looking more as if it sprang up naturally. I understand the effect is even harder to achieve.’

‘An artful artlessness? I can believe it,’ said Giles. ‘And which do you favour, my love?’

‘Well,’ said Kitty, ‘I think it would be reasonable to have a mixture of the two.’

He laughed. ‘Very diplomatic of you.’

Alice spoke up. ‘Reginald Blomfield says gardeners think architects know nothing about gardening and architects think gardeners know nothing about design, and that there’s a lot of truth on both sides.’

‘Who is Reginald Blomfield?’

‘He’s famous,’ Alice said reproachfully. ‘He builds great houses and designs their gardens as well. He’s an architect by training.’

‘So I suppose he favours the classical garden?’

‘Well, you would think so,’ said Alice, ‘but he does say there are some sites where a purely formal garden is out of the question.’

‘I think ours is a case in point,’ Kitty said.

‘Because of the slope?’ Giles hazarded. ‘It’s the reason we’ve never had much in the way of a garden.’

‘The head of the other camp is William Robinson,’ Alice said. ‘Kitty has his book, The Wild Garden. He says a garden is not a house so it shouldn’t have straight lines – the dead lines of the builder, he calls them. It should be all curves, like in nature. Flowing. And flowers all mixed up together.’

‘Like an impressionist painting,’ Kitty offered.

‘It sounds messy. How would you keep it tidy?’

Kitty smiled a little. ‘I think that’s a question you’re not supposed to ask.’