I had thought it was an abandoned pit which Elsa wanted me to see; but, as we walked along the green bridle path into the heart of the Forest, chatting of nothing and aware of everything, she in that attractive black robe hanging prettily straight from the shoulder and chastely outlining high breasts and long legs, she turned aside several times to show me these hidden depressions where the bracken gave way to wild flowers and coarse grass and glimpses of bare rock. At last she settled down in one of these pastoral hollows, a dancing ground for nymphs.

‘I come here when I am tired of that Broom Lodge,’ she said, patting the slope of grass as an invitation to join her.

I was surprised. I had taken her to be as whole-hearted an enthusiast as her uncle. I remarked cautiously that perhaps it was all a bit too solemn.

‘There hasn’t been an Elsa before and there won’t be an Elsa again,’ she exclaimed.

To this petulance I answered boldly that for her very individual loveliness it could be true.

‘You know perfectly well what I meant!’

‘So do you – what I meant.’

‘Am I “maternal”?’ She put the word in inverted commas.

‘I don’t know. If you don’t feel maternal you play it very well.’

She did. There were of course no servants at Broom Lodge. Everything was done by the colonists themselves according to their abilities; for example, those who could cook took turns at it. But somebody had to keep an eye on the housekeeping and general organisation, and that was Elsa’s job.

‘Of course I do. They all trust me, and Simeon has no time for little things. He has done so much. We were very poor to start with.’ She went on to say that I should not misunderstand her. She loved the commune and believed it was the right way to live.

‘But the religion?’ I suggested.

‘Well, why should I spoil it for them? But my body is not an illusion, damn it!’

Again the touch of little girl. I waited for more.

‘And I’m too tall for them.’

Members of the commune were of average height, but she and her uncle – Elsa nearly six foot and he rather more – seemed to tower over them. That effect was due to their air of kindly authority rather than the slight differences of inches.

With a sudden movement she uncoiled and got up. I did so, too, but less gracefully. When we stood facing each other, her grey eyes were on a level with mine. It was impossible to look over them and I did not want to look away from them. As four eyes so ignored the space between them, there might as well be none. I pulled her to me and kissed her. Her response showed that it was what she expected. She may have persuaded herself that standing up she was less committed.

‘They are all … Oh, for them I might come from another world!’ she exclaimed.

‘Sit down and tell me about it.’

‘I shan’t tell you about it. It’s just that I hate it. I feel they think it’s wrong to touch me.’

Myself, I felt it was a sin not to. Her voice and expression implied that ‘they’ didn’t entirely resist temptation but then snatched hands back from the fire so that affairs tended to be exasperating and awkward. She was now sitting close to me and, her head dreamily tilted back, offered her mouth again. She made no effort to stop that severe robe slipping away and then was tremulous but without protest as kisses wandered far and wide until both of us were overwhelmed by that unforgettable demand which still falls short of love but is far more beautiful than crude passion.

‘That was rape,’ she whispered later, with pretended indignation.

Her face was turned away, but one arm was flung out asking to be adored. Of all the erogenous zones a cool, slender arm is to me the most alluring, for it is so lightly joined to all the rest that it seems to be in control of its own movements and has its own personality. I raped that too – in reality now, for I do not think it had experienced such desire before. Its owner was jealous. This time she was surprised at the response of her body, that illusion, and clung to me as if I were life itself.

‘How old do you think I am?’ she asked.

‘In your twenties somewhere.’

To be honest I would have put her in her early thirties and at the very prime of her authority and beauty.

‘I am twenty-two.’

‘And you are really Simeon’s niece?’

‘Of course I am.’

She told me how it had all started when she had left school and had begun a course of hotel management. Both her parents had died young and she lived with her grandmother, a vaguely kind woman occupied with good works and giving little companionship. In that dull home life the visits of Uncle Simeon had been the only bright spots for her. He was always a mysterious and stimulating character earning his living as a laboratory technician and spending his evenings with what he called the Fellowship. Several times he had taken her with him to their meetings in a barren little hall. Their principles had been easy enough to understand but quite unbelievable for a girl bursting to accept with joy whatever the present life was about to offer. He had given her books to read and she had dutifully read them, though rejecting all the arguments after the first chapter. She avoided telling him so outright, since she was grateful for his interest in her.

Broom Lodge had been left to the Fellowship by one of its corresponding members, a retired clergyman who had lived there for years in an atmosphere of heresy and squalor which bothered nobody but himself. His will proposed that it should be used as a country home for the faithful – a thoroughly impractical legacy since none of them could find the money to repair and maintain the place or to restore some value to the neglected land. Simeon, however, had jumped at the opportunity and with fire and faith had persuaded half a dozen of the Fellowship not to sell it but to try their hands at a working commune where all believers would be welcome. Elsa of course must come along. She finished half her course and joined them.

It was still hell, she said, when she arrived there, and if it had not been that she fell in love with the Forest and was flattered to know herself of real service to these industrious innocents – all of whom were double her age or near it – she would have cleared out. Simeon himself had been tireless, she said. The two local skills by which a little money might be made were mining and salmon fishing. Broom Lodge had no rights to mine, but anyone was free to catch salmon in the estuary away from the bank. The expertise of the few remaining professionals with their lave nets, weirs and stopping boats could never be acquired, so Simeon decided to try the unprecedented technique of skin-diving, one of his many pseudo-scientific accomplishments, half mystical, half very real!

‘In the Severn, my God?’ I exclaimed.

‘Oh, he says it’s quite safe once you know the channels and the tides. He often does it still, but at night.’

‘Has he ever caught anything?’

‘Nothing much. But he once speared a dolphin – the one you saw in his laboratory.’

The change in Broom Lodge was a year old. Along with the builders and the tractors came the workshops and recruiting of more of the faithful. Simeon had had a big win on the football pools and devoted the lot to his commune. The new intake of devout colonists had to be impressed by more than height and competence, and that was why Elsa had invented a uniform for herself, halfway between a parlourmaid and a nun. It seemed so absurd to flaunt colour at them when all they wanted – usually – was a mother figure.

We agreed that no one must suspect our affair. Uncle Simeon, she thought, might be sympathetic but would not approve of so swift an attachment to a stranger. As for the colonists, whatever image they had of her – abbess, housekeeper or serene, maternal beauty – would be severely dented.