Every so often, I paused and waited. But there was nothing. Nothing stirred and no birds sang.

IT WAS A SAD place, but I did not feel uneasy or afraid in any way, there seemed to be nothing odd about this abandoned garden. I felt melancholy. It had once been a place of colour and beauty, full of growth and variety – full of people. I looked around me, trying to imagine them strolling about, bending over to look more closely at a flower, admiring, enjoying, in pairs or small groups.

Now there was no one and nature was taking everything back to itself. In a few more years would there be anything left to say there had been a garden here at all?

The silence was extraordinary, the same sort of silence I had experienced in the grounds of the monastery. But here there were no gentle cowbells reassuring me from the near distance. I wondered which way to go. I had come because I had had no choice. But what next?

As if in reply, the small hand crept into mine and held it fast and I felt myself pulled forward through the long grass towards the far hedge.

THE SOFT SWISHING sound my boots made as I walked broke the oppressive stillness. Once I thought I heard something else, just behind me, and swung round. There was nothing. Perhaps a rabbit or a stray cat was following — I was going to say ‘us’, for that was unmistakably how I felt now. There were two of us.

I reached the far side and the arch in the high dark yew and stopped just inside it. Looking ahead, I could see that I was about to enter another garden, a sunken garden that was approached down the flight of a dozen steps at my feet, semicircular again and broken here and there, with weeds growing between the cracks. On the far side stood a vast cedar tree. A very overgrown gravel path ran all the way round. It was not a large enclosure and the surrounding yew hedge closed in like high, dark walls. Because of these and the trees on the other side, less light came in here than into the wide open space I had just left, and so the grass in the centre had not grown wild but was still short, something like a lawn, though spoiled by yellowish weed and with bald patches here and there, where the earth or stones showed through, like the skull through an old person’s thinning hair.

I did not want to step down into it. I felt that if I did I would be suffocated between these dark hedges. But the small hand was holding mine tightly and trying with everything in its power to get me to move.

And then, as I looked down, I noticed something else. In the centre was a strange circle, like a fairy ring. I could only just make it out, for it seemed to be marked from nothing in particular — a darker line of grass perhaps, or small stones concealed below the surface. I stared at it and it seemed not to be there.

The grey clouds above me parted for a moment and a dilute and watery sun struggled through for a moment and in that moment the circle appeared quite clearly against a fleeting brightness.

THE SMALL HAND was grasping mine in desperation now. It was as if someone was in danger of falling over the edge of a cliff and clutching at me for dear life, but at the same time it was trying to pull me over with it. If it fell it would make sure that I would fall too. It was exactly the same as it had been on the edge of the precipice in the Vercors, except that that had been real. Here there was no cliff, merely a few steps. I still did not want to go down, but I could no longer resist the strength of the hand.

‘All right,’ I said aloud, my voice sounding strange in that desolate place. ‘All right. I’ll do what you want.’

I went, being careful with my footing on the loose and cracked stones, until I was standing in the sunken garden, on the same level as the half-visible circle. But at that moment the sun went in and a sudden rush of wind blew, shifting the heavy branches of the great tree on the far side before it died away at once, leaving an eerie and total stillness.

‘What are you doing here?’

The sound of the voice was like a shot in the back. I have never felt such a split second of absolute shock and terror.

‘The garden is no longer open to the public.’

I turned.

SHE WAS STANDING at the top of the steps inside the archway, looking down, staring at me out of a face devoid of expression, and yet she gave off an air of hostility to me, of threat. She was old, though I could not guess, as one often can, exactly how old, but her face was a mesh of fine wrinkles and those do not come at sixty. Her hair was very thin and scraped back into some sort of comb and she seemed to be bundled into layers of old clothes, random skirts and cardigans and an ancient bone-coloured mackintosh, like a bag lady who preyed upon the rubbish sacks at the kerbside.

I stammered an apology, said I had not realised anyone would be there, thought the place was derelict c I stumbled over my words because she had startled me and I felt somehow disorientated, which was perhaps because I was standing on a lower level, almost as if I were at her feet.

‘Won’t you come to the house?’

I stared at her.

‘There is nothing here now. The garden has gone. But if you would like to see it as it was I would be glad to show you the pictures.’

‘As it was?’

But she was turning away, a small, wild figure in her bundled clothing, the wisps of ancient grey hair escaping at the back of her neck like skeins of cloud.

‘Come to the house c’ Her voice faded away as she disappeared back into the tangled grass and clumps of weed that was the garden on the other side.

For a moment I did not move. I could not move. I looked down at my feet, to where I had seen the strange circle in the ground, but it was not there now. It had been some optical illusion, then, a trick of the light. In any case, I had no idea what I had thought it represented — perhaps the foundations of an old building, a summer house, a gazebo? I stepped forward and scraped about with my foot. There was nothing. I tried to remember the stories we had learned as children about fairy rings. Then I turned away. Somewhere beyond the arch, she would be waiting for me. ‘Come to the house.’

Half of me was curious, wanting to know who she was and what I would find in a house I had thought was abandoned and semi-derelict. But I was afraid too. I thought I might dive back through the undergrowth until I reached the gate and the drive, the safety of my car, ignore the old woman. Run away.

It was my choice.

I waded my way through the undergrowth beneath the gathering sky. It was airless and very still. The silence seemed palpable, like the silence that draws in around one before a storm.

It was only as I reached the path that led out of the gardens between overgrown shrubs and trees towards the gate that I realised I was alone. The old woman had vanished and the small hand was no longer grasping mine.

Sixteen

he key was in my trouser pocket. I had only to open the car doors, throw in the tools and get away from that place, but as I went I glanced quickly back over my shoulder at the house. The door was standing wide open where I was certain that it had previously been shut fast. I hesitated. I wanted to turn and head for the car but I was transfixed by sight of the door, sure that the old woman must have opened it because she was expecting me to enter, was waiting for me now somewhere inside.

‘Are you there?’ she called.

So I had no choice after all. I dropped the secateurs and cutters on the ground and went slowly towards the house, looking up as I did so at the windows whose frames were rotten, at the paint that was faded and peeled almost away, at the windowpanes which were filthy and broken here and there, and in a couple of the rooms actually boarded over. Surely no one could possibly live here. Surely this place was, as I had seen it at first, ruined and deserted.