I walked up the steps and hesitated at the open door. I could see nothing inside the house, no light, no movement.

‘Hello?’ My voice echoed down the dark corridor ahead.

There was no reply. No one was here. The wind had blown the door open. Yet the old woman had been in the garden. I had seen her and she had spoken to me. Then I heard a sound, perhaps that of a voice. I took a step inside.

It was several moments before my eyes grew used to the darkness, but then I saw that I was standing in a hall and that a passageway led off to my right. I saw a glimmer of light at the far end. Then the voice again.

The house smelled of rot and mould and must. This could not possibly still be a home. It must not have been inhabited for decades. I put out my hand to touch the wall and then guide myself along the passage, though I was sure that I was being foolish and told myself to go back. I had only just regained my senses and a measure of calm since the awful things that had happened: in Oxford, in the mountains of the Vercors and the garden of the monastery. I was certain that those things were somehow connected with this house, and my first visit here, with the first time I had felt the small hand take hold of mine. Was I mad? I should not have come back and I certainly should not be going any further now.

But I was powerless to stop. I could not go back. I had to know.

Keeping my hand to the wall, which was cold and crumbled to the touch of my fingers here and there, I made my way with great caution down the passage in the direction of what, after a few yards, I thought was the light of candles.

‘Please come in.’

IT TOOK ME a few seconds to orientate myself within one of the weirdest rooms I had ever entered. The wavering tallow light came not from candles after all, but from a couple of ancient paraffin lamps which gave off a strong smell. There was even a little daylight in the room too, filtering in through French windows at the back, but the glass was filthy, the creeper and overhanging greenery outside obscured much of it and it was impossible to tell if the sky was thundery and dark or whether it was simply occluded by the dirt.

It was a large room but whole recesses of it were in shadow and seemed to be full of furniture swathed in sheeting. Otherwise, it was as if I had entered the room in which the boy Pip had encountered Miss Havisham.

In one corner was a couch which seemed to be made up as a bed with a pile of cushions and an ancient quilt thrown over it. There was a wicker chair facing the French windows and a dresser with what must once have been a fine set of candelabra and rows of rather beautiful china, but the silver was tarnished and stained, the china and the dresser surface covered in layers of dust.

She was sitting at a large round table in the centre of the room, on which one of the lamps stood, the old mackintosh hanging on her chair-back but the rest of her still huddled in the mess of ragged old clothes. Her scalp looked yellow in the oily light, which shone through the frail little pile of hair on top of her head.

‘I must apologise,’ she said. ‘There are so few visitors now. People still remember the garden, you know, and occasionally they come here, but not many. It is all a long time ago. Look out there.’

I followed her gaze, beyond the dirty windows to where I could make out a veranda, with swags of wisteria hanging down in uneven curtains, and another wicker chair.

‘I can see the garden better from there. Won’t you sit down?’

I hesitated. She leaned over and swept a pile of all manner of rubbish, including old newspapers, cardboard and bits of cloth, off a chair beside her.

‘I will show you the pictures first,’ she said. ‘Then we can go round the garden.’

I had had no idea that anyone could possibly be living here and now I had found her I could not imagine how she did indeed ‘live’, how she ate and if she ever left the place. She was clearly half mad, an ancient woman living in some realm of the past. I wondered if she belonged here, if she had been a housekeeper, or had just come upon it and broken in, a squatter among the debris and decay.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were watery and pale, like the eyes of most very old people, but there was something about the look in them that unnerved me. Her skin was powdery and paper-thin, her nose a bony hook. It was impossible to guess her age. And yet there was a strange beauty about her, a decaying, desiccated beauty, but it held my gaze for all that. She seemed to belong with those dried and faded flowers people used to press between pages, or with a bowl of old potpourri that exudes a faint, sweet, ghostly scent when it is disturbed. Yet when she spoke again her voice was clear and sharp, with an elegant pronunciation. Nothing about her added up.

‘I think you’ve visited the garden before Mr c’

‘No. I got lost down the lane leading to the house one evening a few months ago. I’d never heard of the garden. And my name is Snow.’

She was looking at me with an odd, quizzical half-smile.

‘Do please sit down. I said I would show you the albums. People sometimes come for that, you know, as well as those who expect the garden still to be open and everything just as it was.’ She looked up at me. ‘But nothing is ever just as it was, is it, Mr Snow?’

‘I don’t think I caught your name.’

‘I presumed you knew.’ She went on looking at me for a second or two, before pulling a large leather-bound album towards her from several on the table. The light in the room was eerie, a strange mixture of the flickering oil lamp and the grey evening seeping in from outside, filtered through the overhanging creeper.

‘You really cannot look at these standing up. But perhaps I can get you something? It is rather too late for tea. I could offer you sherry.’

‘Thank you. No. I really have to leave, I’m afraid. I’m on my way to stay with friends — I still have some miles to drive. I should have left c’

I heard myself babbling on. She sat quite still, her hand on the album, as if waiting patiently for my voice to splutter and die before continuing.

For a second the room was absolutely silent and we two frozen in it, neither of us speaking, neither moving, and as if something odd had happened to time.

I knew that I could not leave. Something was keeping me here, partly but not entirely against my will, and I was calmly sure that if I tried to go I would be detained, either by the old woman’s voice or by the small hand, which for the moment at least was not resting in mine. But if I tried to escape, it would be there, gripping tightly, holding me back.

I pulled out a chair and sat down, a little apart from her, at the dark oak table, whose surface was smeared with layers of dirt and dust.

She glanced at me and I saw it again, the strange beauty shining through age and decay, yellowing teeth and desiccated skin and dry wisps of old hair.

‘This was the house when I first found it. And the garden. Not very good photographs. Little box cameras.’

She shook her head and turned the page.

‘The wilderness,’ she said, looking down. ‘That’s what the children said when we first came here. I remember so well — Margaret rushing round the side of the house and looking at it — the huge trees, weeds taller than she was, rhododendrons c’ She lifted her hand above her head. ‘She stopped there. Look, just there. Michael came racing after her and they stood together and she shouted, “It’s our wilderness!”’

She rested her hand on the photograph and was silent for a moment. I could see the pictures, tanned with age and rather small. But it was all familiar, because it was all the same as today. The wilderness had grown back, the house was as dilapidated as it had been all those years ago. All those years? How many? How old was she?