It was warm in the room when she awoke and for some seconds she was aware of pleasurable anticipation, before the revelations of the day before came flooding in on her. Higgledy-piggledy they came, without rhyme or reason. Unwillingly she marshalled them into order, beginning with the moment when she and Stephen had stepped out of the French windows, apprehensive because Timothy Gedge was in the garden. Stephen had been friends with her then. He had been friends while they talked in the spinney, and while they made the dam on the stream and read their paper-backed books after they’d eaten their sandwiches.She got up, pulling back the bedclothes and releasing the blinds on both windows. The sea was calm. No breeze disturbed the budding magnolias or the tree mallows, or the azaleas for which the garden was noted. Mr Blakey stood among his cropped rose-beds, pondering something. In their favourite morning resting place, warm in the sunshine by the summer-house, the setters reclined with dignity, like sleepy lions.
