He did not write that he loved her. Sitting in a series of hideous trains crawling home across Europe, Cecily reflected that he had never said it either. She hadn't noticed, so busy had she been doing the loving for both of them. She arrived in battened-down England in August, numb and almost speechless, and went out to Suffolk to her parents' house, where her mother was relishing the prospect of the privations of wartime, had already sold all her childhood books for salvage and had painted a red line round the bath, four inches from the bottom, as a peculiarly irritating kind of Plimsoll line.

Cecily tried to sing, but she couldn't. War was declared in September but it seemed to her that the news came from very far away and had no direct relevance to her. She slept badly and spent a greater part of each night lying awake reliving Vienna. By day she went for punishing walks and talked a good deal about joining up, which she did not do. Then suddenly, out of the blue, she announced she was going to Canada, to Toronto, to teach singing in a large girls' school. She went for six years. Her parents thought she might marry a Canadian, but she married no one. She returned to England in the grisly winter of 1946 and the following June she married Richard Jordan, whom she had met on the train that she had taken from Southampton after leaving her transatlantic ship.

Richard Jordan was an engineer. He had been in Southampton looking at a bombed site as a possible place for a factory to make drills for wells. He prospered. He and Cecily had two sons in five years and bought a manor house in a wooded valley a mile from the sea beyond Corfe in Dorset. Cecily, who found in due course that she could not naturally enjoy the company of any of the three men in her life, discovered some kind of recompense in the manor's garden. She became a gardener of imagination and then distinction. She wrote books on gardens and was invited to lecture all over England in the sixties and, as her fame spread, all over Eastern America in the seventies.

And then, in 1976, her younger son, Martin, brought Alice home. It was a September day of ripe perfection, the gardens at Dummeridge replete in the late warmth, bursting fallen plums lying stickily in the long grasses, fat things humming and buzzing in the borders. Cecily had been out by the eighteenth-century summerhouse she had discovered derelict in Essex and had transported to Dorset, tying up a heavy double white clematis that obligingly bloomed twice a year, when someone behind her said, quite easily, 'You must be Martin's mother.'

She turned. There was a tall girl standing six feet away. She wore jeans and a blue shirt and her abundant brown hair was tied up behind her head with an Indian scarf.

'I'm Alice Meadows,' the girl said. 'Martin wanted to catch up with the cricket but I said I couldn't bear not to come out here. I hope you don't mind.'

'Mind,' Cecily said, 'I should think not.'

She took off her gardening glove and held her hand out to Alice.

'More than welcome, Alice Meadows,' she said.

She had put Alice to sleep in the little south bedroom that she privately thought she would use for herself when Richard was dead. It had a brass bedstead, polished floorboards with rough cream Greek rugs, blue and white toile de Jouy curtains, deep windowsills, and, in a corner, a huge china jardiniere out of which a violently healthy plumbago cascaded in a riot of starry pale blue flowers.

'Do you like it?' Cecily said, unnecessarily.

'In everyway.'

'It's my favourite room. It has a very nice personality.' She glanced at Alice. 'Are you and Martin serious?'

Alice returned her look, entirely unperturbed. The house and the room and this fascinating, strong-looking woman with her drill gardening shirt and trousers, her beautifully coiffed hair and her ropes of pearls, made her feel that there was nothing to fear or to be decided it would all be done for her.

'No,' Alice said. 'We have known each other for two weeks. Martin met my brother, playing squash, and my brother brought him home. We have been to the cinema twice and to the pub a bit. You know. And then he asked me here.'

She ran her hand round the fat brass knob on the bed end.

'Do you think,' she said to Cecily, 'that I was wrong to come if I don't mean to be serious?'

'No. Whatever you end up being, you were right to come.'

They went down into the garden again together and Cecily left Alice under a willow at the edge of the lawn while she went to make tea. Alice lay back in an old cane chair whose arms were unravelling in spiny strands, and looked up at the strong blue sky through the fading blond-green fronds of willow and felt - she hunted about in her mind for a word. Happy? Too thin. Content? Too sluggish. Gorgeous? Too self-regarding. But all were right in their way, and so was replete and sleek and blissful, and so was-

Would she, Alice wondered abruptly across her own thoughts, tell Martin's mother about her family? Would she say that to come to this ancient and lovely house, to drowse in this romantic and sensual garden, was an answer to a prayer, the antidote to her own home where the unlovely walls echoed, day in, day out, with her mother's steady complaining? I am ripe for this, Alice told herself, pushing off her shoes with her toes and stretching her bare feet in the sun. I am an absolute sucker for this paradise, I was a pushover even before Martin's mother opened her mouth. She shut her eyes and let the willow dapple its shadow softly across her eyelids. At home now, at Lynford Road, Reading, her mother would be drinking Indian tea out of an ugly mug given away by a garage, while not listening to Kaleidoscope or the end of Afternoon Theatre on Radio , but instead storing up in her mind all the day's grievances which were, indeed, a lifetime's grievances, against her friendly, amiable philandering husband, Alice's father, who was probably, even now, taking a seminar on the Metaphysical Poets at the university and thinking about sex.

She wouldn't leave him. It was one of her complaints to Alice that she wouldn't because she loved him and look how she was treated, how her loyalty was abused. Alice had come to see that it was closer to tyranny than loyalty, even though her father's carryings-on disgusted her. She felt, as she got older, that even her friends weren't safe from him; they all thought him dishy and flirted with him when they came to collect Alice for the cinema or a disco. Alice's mother wanted her to take sides, to defend her, but Alice wouldn't. She thought they were both wrong, and she knew that the moment she had finished art school, she would leave Reading and the hideous house with its charmless contents and her mother's bitter laments and her father's selfindulgence and she would go, like her brothers had, and not come back.

One of her brothers had gone right away, to Los Angeles, where he was a tremendously successful taxi driver. The other had only gone to London, to live happily in a huge disordered flat with six others off Lavender Hill, and do his Law Society exams. It was he who had brought Martin Jordan home - well, not home exactly because passing through was all he could take - on their way to play squash in some tournament in Oxford, and because Alice had been upstairs painting in an absolute fury after the newest student conquest had telephoned quite openly to ask to speak to Professor Meadows, they had taken her to Oxford too. She wouldn't watch them play squash, but went to the Ashmolean instead and looked at the Caernavon marbles, and came away much soothed. Martin Jordan had come down from London four times in two weeks to take Alice out - the last time he had brought flowers for her mother which nobody had done, Alice thought, in twenty years - and then he had telephoned and said he was coming through Reading, on his way to Dummeridge, and that he would collect her. If she'd like to go.

Alice said Reading wasn't on the way to Dorset from London.

'It is,' Martin said, 'if I'm coming to collect you.'

So he had, and they had driven away from Lynford Road and Alice would not look back to wave at her mother because she knew herself to be the cause of a new complaint for daring to go off to enjoy herself while her mother was forced to stay behind and suffer. And here she now was, as long and supple and warm as a stretched-out cat, lying under a willow in a place like heaven, while someone wonderful brought tea which would be, Alice knew, China, in pretty cups, with slices of lemon to float in it and perhaps almond biscuits.

'There,' Cecily said, 'what a contented looking girl.' She put down the tray. 'I hope you like China tea. And Dorothy, who helps me, has made some shortbread.'

Alice said laughing, 'I said almond biscuits in my mind.'

'And China tea?'

'Oh yes-'

Cecily smiled broadly and sat down in a cane chair.

'Martin is still glued to the box.'

'I don't mind. As long as he doesn't want me to be glued too.'

'He says you paint.'

'Yes.'

'Things you see, or things you imagine?'

'Things I see coloured by things I imagine.'

'Lemon?'

'Oh, please-' She swung herself upright and put her bare feet down on the brisk, warm, late summer grass.

'You don't know,' she said to Cecily with some energy, 'how heavenly this is.'

'I do, you know. Don't forget that I have virtually made it, so I like to take all the credit.'

She held out a shallow eggshelly cup painted with birds of paradise.

'Where I live,' Alice said, taking it reverently, 'everything is as ugly as possible. I think it's my mother's revenge on life for not making her happy.'