“You’ll have plenty to learn though,” Aymer had remarked drily when he made the announcement. Christopher refrained from asking for an explanation with difficulty.
Towards the middle of October Nevil Aston, just in the midst of a period of blissful laziness, sauntered down the long walks of the south garden in Renata’s wake, occasionally stopping to pick up one or other of 47 the two fat babies who struggled along after their mother, interrupting more or less effectually the business on which she was engaged. A pathetic-eyed yard or so of brown dachshund and a tortoise-shell kitten completed the party. Renata Aston was small and dark, gentle and deliberate of movement, and possessing an elf-like trick of shrinking her entrancing personality into comparative invisibility that bereft one of further vision. She moved from border to border choosing her flowers with care, and looking even smaller than she was in the proximity of her lanky husband, and the plump little babies toddling after.
Presently she came to a stop. All her satellites stopped too. She regarded her trophies critically.
“This is very good for the end of October, you know.” She remarked to all the assembled court. “I only want some violets now. Nevil, I wish you’d stop Charlotte picking the heads off the fuchsias: there are no more to come out.”
Nevil hoisted his small daughter on his shoulder as the safest way to avoid an altercation and humbly asked if he must pick violets, “they grow so low down.”
“You grow so far up,” she retorted scornfully. “Max can help me. You can watch with Charlotte. You are very good at watching people work.”
“It is not a common virtue,” pleaded Nevil, “watchers generally tell the workers how to do it. I never do. Why don’t you tell a gardener to pick them, Renata?”
“A gardener! For Aymer?”
“All this trouble for Aymer?”
“It is a pleasure.”