I was trying to imagine Lamoir seven years old. It was easy, of course, as it always is easy with people one likes. Her curly grey hair would be golden then, and maybe her grey eyes would be more blue than grey, and they would look enormous in a tiny face. And she would be walking, very still, making no noise at all, with two thin brown sticks for legs and two blue pools for eyes, very thoughtful indeed, and all this would be happening in a garden of red and yellow flowers with a long low white house nearby. That was how Hugh first saw Lamoir, in a garden, and nearby a long low white house with a broad flight of steps up to the open doorway and tall, shining windows.
Dazzling white the house seemed to him, Hugh said, but that must have been because there was a very brilliant sun that afternoon. There was no noise, except just summer noises, and although he didn’t remember actually seeing any birds there must have been a lot of birds about, because he heard them. And simply masses of flowers there were in that garden, red and yellow flowers, and over a grey wall somewhere there was hung a thick curtain of flowers that may have been blue roses. And they may very well have been blue roses, Hugh said. And bang in the middle of all those flowers was Lamoir, staring at him as he came into the garden. Hugh was so surprised, he said, that he didn’t know what to say or do.
He hadn’t, you see, intended coming into that garden at all. He hadn’t, a moment before, known anything at all about that garden or whose garden it was or even that there was a garden there at all. That is the funny part about the whole thing, the way it just sprung out at him, garden, Lamoir, blue roses and all, out of the summer afternoon. But there it was, and there Lamoir was, staring at Hugh. Not that she looked a bit surprised, Hugh said, although she was such a kid. She just stuck her finger into her mouth and came towards him.
Hugh’s father’s place, Langton Weaver, lay on the slope of a low hill not far from Hungerford, looking over the plain towards where the old red Elizabethan pile of Littlecott lies embowered in trees. Hugh, that bright afternoon, was kicking his heels about in the lane outside his father’s gates, which was of course against all rules. But Hugh was lonely that afternoon, he never had any brothers or sisters, and he was wondering what he would do next, and he was hoping that someone would come along to do something with—when, bang, there he was in that garden and a little kid advancing on him with a finger stuck in her mouth. It was very odd, Hugh said.
“Hullo!” she said. All eyes, that’s what she was.
“Hullo!” Hugh said. She was only a kid, after all. Hugh was nine.
“You’re a boy,” she said.
“Of course I’m a boy,” Hugh said, and he was going to add “just as you’re a girl,” but a fellow couldn’t stand there arguing all day with a slip of a thing like that. Then he suddenly remembered he didn’t know where he was.
“I say,” he said, “I don’t know how I got here. What’s this place?”
She twisted her finger out of her mouth and stared at the wet thing. Hugh remembered that it shone in the sun. And her hair shone in the sun, too. Hugh said her hair shone even when they were in the shade. But of course he didn’t attach any importance to that kind of thing.