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sweeping a hand brush over the running boards.
    He had round eyes and stuck-out ears, which looked too big for his long face. His thin lips formed a tight, straight line. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth.
    Without asking for permission, Agnes opened the car door, climbed up into the driver’s seat and spread her hands over the steering wheel.
    ‘Thompson, I’m going to drive to Brighton today. Lydia is coming with me. Climb in, Lydia.’
    Lydia looked nervously at Thompson who just stood there, his big hands hanging at his side.
    ‘Well, come on!’ Agnes sounded impatient.
    The man jerked his head, took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth and spat on the floor. ‘Go on. Best do as her ladyship tells you.’
    After dislodging a scrap of tobacco from his lip, he stuck the cigarette back in position, grunted something about interruptions to his work, and then returned to what he was doing.
    Lydia got in beside her new friend.
    Agnes reeled off each part of the car whilst pointing with long, strong fingers.
    ‘Now this is the steering wheel. This is the brake. You have to squeeze the clutch tightly to ease it off. That thing there is a damper …’
    ‘Are you really going to earn a living driving a car?’ Lydia asked, her eyes shining with admiration.
    Agnes eyed her haughtily. ‘This is the twentieth century. I can do whatever I want. I can be whatever I want. I had my first driving lesson when I was only nine years old. Thompson showed me how.’
    ‘He showed you?’ Lydia was now seriously awestruck.
    ‘Yes. I had a go.’
    Thompson looked up at them from the job he was doing on the running board.
    ‘I told you not to tell.’ He sounded displeased.
    ‘Where did you drive?’
    ‘At Heathlands. Sir Avis’s country estate. We don’t just stay there for Christmas. We stay there at other times too. There’s a drive, a piece of road with no other traffic on it except for the odd farm cart. Acres and acres of grass to drive on if I wish, and there are deer and a lake.’
    Lydia had visited the house owned by her mother’s family in the town of Wareham in Dorset, a stout building adjoining the shops they owned, but it was nothing like the house Agnes was describing. The main street was dusty during the summer and slick with rain or ice in the winter. The green hills surrounding Wareham were within walking distance and sometimes they had gone there for a picnic or taken the train to nearby Weymouth.
    ‘I’ve been to Weymouth,’ she exclaimed in an attempt to match Agnes’s experiences. ‘I saw the sea.’
    Agnes was not to be outdone.
    ‘I’ve seen the sea too. Sir Avis also has a house in Brighton though we don’t go there now. Lady Julieta lives there.’
    ‘Who’s she?’
    ‘Sir Avis’s wife. They don’t like each other so they don’t live together.’
    ‘I see.’ Lydia nodded solemnly as though the fact that two married people lived apart was perfectly understandable.
    ‘If you like you can come to Heathlands in the summer too – that’s if you like it at Christmas. I can show you how to drive a motor car; perhaps not for Christmas, but at some other time. Sir Avis often has friends and family to stay – mostly friends. He only invites those members of the family that he’s on speaking terms with. He prefers servants and friends rather than family. Some people call him eccentric because of that. But he’s not. He’s just a humanist. That is how he describes himself. A humanist.’
    Lydia nodded. ‘A humanist,’ she repeated, as though that too was as understandable as not living with a despised spouse.
    ‘I’m hungry,’ Agnes said suddenly. ‘Let’s see if there’s some sliced ham in the kitchen. I’ll make sandwiches. With pickle. Do you like pickle?’
    It seemed rude to say that pickle upset her, so Lydia nodded and said yes, she was quite fond of it, though not too much please.
    The garage had been warm and cosy; outside the air had turned