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run down, that was all. She plied me with patented tonics. They tasted of blood and phlegm.
    – I’m all right, I would mutter, warding off the brimming spoon. I’m all right.
    And when she persisted I would get up and walk out, slamming the front door behind me, making the whole house flinch.
    I walked and walked. People in the streets passed before me in a blur, like the bars of a cage. When I had exhausted the town I took to the outskirts. I trudged along the Coolmine road, by the rubbish dump, in the sun, my palms wet and my hair hot. There had been a pit-head here in the days when the anthracite was still being worked, the great mine-wheel stood yet, skeletal, motionless and mad. Now the place was a tip for the factories of the town. Lorries from the brick works and the iron foundry would lumber down a rutted track, slewing and whining like crazed ruminants, stop, squat, and drop a pile of rubbish in a fecal rush from their tilted rear ends. Among the dust-hills bands of tinkers scavenged for scrap metal, and old women with sacks slung at their sides grubbed after nuggets of coal, while enormous seagulls settled in flocks, and rose and settled again, furiously crying. Below ground there was a network of tunnels and deep shafts where the mine had been, and now and then suddenly a hole would open in the earth, into which with a sigh a cliff-face of rubble and dust would slowly collapse. It was here that I had my first glimpse of Mr Kasperl. He strolled out of the gateway of the dump one morning with his hands clasped at his back and a cigar in his mouth, a large man with short legs and a big belly. He had an odd, womanly walk, at once ponderous and mincing. He wore a sort of dustcoat that billowed behind him, and black rubber overshoes. The coat, and the galoshes, incongruous on a summer day, were impressive somehow, as if they might have a secret significance, as if they might be insignia denoting some singular, clandestine authority. He had a blunt, cropped head, and little ears, mauve at the tips and delicately whorled, like an exotic variety of fungus. As he passed me by he glanced at me without expression. His eyes were of a washed, impenetrable blue. He went on, in the direction of the town, leaving a rich whiff of cigar smoke behind him on the surprised, sunlit air.
    Sometimes I went out to Ashburn, and walked where I had walked with my mother years before. Even Miss Kitty was gone now. The big house was padlocked, the park had turned into a wilderness. Here and there, under the dilapidations, signs of a vanished world endured. Pheasants waddled about in the long grass. In the midst of wind-shivered foliage a deer would silently materialize – a glossy eye and a glistening tear-track, a stump of tail, a unicorn’s dainty hoof. In a patch of brambles a broken statue leaned at an angle, goggle-eyed and glum, like an inebriated queen. I picked my way through the mute forge, the empty stables, where the air was still hung with the smell of horses. I stood amid the ruins of the cottage where my mother was born. A rapt, intent silence surrounded me, as if everything were watching me, shocked at my intruding in these deserted places. A shell of lupin seeds would pop, or a thrush would whistle piercingly, making me jump. A handful of brick-dust trickling out of a crevice in a crumbling wall seemed a threat hissed at my back.
    One day I heard voices. It was noon. A hot wind was blowing. I was standing in an overgrown orchard. No, wait, I was walking along an avenue of beeches, sycamores, something like that. The trees thrashed in the wind, each leaf madly aquiver. The voices wavered, because of the wind I imagine, and at first I could not tell from which direction they were coming, these curiously quaint, miniature sounds. Beyond the trees there was a thick high hedge. I came to a gap and squeezed through it, and found myself in a dappled glade that sloped down gently to the edge of a sun-drenched strip of meadow. I