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After a pause she asked: ‘And what were your forefathers, lords or stablehands?’
    ‘This forefather was a fore-uncle. I— we’ ... he looked at her cruelly, remindingly . . . ‘inherited from him. He was a ’
    ‘A banana baron?’ Paddy broke in before he could finish. She had heard of the banana barons of the north coast. She added with deliberate impertinence: ‘Do I bow?’
    He let that pass. He helped her out of the car, then led the way up the steep, imposing flight of curved stairs to a wide patio. On every rise there was a tub of oleander. There was an immense front door ... portal, Paddy found herself thinking of it... and it was flung open to display a long, red-carpeted hall.
    ‘Not put down for you,’ Magnus David assured her, ‘so please don’t feel embarrassed. No, it’s been in use for years. As long, possibly, as the house, which is so old by colonial standards, and so significant of its period, that there’s been an approach from the National Trust.’
    ‘I wasn’t feeling embarrassed,’ Paddy replied, ‘I was feeling a little dubious about such a beautiful carpet and four wards.’
    ‘Oh, they don’t live this side.’
    ‘Yet I do?’ Paddy turned to him in righteous protest.
    He smiled almost pityingly back at her. ‘The last thing I would want to do ... with you ... is flaunt convention. Oh, no, I’m just being polite and having you here first.’
    ‘To show me around?’
    ‘And give you a general idea of the place, of the kind of job it is.’
    ‘Oh, I know that. I’m trained, Mr David.’
    ‘But not experienced, I hear. I’ve no doubt that lacking an aircraft to practice on a man could still be taught to fly on paper, but I can tell you I wouldn’t be a passenger when he did reach the controls.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘Meaning how will you manage four actually in your hands instead of at the end of a pen?’
    ‘Well, you won’t be one of my “passengers”, will you?’ she answered smartly. ‘I anticipate little trouble. Unlike you, Mr David, they will be the needing ones, the unfortunate, the unbelonging ones—something you never were.’
    ‘You were yourself?’
    ‘No, but I’ve been trained ’
    ‘Trained! ’ The laugh was more a sneer. ‘All the same, you’re quite wrong. I ... and my brother ... were orphans.’
    ‘But privileged ones.’
    ‘Can an orphan be privileged?’ he came back.
    He let a moment go by, then said: ‘My father died when I was sixteen. It was a big blow. We were very close. But the blow was minimized with the amazing news of my mother’s pregnancy. She had been married at a very young age, had had me, then that was that.’ He shrugged and extended his hands. They were big, working hands, Paddy noted, not delicate like Jerry’s had been. Yet there was something else about them ... a kind of gentleness for all their firmness, as though he sometimes dealt with gentle situations.—But gentleness in this man ?
    ‘Jeremy was a complete surprise,’ he was saying, ‘and a lovely surprise ... at least it would have been if she had lived.’
    ‘Your mother died, too?’
    ‘One year after my father and following Jeremy’s birth. I hated Jeremy for a while for that. Then I came to my senses and I—well, I loved him instead. Loved him much more, I think.’
    It was all making sense now. This man had gone from one extreme to the other, from resentment to devotion. Paddy could see how he had disliked her so much .. . and yet, she thought, if he had loved Jerry, really loved him, shouldn’t he have been pleased that for a while, anyway, his brother had been glad? ‘Maryrose: Remember September? Magnus.’ Shouldn’t he have smiled, not scowled over that?
    ‘My aunt Mirabel brought Jeremy up while I finished my education,’ Magnus David went on.
    ‘Jerry grew up here?’
    ‘I did, too, once away from school. Aunt and Uncle had no children and it was a well-known fact that the property would be ours one day.’ There was the