I am very blind as I type this, twisting my head around in the search for sight. It does not escape me that I am twisting away, too, from the subject. In spite of being one who loves family, home, and the detail that comes with settling, what I have done is cut and run when I can extract no answer that does not involve confrontation or change. I am anxious to staunch this reaction, as I hope to curtail the delusion of self-comfort by means of suicide, in order to protect the next generation.

The way that I can see to staunch it is to see, or to try to see, and certainly to name, only what is true about it all, and not to rush from hurt into harm, or from pain into damage, since harm and damage affect those others, whom I live not to hurt or pain.

It is easier by far, I am afraid, to come to these serene-sounding conclusions living alone on an island, where little is required of me save the capacity to earn enough to pay for my keep. I need not see here, nor walk, nor have social contact, all of which are beyond me. I keep clean and live retracted like a claw within a paw.

At least I need not insist on pressing upon the thorn in the paw. At some point I may allow it to work its way out. I must not define myself around it.

Young thrush are everywhere in the garden this evening. They are slighter than their parents, no speckled waistcoat yet. They sing their hearts out in the long grass under the soft-leaved flowering sorbus that line the drive of this much adapted house in which I first found refuge over forty years ago.

It was pale strawberry-ice pink then, with white sills and window frames. Its wings wore, as they still do, mock windows that need painting in, like eyes on a blank face, like those eyes in the front of a boat I mentioned at the start of this memoir. Now the house is pale cream, its sills a pigeon grey. Or is it yellow? It depends on the rain. At its skirt where it meets the gravel of the drive along its two embracing arms and surprised central block, are still ranged hundreds of green glass floats and two cannons. At the back the house rises from a sea of planting, mainly blue flowers, agapanthus, blue poppy, aquilegia, cerinthe, iris. A magnolia and creamy roses clothe its walls.

Downstairs the bigger rooms are shuttered and cool. They are seldom in use till summer is higher, as they used to be when there were two parents and six children and me here.

The dining room and the drawing room smell of wood polish and damp, the flagged hall of stone and coal, the billiard room of leather from the brown eighteenth-century books that sit around the old half-sized table. The cues are in their clipped rack, the stained ivory balls arranged in patterns by the last children who played there. Even if you didn’t know, you would be able to tell that it was little girls rather than small boys. The colours are arranged in patterns along the cushioned table-edge, to look pretty. It’s not set up for a game, nor are the balls all scattered on the green. Girls have been here.

Or someone who has the fiction writer’s habit of making patterns out of anything at all that comes to hand.

The curving corridor-room that leads from the hall to the drawing room has changed least. It has lost the stuffed bison head and a tally of bird-sightings that used to be kept beside the wind-up telephone over the window seat. The wind-up telephone has gone and there is one that our children now think of as old fashioned as we thought the wind-up one with its separate mouthpiece shaped like the chained drinking cup from the wishing well halfway up the old drive, that has chased around its rim, DRINK YOUR FILL THEN WISH YOUR WILL. The window seat is curved, like all the fitted furniture in the embracing wooden room. The window looks out on to a lawn at whose centre rises an enormous member of the lily family that looks like a palm tree.

Under the old lairds, the McNeills, that part of the garden was laid out to look like a Victoria Cross. Things in the shape of other things, that British passion. Now the borders around the lawn are soft in the revived cottage fashion, taking advantage of the pocket of botanical shelter and comparatively hospitable soil that lies around this house. The corridor-room is rayed in its curved ribs of bookshelves with many hundreds of clothbound books set in order by various sometimes contradictory understandings of sequence. History used comfortably to crop up everywhere, while gardening took up twenty or more densely plotted and embedded shelves, the books tucked in as tight as alpines. There were rather few novels, except for Wilkie Collins and C.S. Forester. Lawrence Durrell made a flashy showing in a lower shelf. He seems for now to have made off with the gardening books. They will be coming to an arrangement in one or another bird-wallpapered bedroom in the house. Walter Scott meanwhile has settled in the billiard room.

In the shelves of the corridor-room, the spines of the cloth bindings have succumbed to the light of the Hebrides; bright hues have quietened down so that the shelves now show the muted upstanding ranks of the field of lupins, purple and cream and dim yellow and soft pink bars of opacity ranking the length of one long curve, taller than a man, measured in batons of soft colour all along the tight arrays of shelving opposite the big window.

This evening there is no one in the bigger rooms, and even were Alexander and his family here, the rooms would most likely be empty, though not devoid of living things.

The drawing room has two tall windows that look out at the same lawn as the corridor-room window, a curvaceous triple window in the vaulting Regency idiom out to the front of the house, and a double door out to the long glass-roofed loggia that is full of scented plants and surrendering wicker furniture, and a tired cushioned swing on a rusting white-painted iron frame, with a rotting canvas jalousie. There is a ceramic sink on the loggia, for washing glasses and picnic plates or cleaning flowerpots or garden shears. When you turn the tap on, the water trembles within the pipe that is conducting it long before it condescends to arrive. The pipe softly clanks. The bolts holding it to the side of the house loosen minutely.

Growing up through a window seat in the first tall window as you enter the drawing room is a tall glaucous-leaved tree poppy, romneya, with petals white like a kerchief in a portrait of a lady by Romney himself. The romneya asserts its spindly but persistent life annually through the house’s painted pebbledash skim, through its brick, through its floorboards, and into the habitual place it achieves, determinedly driven by the imperative to reproduce itself, clipped between the shutter and the cushioned window seat, on which piles of green photograph albums, recording equivalent human struggles and bloomings, lie and soften in the damp efflorescent air.

In the cupboard opposite the loggia door, drinks are kept, and an oval tray of the old silver Madeira cups that came out on the Sundays when we listened to long-playing records on the wind-powered record player, also stationery and some outlived toys. In this cupboard one recent spring, a mallard raised her brood among the envelopes and sticky labels. Did she have an accomplice, who let her out to fetch grubs for her ducklings? Did she feed off the spiders and mites and woodlice who would conquer the drawing room in a sleeping beauty’s rest time, if they weren’t shooed away from time to time? Were those ducklings raised on correspondence cards and flat Schweppes mixers?

Any precise answer rests with that duck mother and her children, so the answer will be, as it is to many things, a dry quack and no more.

We cannot always see the whole picture, after all.

It may be as well to keep a door in the mind open to whatever may alight among the paper and strong drink and forgotten toys.