And so, Laura becomes “Aunt Lolly”, a caretaker for the younger children, accompanying them on seaside holidays, even though she’d rather “go by herself for long walks inland and find strange herbs”. She is prone to seasonal fugue, a “recurrent autumnal fever”, and daydreams of dark woods. Days become years, years become decades; the spinster bides her time. One day, shopping for chrysanthemums on Moscow Road, Lolly sniffs a bouquet of beech sprays. “They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination.” She enquires after their origin. “From near Chenies, ma’am, in Buckinghamshire.” That evening, at dinner, she announces a change of course to her extended family, whose mouths gape in bafflement: “Great Mop is a village in the Chilterns, and I am going to live there, and perhaps keep a donkey.” (Readers bedeviled by spoilers would be wise to leave off here.)
