Five Roundabouts to Heaven Read Free

poppies and cornflowers.
    The sun was at distant tree-top level when I pulled the car in to the side of the road, a few yards from the end of the poplar drive, and switched off the engine.
    The evening was silent except for the creak of a cart on some distant farm and the faraway barking of a dog. The sky was cloudless. I climbed out of the car, and closed the door, and looked up and down the road. There was nobody in sight, and as I made my way towards the end of the avenue leading to the château, the sound of my shoes upon the hard road seemed uncannily loud.
    For a second I experienced one of those curious sensations in the course of which you wonder whether you are really alive, and then the feeling was past. I walked slowly, now that the fulfilment of my ambition was at hand, wishing to savour every minute, every second.
    It was at first my plan to walk down the avenue, but at the last moment I decided against it. The family no longer lived there, and I had heard from one of the brothers that it was now the home of two families of American Air Force officers who were stationed in Orléans. They had set up a kind of communal cocktail bar in the entrance hall. If they were now sitting drinking on the terrace, they would be in a position to watch me walking down the long avenue and to speculate upon what I wanted.
    I had no doubt that I would be hospitably received if I explained the nature of my visit, even though I was a stranger, but I did not wish to spend my precious time talking to other people, be they American, English, or French. My rendezvous was with the happy ghosts of the early 1930s, not with the worried flesh and blood of postwar years.
    I turned aside, therefore, into the woods which pressed close upon the poplar-lined drive, following a path which I knew well of old, which twisted and turned, but which eventually passed by the tennis courts, and by the side of the house, and led to the rising ground on the other side of the château.
    It was a path which Bartels and I had often taken together, in the old days, when we wished to cross the Orléans-Blois highway to try for partridges on the land across the road. We preferred it to the avenue, for there was always the chance of a shot at a rabbit or a pigeon.
    I trod it now, stepping as quietly as the leaves and twigs would permit, for the closer I came to the house the less I wished to be disturbed. Thus, stealthily, dreading equally the querying word or friendly shout, I returned like a poacher to the scene of my happiness.
    I passed the great rabbit burrow, where we had once lost a ferret, and caught a glimpse, as I neared the house, of the cottage where grizzled old Georges Durois, the garde de chasse, used to live with his wife, Marie. Both are long since dead. (How he would grumble when I missed the rabbits which his ferret put out for my inexpert marksmanship!)
    Then, close by the house, to the left of the path, I saw a weather-beaten wooden hut and paused, for I did not recall it, though to judge by its appearance it had been there many years. It stood among some young trees, surrounded by brambles and other bushes, and appeared to serve no useful purpose.
    I left the path to examine it more closely, but it was empty, rotting, a reminder of death and decomposition, and I turned away; but as I did so I caught a glimpse among the saplings of a sagging post with a metal handle, and looking more closely I saw near at hand some rusting wire netting and another post, and knew that I looked upon all that remained of the tennis courts.
    Of all the laughter and youthful energy which this patch of ground had known, nothing now remained; it was just trees and brambles and a hut rotted by the weather.
    The back of my throat ached, and I struck a match and lit my pipe. It was something to do, some physical action which might relieve the tension.
    Behind me, in the wood, a pair of jays began to call harshly to each other; and above me, in a tall oak, I heard the