So I walked down the shallow steps of the terrace and into the gardens of the Villa Monte Rosa. After crossing a small oval lawn with a lily pond at its centre, I took a serpentine path that led down through shrubberies. Great tropical fronds stooped over me. The gravel path was riven with weeds, and more than once I tripped over a thin green limb of vegetation that had clawed its way across it in search of nourishment. I imagined myself to be an archaeologist uncovering the remains of a lost civilization.
It is often a great shock to find one's fantasy life confirmed by reality. I came down into a dell to find a structure consisting of a statue in a niche above a stone basin in the shape of a shell. It looked like the fountain at the gate of some ancient city. The statue was of a naked woman, lichened and weather-worn, holding a jar, tilted downwards, from which, water had once fallen into the basin which had been dry for a long while. The figure, I now think, was probably modelled on Ingres' La Source, which made it mid- to late-nineteenth century in origin. On its pedestal was carved the word DANAIDE. This meant something to me even then. I knew from the simple gobbets of Greek prose that I was beginning to study that the Danaids, because they murdered their husbands, had been condemned to fill leaky vessels for all eternity in Hades, the Land of the Dead.
I stared for a long time at this ancient conceit, turning its significance over in my mind, but coming to no conclusion, until eventually I decided to follow the path around it and travel further down the slope. After a few minutes I came to another clearing, where I received my second and more prodigious shock.
Within a little amphitheatre of box and yew, both rampant and un-pruned, was a hard floor of grassless grit in which was built out of smooth, dressed stones a low circular wall that I took to be the mouth of a well. On the wall sat a pale, fair-haired boy of about my age. He wore grey flannel shorts and a white flannel shirt, of the kind I was made to wear out of doors in the summer at my school. We stared at each other for a long while. To me he was horribly unexpected.
One reason why I spent so long looking at him was that I could not quite make out what I was seeing. He was a perfectly proportioned flesh-and-blood boy in all respects but one. He seemed smaller than he should be, not by much, but by enough to make him seem deformed in some subtle way. As he sat on the wall, his feet dangled a foot or so above the ground when they should have touched it, but he was not dwarfish. His legs were not bowed or stunted; his head was not too big for his body. Apart from the extreme pallor of his skin and hair, he was, I suppose, rather a handsome boy. I could have gone closer to him to confirm my suspicions about his size, but I did not want to.
"Hello," I said, then recollecting that the boy, his appearance notwithstanding, was almost certainly Portuguese, I said: "Bom Dir."
"You're not Portugoose, are you?" said the boy. "You're English."
"Yes," I said. He had a voice like mine. He belonged to the middle classes. He asked me my name. I told him and he said his name was Hal.
"Hal what?" I asked.
"Just Hal."
"What are you doing here?"
"What are you doing here?"
I told him and then I said it was his turn to tell.
"I come here sometimes," he said.
"Do Mr and Mrs de Walter know?"
"Of course, they do, you ass," said Hal. "Anyway, what's it got to do with you? Mind your own beeswax!" Mind your own beeswax. It was a piece of slang I had heard once or twice at my school, but even there it had seemed dated, culled perhaps from a reading of Billy Bunter or Stalky & Co.
Hal asked me about my school, in particular about games. I boasted as much as I could about my distinctly average abilities and my exploits in the third eleven at cricket. He kept his eyes fixed on me, but I wondered how much he was taking in.
He said: "When I grow up I'm going to be a cricketer, like Wally Hammond."
"Who's Wally Hammond?" I asked.
"Crikey, don't you know who Wally Hammond is? You are of blockheads the most crassly ignoramus."
"Is he a cricketer?"
"Is he a cricketer? Of course he's a cricketer, you utterly frabjous oaf! Don't you know anything?"
As I was one of those boys who had learned by heart the names of the entire England cricket team, together with their bowling and batting averages, I took great offence at this. Later in our conversation I slipped in a reference to Geoffrey Boycott.
Hal said: "Boycott what?" I did not reply, but I felt vindicated.
It was not long after this that I began to feel that my company was no longer a pleasure to Hal. Something about his eyes was not quite right. They seemed to be darker than when I had first seen them — not only the irises and pupils, but the whites had turned a greyish colour. Perhaps it was a trick of the fading light that may also account for the fact that he was beginning to look even smaller.
Suddenly he said: "Who are you anyway?"
"Who are you for that matter, and what are you doing here?" I said, taking a step towards him.
"Go away!" he shouted. "Private Property!"
The sound of his cry rang in my ears. I turned from him and ran up the path to the top of the slope. When I had reached it, I turned again and looked back. Hal was still sitting there on the lip of the old well, his heels banging against the stones. He was facing in my direction but I could not tell whether he was looking at me or not. The light, which was not quite right in that strange garden, had turned his eye sockets into empty black holes. I turned again and ran. This time I did not look back.
For some time I found that I was lost. In that dense foliage I could not tell which way was the sea and which way the Villa Monte Rosa. I remember some agonizing minutes during which I could not stop myself from going round in a circle. I kept coming back to the same small stone statue of a cat crouching on a plinth. It was perhaps the tomb of a pet, but there was no inscription. I began to panic. The cat looked as if it were about to spring. I decided that the only way of escape was to ignore the paths and move resolutely in one direction.
Surprisingly enough this worked, and in a matter of minutes I found I was walking across the little lawn towards the terrace where my parents were. I was about to set foot on the steps to the terrace when I saw Mrs de Walter at the top of them, scrutinizing me intently. She came down to meet me.
"So you've found your way back," she said. "We were beginning to wonder if you were lost.
I shook my head. She laid her thin hand lightly on my shoulder.
"Did you meet anyone on your travels?" she asked. It was a curious way of expressing herself and I was wary. "You did, didn't you?"
I nodded. It seemed the course of least resistance.
"A little boy?"
I nodded again.
"An English little boy?"
I gave her the same response. The pressure of her hand on my shoulder became so great that I imagined I could feel the bones in her fingers through my thin shirt, or was it the cords of her strange crocheted mittens? She said: "We won't mention the little English boy to anyone else, shall we? Not even our parents. This shall be our personal secret, shan't it?"
I was quite happy to agree with this suggestion, because I had a feeling that my parents would not believe me if I did tell them about Hal.
"Come!" said Mrs de Walter. "I want to show you some things which will amuse you. This way!" Her hand now pressed firmly against my left shoulder blade, she guided me anticlockwise around the villa to a part of it which I had not seen — a long low structure with tall windows abutting onto the main building.