Chris Chapman’s Reviews > The Face of Innocence > Status Update

When the car at last drew up, she came slowly down the steps, took a last and most longing look back at the house, gave her head the breath of a toss and entered the car.

I turned back to the forlorn river, to the scrappy breeze that rippled an evening cold across it, to the barges and the tugs that no longer looked busy and plucky but now soot-poor and tired.

It was a six-bedroom affair built in the twenties, retired enough in its three acres of rhododendron, birch and fir. But retired only in that it was hidden among trees – in itself it was a formidable amalgam of many telling styles: one felt that the railways had managed a direct line falsewards into the Wars of the Roses.