Brokenclaw

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The elderly man wore jeans and a checked shirt. Comfortable Adidas trainers protected his feet and a battered Panama hat was tipped forward to shade his eyes from the afternoon sun. He stretched out in his deck chair, lowered the newspaper he had been reading and looked out at the view which he had come to love.

This, he considered, could well be an English country garden in mid-summer. The long, broad lawn was precisely cut, giving that pleasing trompe l’oeil effect of broad, perfect stripes in two shades of green. The borders were slashed with crimson salvias, overshadowed by deep purple lupins and nodding hollyhocks. Some sixty yards away from where the man sat, the lawn ended, merging into a rose garden built with a series of trellised archways, giving the effect of a great corridor of colour. In the far distance there were trees, and through a gap you could clearly view the sea stippled with points of sunlight.

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