My mother read it [The Flight of the Heron] with pleasure, but not with the passion I felt but which it seems I successfully hid from her. She soon got on to the sequels, 'The Gleam in the North' and 'The Dark Mile', and mentioned casually one day that she had glanced at the last page of 'The Dark Mile' and seen that 'he was mashing someone called Olivia' -I recoiled. Mashing. My faithful Ewen, who had married Alison in the first book. But it was all right. It was his cousin Ian. Mother could not tell the difference.