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Fitz regarded the large woman as she proudly patted the head of her newly wrapped garden gnome, his face blank. First compost, now an ignorant old biddy who wouldn't go away. She'd spent the last ten minutes making snide remarks about his appearance, his goods and possibly his morals, and now expected to have a friendly chat with him just because she'd bought something.

The woman was still looking at him, and it took him a few moments to realise he was meant to respond. He pulled back his lips in an attempt at a smile, but it rapidly twisted into a noisy yawn.

'You mean J.R.R.,' he got out, as the yawn died away.

'I'm sorry?'

Fitz sighed. Tourists. They weren't too good with accents, he'd come to realise, particularly his French one, which he was employing to divert himself today. He tried again. 'I think you mean J... R

-'

The woman squealed with delight, her fat face furrowing into a grin bigger than anything in England. ‘You mean there's an R.J. Tolkien Junior? How neat!'

Fitz kept his face deadpan and lit up a cigarette. 'RJ. conceived him in France. He slept with a beggar woman in the Boulevard Saint Germane.

The only tooth in her head was made of gold, and they pawned it to buy diapers.' At the woman's gasp of appropriate astonishment, Fitz leaned forward conspiratorially. 'The woman's name was Frodo.'

The woman gasped. 'You're kidding me!'

Fitz exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke into the woman's grimace. 'There are many women called Frodo in France. It was my own mother's middle name.'

'I have got to visit your country!'

Fitz nodded with a smile, and pushed away a clump of straggly brown hair from his eyes aa he pulled out a brown paper bag from under the counter.

'You old bag, you're so ugly...' he muttered.

The woman's face hardened. 'What did you say?'

Fitz looked up, his grey eyes wide and innocent. 'This bag. It fits him snugly. Au revoir!'

The woman took the proffered parcel with a confused smile and waddled off along the leafy path in the direction of the tea rooms.

'People,' sighed Fitz lazily, watching her go."They're all so... stupid!

'That's a gross generalisation, surely,' came a polite, quiet voice that somehow made Fitz spin round as if he'd been given an order. 'I'd like this begonia, please.'

The man was looking at him. There seemed something slightly aloof about his manner, about his whole bearing; a sense of detachment from the quiet and the greenery about them. Only the eyes seemed definite, anchored on to his own as if peering inside him.

'This begonia?' Fitz broke eye contact and studied the plant. 'But it's nearly dead.'

The man smiled, and Fitz wondered, looking at the stranger's strange clothes and shoulder-length hair, if this man was some kind of dropout himself.

'I know,' said the man. 'I intend to rescue it.'

'Rescue it?'

'Indeed. You could call it a calling.'

Fitz regarded him with his long-practised look of studied boredom. 'A calling.'

'Oh, you just did. Do you simply like my turn of phrase, or were you raised by parrots?'

Fitz realised with a surge of annoyance that his own act was being turned back on him. 'One and six for the begonia,' he muttered with a puff of a cigarette smoke.

'One and six,' sighed the stranger. 'The price of compassion.' The man's face crumpled into a sorrowful frown as he checked the pockets of his dark-green velvet jacket. 'I don't have one and six. Would tuppence suffice?'

'Can't do that,' said Fitz, vaguely, the hint of a jobsworth smile on his lips and glancing about to see if anyone else was in sight. He noticed some old women strolling towards his stall and found himself looking forward to the boredom of their presence.

'Oh please,' begged the strange man, looking longingly at the begonia.

'One and six or it goes back.'

'But I only want to help it -'The man broke off and stared at him, suddenly baffled. 'Why are you putting on that French accent?'

Fitz felt his face redden as the old women approached closer. He affected anger as the cause for this rush of his