Norton loses her bags and believes the reason is the place: "I don't lose things except coming here; I am efficient really. But there seems a kind of fatality…" When the Montmorencys arrive at Danielstown, the house seems to protest but silently: "Two storeys up, she [Lois] could have heard a curtain rustle, but the mansion piled itself up in silence over the Montmorencys' voices." The movie was filmed in Dowth Hall, County Meath in the late 1990s, along the riverbanks of the River Boyne. Oriental/colonial presence The exotic is presented to us in the Anglo-Irish society in the first chapter: "Going through to her room at nights Lois often tripped with her toe in the jaws of a tiger….There were two locked bookcases of which the keys had been lost, and a troop of ebony elephants brought back from India by someone she did not remember paraded along the tops of the bookcases." There are also a number of instances where antiques from the Orient are part of the furniture of Danielstown. Gerald also is described as "Bedouin" by Betty Vermont: "This was not a thing she could have said to every man, because really the East had become so very suggestive. But he was the dearest boy, so absolutely nice-minded." There is an insinuation that the East carries sexual connotations but Gerald is "nice-minded" and he will not be offended by this association with the East. The colonial project is embodied in Gerald. When Laurence asks him about the meaning of civilisation, he believes that the British Empire is very capable of delivering civilisation to people: "I mean, looking back in history – not that I'm intellectual – we do seem the only people." Maud Ellmann points out: "The British soldier Gerald Lesworth is naïve enough to think that the good guys can be firmly distinguished from the bad guys. If war were openly declared, he blusters, we could clean these beggars out in a week". In addition, the colonisation is viewed as a career. Gerald criticises Mr. Armstrong because he is not "keener on his career". Frozen youth The narrative insists on framing the temporal element of the novel within a fixed period of time, "In those days…" and "cancelled time". In Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle believe that this style of stasis and abeyance in the narrative is