Mario and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent

The pre-agoraphobia era marked in the grounds themselves. The bramble thickets Millicent Kent is beating through were "brambly thickets Mrs. Incandenza had—when she'd still spent time outdoors at all—planted to discourage part-time employees from short-cutting up the hillside." The parenthetical carries it: there was a time Avril went outdoors, and it's past. The control-need is legible even in that earlier era — she planted the thickets to enforce paths, to stop people cutting where they shouldn't — and now the enclosed, grounds-bound Avril of the present tense has left those brambles behind as a fossil of when she still walked the hill. The estate keeps the record of her contraction: living barriers she set to route others, dating from before she stopped going out at all.