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the farming children of farming parents; for most of them the decision to devote themselves to the land had scarcely been a decision at all but rather an acceptance of the preordained path of things. Looking around the smoky bars of pubs and clubs, Caro saw, with a kind of awe, that she, the nomad, had at last come to rest among settlers, among people who identified themselves more by place than by personality or trade. And, to her surprise, she liked it.
    Robin Meredith watched her for five weeks before he spoke to her. Being tall himself, he was struck by her height, and then by the exoticism of her accent. She was a different build to English girls, and she used her body differently, and her hands. He was told she was a hired hand in the farm shop at Thripps End, so he supposed she was part of the itinerant community of international students postponing both the return to the familiar and facing the future. When he finally bought her half a pint of cider, he discovered that she was neither a student nor in work. She had come to England, she said, at someone else’s suggestion, and because of their generosity.
    â€˜Why?’ he said.
    She shrugged. ‘To look, I guess. To look at over there from over here.’
    â€˜Why?’ he said again.
    She had paused and looked down into her cider. Then she said, with her new-found self-knowledge, ‘Maybe to see if I really am a nomad.’
    He didn’t know what she meant, but he asked her out anyhow. He drove her through the countryside pointing out farms and crops and woodland planted especially for the rearing of pheasants. He took her to the cinema, where he sat with his long thigh pressed to hers but did not take her hand, and to the local annual horse fair where she saw the first gypsies of her life, and to the top of Stretton Beacon where he showed her the county laid below them like a map, orderly and tamed from this height, the agricultural spaces punctuated by the roofs and chimneys and spires of settlements. Up there, in the wind, he kissed her and told her he was leaving home to set up his own dairy herd.
    â€˜Down there,’ he said, pointing at the grey loops of the River Dean winding below them. ‘Down there.’
    â€˜I’ve never touched a cow,’ Caro said.
    â€˜I’m starting with twenty,’ he said. ‘Twenty. I’ll build a herringbone parlour.’
    She looked down at the landscape below her. She’d seen lovelier landscapes, certainly, more dramatic, more powerful. But had she ever seen landscape that seemed to offer itself so benevolently for people to live in, and use? Had she ever seen any place so manageable, so involving, so harmonious? And it just lay there, at her feet, 20 or 30 square miles of peaceful, tractable cultivation, not fighting mankind, not riven with exaggerated weather and earthquakes, not elusive because of impossible distances. It was a world down there, a complete world of man and land and beast under an unremarkable, unthreatening English sky. Caro put her hands into her jacket pockets and shut her eyes. How was she to fashion, with no means at her disposal except the simple fact of herself, the chance to stay?
    A week later, Robin drove her to Tideswell Farm. They inspected the house and the derelict yard, and they walked through the neglected fields down to the river where ducks and coots and moorhens prattled among the reeds. It was late March, and the willow trees had their yellow-green spring haze about them, and on the opposite slope, a tractor was ploughing the red-brown earth into a satisfactory ribbing, like corduroy.
    â€˜What about the house?’ Robin said.
    Caro watched the tractor. A decorative flock of gulls was wheeling above the turned earth in the wake of the plough. Robin’s house was almost too strange for her to have an opinion of, so old, so solid in its stone walls, so rambling, with its gaunt, chill Victorian additions, that passage with the