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mosaic-tiled floor in red-and-ochre, the bay-windowed room with the wooden fire surround like a Gothic church.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t anything to compare it with—’
    â€˜Does that matter?’
    She looked at him.
    â€˜No,’ she said slowly, ‘I don’t suppose it does. It’s just when you keep travelling, you keep comparing. You can’t help it. It’s what all the differences do to you, it’s how you think.’
    He reached up into the willow above their heads, and broke off a long, smooth, flexible twig.
    â€˜What’s the best place you ever lived?’
    â€˜Oh,’ she said, ‘I haven’t found that yet. I’m still looking.’
    Robin bent the twig into a circle, a willowy coronet, and skimmed it out across the water like a quoit.
    â€˜You don’t have to wander,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to.’
    She looked at him. She looked at his rough, near-black hair and uncompromising features, at his corduroy trousers and his boots and battered weatherproof jacket with the collar turned up around his ears. She thought: Do I know him? and then, almost simultaneously: Who have I ever known?
    He turned to look back at her.
    â€˜I said, “You don’t have to wander.” Not any more.’ He gestured back up the fields in the direction of the house. ‘You could live here. I’d give you somewhere to live. You could—’ He paused and then he said, ‘You could marry me.’

Chapter Three
    Velma Simms stood at the sink in the kitchen at Tideswell Farm and washed up Robin’s breakfast dishes. Caro had installed a dishwasher, but Velma never used it. She didn’t use it because she disapproved of the fact that it in turn used electricity. By the same token, she preferred using the mechanical carpet sweeper to the vacuum cleaner and to performing almost all tasks in the half-light. In her council house, the electricity meter, resentfully fed with coins, was regarded as an ill-intentioned household god forced upon her by the authorities. Anything Velma could do without submitting to the tyranny of electricity seemed to her a blow struck for personal victory over a force of darkness.
    Behind her, at the kitchen table, Gareth sat eating a bacon sandwich. Debbie made him a stack of them late each night for the following morning, and Gareth had taken to eating them in the farm kitchen after the first milking, to save going home. Home, a three-bedroom brick tied cottage that Robin had built for the previous herdsman, was only a few hundred yards away, but the farm kitchen made a change from his own, and fifteen minutes in it daily meant that he kept up with everything that was happening. When Caro was alive, he hadn’t liked to do this, being dimly aware at some level that he was intruding on territory that was both mysteriously female and forbidden. Sometimes, he had stood in the doorway in his boiler suit and stockinged feet, and left messages for Caro to give Robin about a cow with mastitis or the failure of the artificial insemination technician to show up, but he’d never intruded further. He was always struck by the refrigerator. While he was talking to Caro, he kept his eye on it in wonder, this huge, double-doored American thing, big as a wardrobe.
    â€˜You should see it,’ he said to Debbie. ‘You could get a couple of blokes in there, easy.’
    He sat with his back to it now, chewing. Without Caro there and its cavernous spaces only housing Robin’s utilitarian supplies, the refrigerator had lost its magic. Its chief purpose now was for taunting Velma, to try and get her to open the door or, even better, both doors. She hated opening the doors because it made the lights come on.
    â€˜Waste of electric!’ she’d shriek, slamming them shut almost before she’d got the milk out.
    â€˜He won’t eat cooked,’ Velma said now, parking