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Real villagers will pick you six tons in a day. Five anyway. Not that we've got more than three here, at the outside."
    Her head lifts, she smiles but says nothing. I conclude that she is gently mocking me for my yeoman's fantasies.
    "So I reckon if we have Ted Lanxon and the two Toiler girls, and if Mike Ambry isn't ploughing, and maybe Jack Taplow's two sons from the choir could come after church if they're free—in exchange for our support at Harvest Festival, naturally...."
    An expression of distraction passes across her young face, and I fear that I am boring her. Her brow puckers, her hands lift to close her blouse. Then I realise to my relief that it is merely some sound that she has heard and I have not, for her musician's ear hears everything before I do. Then I hear it too: the wheeze and clatter of a frightful car as it pulls up in the sweep. And I know at once whose car it is. I do not have to wait until I recognise the familiar voice, never raised yet never too quiet to hear.
    "Timbo. Cranmer, for God's sake. Hell are you hiding, man? Tim?"
    After which, because Larry always finds you, the door of the walled garden swings open and he is standing there, slim as a whip in his not very white shirt and baggy black trousers and disgraceful buckskin hoots. the Pettifer forelock dangling artistically over his right eye. And I know that, nearly a year late, just when I am beginning to believe I have heard the last of him, he has come to claim the first of my promised Sunday lunches.
    "Larry! Fantastic! Good heavens!" I cry. We shake hands, then to my surprise he embraces me, his designer stubble scraping against my freshly shaved cheek. All the time he was my joe, he never once embraced me. "Marvellous. You've made it at last. Emma, this is Larry." I am holding his arm now. Again, the holding, is all new to me. "God sent us both to Winchester and then to Oxford, and I haven't been able to get rid of him since. Right, Larry?"
    At first he seems unable to focus on her. He is guillotine pale and a little fierce: his Lubyanka glower. To judge by his breath, he is still drunk after an all-night binge, probably with the university porters. But as usual his looks do not reveal this. According to his looks, he is a studious and sensitive duellist, about to die too young. He stands before her, head tipped critically back to examine her. He rubs his knuckles along his jaw. He smiles his scampish, self-deprecating smile. She smiles, scampish also, the shadow of her sun hat making a mystery of her upper face, a thing she knows perfectly well.
    "Well, stone the crows," he declares happily. "Turn, beauty, turn. Who is she, Timbo? Hell did you find her?"
    "Under a toadstool," I reply proudly, which if unsatisfactory to Larry sounds a great deal better than "in a physiotherapist's waiting room in Hampstead on a wet Friday evening."
    Then their two smiles connect and light each other—hers quizzical, and his, perhaps because of her beauty, momentarily less confident of its reception. But a mutual smile of recognition all the same, even if it doesn't quite know what it recognises.
    But I know.
    I am their broker, their intermediary. I have guided Larry's search for more than twenty years. I am guiding Emma's now, protecting her from what in the past she has too often found, and swears she doesn't want to find again. Yet as I observe my two destiny-seekers taking stock of one another, I realise that I have only to step out of the ring to be forgotten.
    "She knows nothing," I tell Larry firmly as soon as I get him alone in the kitchen. "I'm a retired Treasury boffin. You're you. That's absolutely it. There's no subtext. Okay?"
    "Still living the old lie, eh?"
    "Aren't you?"
    "Oh sure. All the time. So what's she?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "What's she doing here? She's half your age."
    "She's half yours too. Less three years. She's my girl. What do you think she's doing here?"
    He has his face in the fridge, where he is looking for cheese.