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curling on her side with her knees up, she descended the ceremonial staircase of her sleep, shedding a heavy cloak on the steps behind her, unpinning the dark rivers of her hair, which fell in her dream all the way down her back to the floor.

Two
    KASIM ATE BREAKFAST the next morning in a deckchair in the garden outside the French windows, scowling, retreating inside himself, without even a newspaper or his iPad to hide behind. He had shed the previous evening, choosing to remember nothing about it. The second gloriously fine day in a row already struck him as monotonous – what were you supposed to
do
with fine weather? Ivy and Arthur, who’d been up for hours, watched from a respectful distance where they sat cross-legged on the lawn; when he turned his back on them deliberately, they moved to a new vantage point. Alice and Fran – revealed to him, disturbing, softer, older, in their dressing gowns and without make-up – supplied him solicitously with coffee and orange juice and toast.
    He contemplated escape, imagined himself on a train back to London, and asked if anyone was driving into town. But then he saw in Alice’s face how she would be crushed if he left; because of his father, Kasim felt exposed whenever Alice showed her vulnerability. Anyway, London wasn’t what he wanted, he was already on the run from there. On second thoughts, he said, he would rather stay put. He pretended he had work to do, though actually he hadn’t brought any books. Reprieved, with a rich smile, Alice put her cool hand on his forehead as if he was sick.
    â€” You take it easy, she said. — Enjoy yourself.
    He tried not to show how much he wanted her to take her hand away. After breakfast he made a little pilgrimage, up through the field with the cows in it to the gate at the top, to check his phone. Ivy and Arthur followed faithfully after him.
    â€” Now, wait here, he said sternly, stopping some little way before the gate, gesturing out an invisible line along the ground. — No coming any closer. This is private, right?
    Impressed, they kept back religiously behind his line, standing poised on the very brink of the forbidden, shuffling their feet to be as close as they could get, both making pantomime efforts not to topple forwards, Ivy tugging Arthur fiercely back into his place. Kasim climbed to the top of the gate as Ivy instructed. He didn’t know why he bothered. Among his messages there was one from his mother, which he didn’t read, and one from the girl; he decided before opening this that if she used any form of text-abbreviation, which he despised, then he wouldn’t respond.
    â€” Where r u Kas? she wrote.
    With a sigh he switched the phone off and discovered that from this elevation he could see the sea in the distance, looking more like a flat wash of silver light than like water; and beyond the silver wash, a blue line of hills. He had had no idea that they had arrived so close to this other edge of the country – how small it was! He said to himself sometimes that he was more at home in the Punjab, although he hadn’t been there since he was fifteen, when his grandfather died.
    Roland and his seraglio – as Alice called them, though not to his face – arrived at Kington at lunchtime. He drove an old Jaguar XJ6 with all the original beige leather upholstery. His new wife Pilar, Argentinian and a lawyer, was beside him in the passenger seat; she had passed the journey reading through papers, replacing one file every so often in her briefcase and pulling out another. Sixteen-year-old Molly had been stretched along the back seat, either asleep or playing with her iPhone, and every so often she had asked how far it was now, just as she had done when she was six.
    They pulled up on the cobbles beside the outhouses. All the noise and forward thrust of travel faded and receded, the engine clicked secretively as it cooled, and when he stood up out of the car