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retorted.
    ‘ – that’s just the effect those moths had on me. You didn’t see them.’
    ‘I wish I had.’
    ‘They were really massive. I never thought moths existed that size. And so many! You know how small the garden is – well, there must have been a hundred at least crowded in there. Great shadowy forms fluttering about in the dark. And that squealing! I thought at first they were bats.’
    ‘It’s understandable you were scared,’ her sister conceded.
    ‘But I wasn’t, that’s what is so strange. Then I remembered old Mrs Beerston had died only a few weeks ago and it
was
her cottage. That made some sort of sense. The souls of the dead – why not? A village is a community after all, and here am I, the intruder…’
    ‘Moths are arthropods, Ginny,’ Lesley instructed her in a flat, down to earth manner. ‘Not spirits or ghosts or devils out of hell. Simply arthropods.’
    Ginny laughed. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’
    ‘It means they are living animals. Oh – like lobsters or prawns, with a hard skeleton on the outside. But
alive
. Can you imagine old Mrs Beerston coming back as a flying prawn?’
    ‘I never met her. And a lot of people do believe in reincarnation. Buddhists do.’
    ‘Old Mrs Beerston didn’t, you can be sure of that. Ask the vicar, he knew her better than anyone. In her young days she used to go stomping around the country preaching atheism and the like. One of Bertrand Russell’s early lays, he says, though I think that’s just his dirty mind. Anyway, she’d be the last to want to come back haunting people.’
    ‘Oh, you’re obviously right,’ Ginny admitted, tiring of the argument. ‘It’s common sense. But can’t you feel the mystery of it? No, I don’t suppose you can.’
    ‘You were hungry, that’s all. You hadn’t eaten anything all day, I’ll bet.’
    ‘I had!’
    ‘What? Two nuts and a yoghurt? You picked up some lousy habits in that television job. Don’t think I don’t know, sister mine.’ She shook her head, disapproving. ‘Now Ginny, if I bring some books of pictures, d’you think you could remember the markings on the wings well enough to identify those moths? Because they do sound unusual.’
    ‘Isn’t that what I was trying to tell you?’
    A peal of laughter. ‘Ginny, you’re impossible! Can’t you be serious even for one minute?’
    Perhaps she should never have brought the subject up, Ginny thought ruefully. The experience of watching those moths from her bedroom window on that first evening in the cottage now seemed like a moment of sheer poetry which she had no wish to destroy. Lesley would trample over it if Ginny let her, and not even understand what she was doing.
    And it was odd how Jack had also encountered the moths on his drive back. ‘Obviously seeing you off the premises,’ she had teased when he described it to her. Much to her annoyance he had turned up on her doorstep days before she’d expected him. ‘I think they’re watching over me,’ she’d added. ‘Protecting me from predatorymales.’
    In a strange way she had meant it, too.
    With her sister Lesley creepie-crawlies had always been something of a passion. As a girl – much to Ginny’s horror – she had collected caterpillars in empty matchboxes. Later, at London University, she had chosen to study zoology, aiming for a career in science until the day came when she found herself pregnant and gave it all up to marry the medical research student responsible.
    Of course everybody told her she was stupid to throw away her career like that, but the truth was – she’d confessed to Ginny – she had begun to hate the whole business of slicing up living creatures to discover how they functioned. What she loved was observing them alive, unharmed, in natural surroundings.
    She was also in love.
    Head-over-heels.
    So hopelessly in love, it was impossible to get any sense out of her.
    After the wedding, her husband Bernie left his university research