I was glad of the journey. Glad it took nearly an hour to get back to Trewarren; it gave me some time to absorb the shock, but also, to welcome it gladly. Hugo's culpability in the water pollution and its ramifications still loomed, but my mind flew selfishly to my own life. My new emotional life, which I would so welcome. I could be friends with Hugo and Christina; could even envisage suppers together, barbecues in their garden, all the things I never could before. And I'd have lunch with Hugo, tell him that: tell him if only I'd known. Watch his eyes, still dear, beloved eyes, widen with recognition, with relief, over his Dover sole at Wheelers where we'd meet in the City. Realize that, if only he'd told me! But Hugo was one of the few people who had no idea I had still been in love with him. Just that I was bitter and avoided his family. Although it wouldn't take a genius to work it out.

But there were other repercussions to full disclosure on his part. He might not want Peter to know. Or, he might have wanted to tell him himself, when he was eighteen, or twenty-one, perhaps. Or not at all. This last struck me as entirely possible. Hugo was not a brave man. Plus it's a huge thing for a child to absorb. Would still be, it occurred to me, for his other children, Theo and Ibby. It suddenly struck me as a profoundly selfish thing to do, but that was another story. My mind was on my own story. Because, actually, how could I have known, I who had my heart plastered permanently to my sleeve, and not told Peter? My mother, Celia? How could I have walked around with something that huge? Hugo would have known that I couldn't.

The car windows were down and I took great gulps of salty sea air as I came off the main road and followed the familiar country lanes. The high banks and towering hedges precluded any glimpses of the fields: the stunning, rolling green vista was only teasingly revealed in quick glances through a five-bar gate, or from a particularly high hill, before a vertiginous drop down into a hollow. Very occasionally, as I climbed a hill, a sliver of silver blue, a tiny glistening triangle, would flash in the distance. When I was young, and we'd been away, I'd shout from the back seat that I'd seen it, and Dad would pretend he hadn't, but I knew he'd seen it first. Glimpse by glimpse, it would become a stretch rather than a sliver, the centerpiece, framed by the hills, beckoning me on as it did now.