Jim leaves him alone just before four, charging him with completing the task while he returns to the farm for the afternoon milking. Jack works consistently, pausing every so often to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm, squinting up into the blue sky at a bird of prey he is unable to identify. As it wheels above him, he marvels at the unfamiliar peace of nature – the soft rush of rippling leaves, the warbling bird song, the thrum of bees crawling over the speckled petals of bramble blossom. For a moment, he is captivated by the fluttering dance of a butterfly, so blue it is as if a fragment of sky has fallen to earth to play upon the gentle breeze. For the first time since leaving Newcastle something settles inside him, filling the emptiness in the pit of his stomach, and the ever-present pain in his chest that has threatened to consume him recedes a fraction.

But it proves a false respite. Jenny requires no invitation to invade his thoughts, because she is already there, lingering in the dark recesses of his mind, a ghost he can sense if not see. Just as he is beginning to take succour in the new marvels that surround him, her spirit, unbidden, whispers into his consciousness and he finds himself thinking how she would have delighted in this bucolic scene. His vision blurs as an image of her tipping her freckled face to the sun burns itself into his mind’s eye. In an instant, with a flood of anguish and remorse, his quiet contentment is destroyed. He is grateful then that he is alone. As the sun becomes lost behind a cavalcade of cloud the raptor plummets upon its prey, and sobs wrack Jack’s body as he weeps for all that is lost and for acts that can never be undone.

Just after five, he gathers his things. His outpouring of grief has proven cathartic; his tension has ebbed, his anxieties – for the time being at least – have been ameliorated. The labour has also served to cleanse his soul, and as he leaves the small field, he pauses to survey the neat hedgerow and the thistle-free pasture. He savours his sense of satisfaction over his endeavours, manifested in the scratched and blistered hands he splays before him.

He takes a wrong turn on the way back to the farm and for a while is lost amongst banked narrow lanes bordered by fields which all the look the same. It is with some relief that he finally sees the white-rendered farmhouse rising like a beacon in the distance, and eventually he succeeds in guiding himself to it.