The path went up through a sea of emerald nettles, dusty and going to seed. Just past Ogbourne, a track led up to Smeathe’s Ridge. On either side of us, the land fell away. Further on, there was an ordinance survey marker that showed north and south, east and west. To the north, far away, there was the motorway, the M4. Cars were flowing in either direction, a steady flow for as far as I could see, and it conjured the image of a ribbon drawn in either direction, a ribbon being tied around the earth. A breeze was blowing. It plucked at our T-shirts and blew my hair about my face.

“I don’t want it to end,” Peter said. But it seemed like it was already seeping away, so we took the other halves, only to find ten minutes later we were peaking again. When the second halves kicked in, Peter dropped to his knees in the grass.

David turned to me, pale, his pupils black and dilated. He looked like a rare and exotic flower, impossibly beautiful.

Dry mouth. Thudding heart. Skin burning. I sat down and closed my eyes, lost in it. When I opened them again, both Peter and David were lying on their backs staring at the sky.

“I’m going to go. I want to see my mum. I want to talk to her.”

Peter raised himself up on one elbow.

“Bad idea. Bad idea. Stay with us.”

But I shook my head.

“Really, Andy? You’re going to go?” David said. “Can’t you talk to her later? You were going to show me this castle.”

“Come on. Listen, let’s have a cigarette. Let’s go threes.” Peter started fumbling in his pocket. “There’s something I want to tell you, Andy. It’s bad but it’s good. It’s really bad, but it’s also good. Stay. Don’t go.”

But I did, leaving the pair of them sprawled on the hillside.

By the time I got to the lanes, I was seeing fractals in the clouds, trails when I moved my hands. I got within a couple of hundred yards of the house, and then I climbed over the gate and lay down in the grass at the edge, hidden from the road by the hedgerow.

All the things I wanted to say to my mum were gone. Instead, I watched the barley rippling—the many thousand, thousand assembled ranks of stalks, the lifted ears—and I felt such tenderness for them. The clouds passed. At dusk, a field mouse crept between the rows, such a tiny thing, so busy, seemingly about such important work. I stayed there till it got dark and the ground grew cold.

Marcus was pissed off I hadn’t spent more time aahing over his ankle and listening to his mum chat on about three-piece suites. He was driving again, but at the manor he wouldn’t play the game, said he had to rest his ankle. I’d hidden the necklace, so I waited with him on the blanket while the others looked.