“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.

“What’s up with those two?”

David and Peter were coming round the side of the house, Peter almost on David’s heels, David with his eyes fixed on the ground. Something had happened after I’d left them on Smeathe’s Ridge. Whatever it was, it hadn’t done Peter’s cause any good.

“Dunno.”

“Lovers’ tiff?” There was an edge to Marcus’s voice. I could have placated him by saying something mean in agreement, or putting my hands on him, but I didn’t feel like it. It was a relief when he went back to work.

We only went out together once, to celebrate our exam results. Mine were solid. Em got an A in art, which was all she cared about. Peter’s were outstanding. Balliol would take him to read law starting October. I’d known it was coming but still had to swallow back the bitterness that flooded my mouth.

“A night on the tiles then?” Em’s mum stuck her head round the bedroom door. She was carrying a plate of cheese on toast, the bread cut into little squares. “To line your stomachs.”

When we were a bit younger, I’d made Em go nicking with me. Never in Marlborough, in Swindon where the shops were bigger. She was surprisingly good at it. Afterward we’d come home and divide the spoils. But we hadn’t been in ages, and I didn’t have anything nice. Em wanted us to wear dresses.