Isolated in the landscape, she and the car seemed destined for one another.

The Cortina swung into the station forecourt among the weeds and grass. The window went down.

‘Name of Smith?’

The driver had an indeterminate alien accent.

‘Yes.’

The door opened and politely the driver came to lift her two bags into the boot. Heavy with books, not clothes, he must strain. He said, ‘Come for a holiday?’

‘No,’ Rachaela said, coldly, to exclude him.

Not a driver of the city, he did not impertinently press her, presuming on a wish to talk. He fell silent, opening the passenger door.

Rachaela got in. As the car started up she felt relief. Her body had been in motion so long it now seemed only comfortable if moving.

The car was stuffy and dank yet she sank back against the seat, longing to close her eyes. But the alien driver meant she could not abandon herself. She watched the pale olive green of the country stream away along the road. Dark woodland patched it and occasionally the tobacco-coloured basins of fields, a stone farmhouse, an ancient garage with fallen sign and brilliant rust.

The driver did not speak for thirty miles.

Then he said, mildly, ‘I don’t know the area too well. I’m from the town. Will you know the place?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Have to chance it then. Mr Simon sent me a little map. May help.’

She thought of the driver leaving her in the wilderness, running his shabby car home to an electric fireside, a warm semi littered by children’s toys and washing, beefburgers for tea, a warm wife and two lively kids, perhaps a toddler. She was jealous a moment, passionately, furiously jealous of this easy normality. Only the mortgage to worry him, the long odd hours of his work, but the warm wife to come home to and the procreative results of former love.

And what am I? How then do I see myself?

She had a vision of a black moth battered through the night, a deer hastening between the fraught shadows. Dramatic, fearfully apt. No warm fireside for her. To what then was she going, where was this baffled driver, himself unsure, taking her? The quag gaped. Rachaela tensed and found her hands clutched together on her limp black bag long ago wrung out. Faint sickness oozed in her vitals, as it had off and on for days, at this prospect. An adventure after all. Maybe it was correct that she should be afraid. Scarabae.

Across level fields Rachaela saw the sudden sun, watery and veiled, sinking down into the western valleys.

Bold hills rose straight up from the ground, some with white chalk masks, like the heads of phantom animals, leering, smiling, grimacing, holes for eyes. Trees trailed over rock. Ivy grew along the earth, and festooned old broken walls. Once there had been houses. Now, nothing, Gone away.