‘A fine morning,’ said Rachaela, opening the door. Outside was a tiled passage, and a second door, of course. ‘Let’s go, shall we?’

They followed her like reluctant dogs, slinking out through the second door into the animosity of the pale sunlight.

After the storm, the weather had been fair all week.

The storm, anyway, maybe had not happened with the violence she had supposed. The dream had been folded away with the storm. In the morning, waking and remembering it, she had lain a long while, trying it over.

There could be no doubt it was a dream, the thunderclap and bleach of lightning, the man who sat in her room.

Later she got up and examined the chair, as if some-psychic impression might have been made on it. But really, she knew it for a dream at once. They had come in waking dreams before, the tall dark man and the meeting in the tempest. Naturally she would have such dreams, here. Naturally too she would create her father from the limbs and body of the house. He was the fantasy monster of her youth, the bad black wolf who blew into her mother’s life the unwanted seed.

Reason with it as she would, however, the realness of the dream had tinged the days which succeeded it. Lying down at night she had wondered if he would appear again.

But her dreams were only the usual nonsense things. She dreamed of the bookshop and Mr Gerard inserting biscuits into the shelves, or of the flats bulldozed to the ground and swarms of bats flying up with the debris.

Outside the house the path ran along the cliff and back into the woods, towards the heath.

Cheta took the lead along the path.

Carlo went after her, and Rachaela after Carlo.

Three daring explorers in the cold bright morning.

They walked for an hour and a quarter along the half-familiar terrain, then tinned inland, down into scrubby stands of pine and barbed-wire entrenchments of gorse.

Cheta and Carlo did not speak to each other or to Rachaela. She did not want them to.

Birds sang in thickets. Gulls wheeled overhead. The landscape was bare and desolate away from the grandeur of the sea. Rocks with gaps in them might conceal strange creatures. It was a place for a knight to come to fight with dragons.

Half an hour later a road, barely more than a lane, appeared, searing aimlessly across the country. Cheta and Carlo got on to it and walked in the middle of the highway. They feared no sudden traffic, and none came.

Leafless hedges shielded the road, and strips of wild meadow, once fields, ran occasionally behind them. Trees rose in isolation, bent by winds. Rooks exploded from a barren-looking copse and the gaunt wadis of a gutted farmhouse went by.

An hour more and the road spilled down into a valley, and there was the village.