Rachaela looked back from the open window as the van started. She saw Carlo, the great cans in both hands, bowed and leaning forward, staring after her as she was borne away. Growing smaller.

The van man and his wife talked incessantly during the drive. Rene asked Rachaela to close the window, and the van became hot and stuffy, dense with the smell of groceries and washing powder. Behind them things bumped and shifted like ogres balancing in the back.

‘There go those Knight’s Castile. I told you they wasn’t properly secure,’ said Rene.

Their accents were not local, but London, like a signpost, perhaps.

Rachaela tried to keep her mind set on what she was doing, but the flight had made her queasy and excited, and the constant chat and questions distracted and wore her out.

‘And I could just fancy a nice bit of silverside for dinner,’ said the van man, at intervals.

‘It’s fishfingers or go without,’ snapped Rene each time. ‘You don’t mind me saying,’ she said to Rachaela, ‘but they must be a funny old lot at that house. You working there?’

‘That’s right,’ said Rachaela.

‘Must be a real pain, stuck off up there. What do you do, then?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean what work they got you doing?’

‘I’m typing a book,’ said Rachaela, at random.

‘Oh God, you don’t mean to say they do books.’

‘Memoires.’

‘Oh, memoires.’

How much did they know of the house? Not much.

‘Odd to see servants, i’nt it? This day and age. Who’d do a job like that? Demeaning. Just two or three old ducks and them servants running round.’

A cow passed in a field, only one, and not a house in sight.

‘See that cow? I could just fancy a bit of silverside.’

‘It’s fishfingers or go without.’

Eventually the desolation of the countryside was filled by villages, not derelict and malign like the place of dead cars, but quite pretty, with gardens and ivy in baskets, washing, here and there a swing or a child on a lawn playing with a dog.

The fields were sown, neat and kempt, with windbreaks of tall trees. Hedgerows lined the road which had changed to something broader. After an hour, now and then a car passed them, and once a country bus.

At length a broad highway received them. Houses followed the road, stone, but also plaster and pebbledash, bright red front doors, driveways with motorbikes.

‘What road do you want?’ asked the van driver.

‘Just the town centre.’

‘We don’t go there,’ said Rene quickly.

‘I’ll let you off at Market Street,’ said the van man, ‘it’s simple enough from there.’

She paid them their fiver and the van pulled up in a wide, ordinary street, dominated at one end by a high, brown cathedral tower.