Olivia was away as usual working in Oxford and London. She could often reduce her absence to three or four nights, but they still had to spend the core of the week apart. Exactly how their child would fit in to her migratory life was still not clear. He suspected that he would quite often be left holding the baby for a few days. Whereas Olivia might have to be in college, or at the British Library, he was the flexibly employed naturalist, wandering around a beguiling rural setting, counting turtle doves and Purple Emperor cocoons, putting rings on the feet of migrating birds, recording nightingales and checking the health of trees and deer, Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs. Part of him loved the idea of bringing up a child in the middle of this surge of regeneration, but he was also worried about the drastic loss of solitude. There was a lot of hazy talk about what enthusiastic grandparents Lizzie and Martin were bound to be, but they would only be available at the weekends and that would mean going up to London and becoming annexed to the magnificent Carrs. He had grown to love and admire Olivia’s parents and yet there was something overpowering about their virtue and prosperity that strained his self-respect. He hadn’t complained about it, and in a sense it was perfectly natural and convenient, but Olivia’s decision to take their child to her big old home straight from the hospital, as if it were their child’s true home, before they all went down together to her small new home (and his only home), had pissed him off. Why couldn’t they go straight from the hospital to Willow Cottage and then, after a month or two, take the baby to meet its grandparents in their rambling old house? He was just saying – or rather, he wasn’t.