Anna, unaware of these judgements, took home two bottles of Fleurie and a tub of pistachio ice cream then telephoned Marnie and conducted a short but satisfying row; after which they agreed to more broadly respect one another’s feelings and Anna listened to news of Marnie’s ex-boyfriend’s new job. Her plan for the rest of the evening had been to turn on her fifty-inch Sony and eat all the ice cream while watching an ageing wildlife presenter gambol in the brackish waters of the North Sea with the half-dozen mouldy-looking grey seals left in the Shetland Islands; but, four of the animals having the previous week contracted human norovirus, the spectacle was cancelled. Anna wandered about. After her exchange with Marnie the house seemed hot and airless. She took a shower. She stood looking out of the kitchen doorway with a glass of Fleurie in her hand. Called the cat. He didn’t come.

‘James, you depressing animal,’ she said.

At nine, the telephone rang. She picked it up expecting Marnie again, but there was no one at the other end. Just as she put the receiver down, she heard an electronic scraping noise, like starlings in a gutter; a distant voice which shouted, as if to a third person even further away than Anna:

‘Don’t go in there!’

When the cat hadn’t come in by ten o’clock, she went out to look for it.

The air outside seemed even warmer. There was no moon. Instead the summer constellations wheeled above the water meadow. Anna made her way slowly down the lawn, and imagined she saw the cat’s eyes glittering ironically at her from the base of the hedge. ‘James?’ Nothing, only the grey earth still disturbed and scattered about. A strip of orchard ran down one side of the garden, old apple varieties left to themselves to split and fall apart from the centre outward so that their moss-covered boughs curved back down to the ground. The cat would often crouch among them at night; listen for bank voles; chase a moth. He wasn’t there now. Anna balanced her wine glass in the crook of a branch, let herself out through the side gate. ‘James? James!’ she called, all the way across the pasture to where the river, glimmering in the starlight, wound between crack-willow and beds of nettle in soft black earth. Anna, ambushed and thoughtful, stood gazing into the water. Where in daylight it would be solid and brown, with a glassy turbulence at the surface, now it seemed fine-grained, weightless. She trailed her hand. She forgot the cat. She laughed. Suddenly she sat down on the bank and and took off her shoes, and was about to take off her clothes, when something – she wasn’t sure what, it might have been the slightest shift of light on the willow leaves – caused her to turn and look back the way she had come.

Her summerhouse was on fire.