They were. Though none of them were tall, they occupied the little border with a kind of dense self-confidence. Slack, poppyish blooms predominated, but there was a form of lunaria too, and something that promised to uncurl into an oversized altar lily. The poppies had a curious brown metallic colour to their petals, which drooped from pale green fleshy stems, curved towards the top like the stems of anemones, as if they weren’t made to support weight. Between them, lower down, as thick as a lawn, you could see the pubic tangle of a single dark feathery growth – similar to yarrow leaves but finer in construction – which seemed to repeat itself at every scale; you soon lost your place in it. There was no point in admitting that the border had fostered no poppies before today. ‘They look as if they’re made of paper,’ Marnie said, separating the flowerheads with her fingers, bending the stems this way and that so that she could peer down between them – as if she had been thinking of buying them but was changing her mind. ‘Do you think they smell of anything? They’re very artificial colours.’ She stood back, stared up at the summerhouse, and seemed about to speak further.

‘Before you start,’ Anna warned her, ‘I’m not having it renovated, pulled down or redeveloped as a granny annexe.’

Marnie looked disappointed but gave the most uncombative of shrugs. They stood there a moment or two more, listening to the liquid early evening notes of a blackbird in the orchard; then made the mutual if unspoken decision to go back into the house. On the way, Marnie said: ‘I thought we’d do omelettes.’

‘I hope you brought wine, Marnie, or you can bugger off.’

While her daughter cooked the omelettes Anna made salad.

‘That box of old things you found?’ Marnie said. ‘I put them back in the summerhouse. They were just some old pin-badges and things from college.’ She laughed. ‘God knows what I was like,’ she said. ‘Early 1980s social science postgrad, fifty years too late. You’d have thought the world would change more in all that time.’ Her career in contemporary economic history prompted her to add, ‘But the money went, I suppose.’ There was, she believed, no money without change; no change without money. She poked about in the back of the fridge where Anna stored, for periods of fourteen days to three weeks, very small portions of leftovers: half a boiled Maris Bard potato, two dessert spoons of frozen peas dried up in a saucer. ‘What’s in this awful bit of paper?’

‘It’s cheese, darling. Please don’t make faces like that. I bought it because of the name. But then I forgot the name. It was something like “100 yards”,’ she decided. ‘It’s cheese. I bought it at the cheese shop in the village.’