Light struck  off an opened  bedroom  window; the  man  who owned  Dainty  Dot’s Café & Bookshop  came  to  his  door  and shook out a mat. Two or three ponies, suddenly delighted by life, ran about in a paddock. Looking down on the cat-slide roofs and higgledy-piggledy main street at 8am on such a perfect morning, it was hard to find anything to dislike. Then a van drew up to deliver the impressive range of French fermiers – air-freighted in with the dew still on them twice a week – for which the cheese shop was justly renowned, and you saw that while it yearned for vanished values, Wyndlesham had long ago priced out any representative of them. Anna set her back to Ditchling Beacon and the upland wind and walked east, where, beside the broad, flinty, footworn reach of the South Downs Way between Western Brow and Plumpton Plain, she came upon  a clump  of the brown  poppies  that  had colonised her garden.

Up here, they grew taller and more vigorous: rather than being defeated by the wind, they seemed to thrive on it. The stems rattled together.  The flowers yearned  upward  into  the streaming  light. Anna got out her phone  to take a picture  of them  for Marnie, but, becoming nervous, put it away again. She touched the coppery, foil-like petals in wonder and astonishment.  Thinking that she could hear something, she knelt down and listened to them. Nothing; or nothing she could be sure of. Nevertheless she shivered. Then she let the wind and the glory of the skylarks usher her into the downlands – out of which, an hour later, still feeling blessed and strange, she emerged at an unexpected angle, having lost her way. She found herself descending steep chalky ground into sweeps of water meadow and low-lying pasture dotted here and there with thistles, dog rose and spreading bramble, where willows lined a small river winding through. This composition was spoiled only by the house that stood to one side of the pasture.