The boy gave her a sly look. ‘Working dogs,’ he said. He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘I’m out lamping most nights, with that lot in the fields,’ he said. ‘They’re down the fields every night, with the lights and dogs. They’ve got some fierce dogs, that lot.’ Anna said she wasn’t sure what lamping was. The boy looked blank at that. It was so much a part of his life, she saw, that there was too much to tell. He was helpless to know where to start. She indicated the pub, with its with its pleasantly sagging Horsham stone roofs, its wisteria and virginia creeper.

‘I could get you a drink,’ she offered, ‘if you didn’t want to go in.’

The boy set his face. ‘They don’t want these dogs in a bar like that,’ he said. ‘Fat boys,’ he said contemptuously.  ‘Pushing their thousand  quid mountain  bikes up these hills. Pushing them  up the hills!’

In fact the bar was full of ex-estate agents and their wives, ignoring the sour smell of the carpets and drinking gin and tonic as fast as they could – withered men in roomy blazers, their shoulders at odd independent  angles underneath;  women whose gaze seemed unnaturally eager, their cheeks the red you see on pheasants, their hair tightened up chemically to within a nanometre of hair’s tolerance, ready to snap. Anna bought the boy a pint of Harvey’s Mild and a wine-box spritzer for herself. She thought  he might like a packet of cheese and onion crisps. She looked forward to talking to him again. Perhaps he would let her stroke the dogs. But when she got outside with the drinks he was already walking away across the car park, head down, shoulders hunched tensely, hands in his pockets. His long, relaxed stride made it seem as if as if the two halves of his body had nothing  to do with each other. The dogs walked one either side of him on their stiff, fragile-looking legs, so attentive that their heads almost touched his knees. He turned round to wave to Anna.

‘But your drink—!’ she called. He only waved again and went off towards Wyndlesham.

Anna ate the cheese and onion crisps, staring out at the curve of the Downs. She drank the wine then the beer, taking her time. The de Spencer Arms themselves, as represented on the pub sign, featured something for everyone – crosses, chevrons, bars – done in stained-glass colours as rich as the light inside a cathedral; among which was a weirdly modern, penetrative, electric blue.