He was looking out at the rain. All day on the train they had been looking out at rain. There had been so many homecomings, so many times that they had been this way. His parents before he was born, walking in the snow. Or a boy riding in the grain cart, on that same sharp bend. Two boys, one bigger than the other, laughing. The cart swinging round the bend and the surface of the heap shifting, the smaller boy sinking down open-mouthed into a golden quicksand of wheat, feet, legs, body, fear of drowning, grain in his mouth, gripping hard to the hard sides of the cart, coming home with his eyes red and running. Hay fever, his mother would say. From all the dust.

All the times we’ve driven this road, you never told us.

I’m sure I must have. You’ve just forgotten.

Perhaps she had told him, he couldn’t be sure.

This year he had offered to drive for Richard. He didn’t think they would let a boy ride in the cart nowadays. He would have to take care on the bend all the same, take it slowly so that the grain didn’t spill.

Well, it was a long time ago, she was saying. They were close to the house. Through breaks in the hedge on each side of the road came glimpses of Richard’s sodden wheat.

The accident had been her fault, even if Charlie was driving. They had walked home cold in the snow and the dark, huddled by the Aga when they got in, not speaking, each of them separate and alone. They had had a row. It was because of something she had said that Charlie had put his foot down too hard and come off the road. Always it seemed to have been a question of what she was saying and what Charlie was not saying, though it was what Charlie did not say that mattered more than anything she could put into words. She had said what she had said because of Charlie, because of whatever it was in him which was constantly with them and made her afraid. That was before family. Family had been meant to warm them. To fill the silences. Children to bring happiness, to make a way to the future. She was glad that there would be family now, this summer at least, her boys together, this nice girl here, Jonny helping out for these few weeks.