I have to think when we should get out and finish that field, he said. With all this dew it’ll take the longer to dry. Though it’ll hardly be worth the effort.

Why’s that? she said.

Because of the ergot.

Oh yes. It was clear that she had forgotten the ergot.

He thought by the tone of her voice, what I say doesn’t matter. She’s not interested in whatever I can think of to say. Definitely, they were pretending.

There were big birds flying up from the stubble where they had been the night before. Buzzards, Richard said. They had been feeding on the dead rabbits. There were crows on the field also, but they stayed on the ground and didn’t fly up.

People didn’t like carrion birds, Richard said. People didn’t see that they had a purpose and kept the place clean.

There were skylarks overhead. Climbing in the pale air, beginning to sing. Should he talk to her about the skylarks? That would have been a nicer thing to talk about. Why was it that skylarks climbed in stages? Had he not noticed that before? Or had he always noticed it, known it, and only thought about it now because she was here with him? Because she was from outside, and made him see things differently. The spiders’ webs. The birds. Up the larks went to some level, and then they held there and sang, and then they climbed again, level by level, until they were lost to the eye. He was going to get someone out to plough the stubble next week. His mother said that he shouldn’t, because of the skylarks. She said that the skylarks needed the stubble to live in through the winter. But he had told her they seemed to do well enough.

See how blue the sky is now, Kumiko was saying.

Yes, it’ll be a fine day.

They were close to the spinney.

Come this way, come here. Let me show you something.

Perhaps they weren’t pretending any more. There used to be a house here, he said, taking her hand just so lightly and leading her in between the trees. He knew a way in that wasn’t too overgrown with nettles. He held back branches so that she could pass. Not skylarks over them now but rooks, rising, circling, cawing. There was an old chap who used to work for us, Billy, who remembered when the house was here, when he was a boy, and there was a woman still living in it. We used to think she must have been a witch. Look, this is where it was, you can just about see the foundations.

She did not say that she knew the place already. They had met him there before, on the track, but he must have forgotten that. They had been in the little wood, and when they came out Richard was driving by in the Land Rover, so handsome and casual with his elbow on the open window, and stopped and picked them up, and Richard had said that he still went shooting there, and Jonathan thought that he didn’t care. As if it was just a little wood where they shot pigeons and there once used to be a house. An innocent-enough place.