More solemnly he told her how they had buried Billy’s dog. Rosie, her name was. Over there, he said. I made a cross. It’s probably still there if we look.

Then he stopped talking. As if he couldn’t think of any more to say. The rooks were loud overhead. His hands hung very still at his sides.

Something in your hair. A twig. There, it’s gone.

Her hair was heavy and black, falling away, the knot already unravelled.

His hand was more delicate than she would have thought such a hand could be, a hand that dealt with big rough things, with machines, but so light just then that she wasn’t even sure it touched her. She put up her own hand to his. She might have just moved it away, gently, tactfully, just put it away, so that he had taken whatever it was that was caught in her hair and it would have been gone, and all of that moment might have been delicately put away.

Her hand small in his. Her touch soft, and dry. Holding, stalling, his. Movement stalled.

She might have slipped away, out from the trees and into the fields. And when they were outside of that wood, where almost no one ever went anyway, where they would never have needed to go again, then the moment might have been left behind there in the tangle. They would have been out in the clear fields and the daylight where things like that were not allowed to happen. Only she did not slip away. He did what he should not have done. And she did what she should not have done. Because Richard had been somehow at the heart of all that summer, since she saw him that first morning out there in the wheat when it was still green. They were standing under the tree. He reached to her hair and she put up her hand to move his away, and he caught her hand in his. She had her back to the trunk of the great tree. He held one of her hands in his, and put his other hand to the tree beside her. He was the summer. He, they, the two of them, were destroying the summer. She spoke too late.

This is crazy. We cannot do this. I should not be here. Why did I come here?

She spoke softly, her hand twisting in his, but holding it all the same. She could have gone. She could so easily have gone, twisted away, but she did not move. She only spoke, in that soft voice of hers. We can’t. Can’t what? Whispered words. A racket of rooks overhead. But she had begun it. She had come out to find him, hadn’t she?