He did not believe it was going to rain. He had not meant to go into the spinney but she ran ahead of him and he followed. He had not gone to the spinney since his father died. At first he had consciously avoided the spot, the scene of the first maumau, but so integral it was to the landscape, the little group of trees on a slight rise, visible from the house and from all across the farm, that in time it had become just a forbidden no-go place, as if it was an island of land that wasn’t their land at all but someone else’s, fenced off from him, and he would have been trespassing if he’d gone there. It must have changed, in all those years. It didn’t feel changed. Except for the rooks. He did not think there had been rooks before, at least not in these numbers, loud overhead, their nests high in the ash trees – though of course the trees themselves must be higher or more broken than they had been then, some fallen and others grown. He didn’t remember any rooks before. The trees were in leaf now in the summer, no sky to be seen above. Before, there would have been sky, or mist at least, not this close green light, this dappling over the ground, over the nettles, over her face. They came to the old oak. It was still a magnificent tree though it had recently lost a limb, a huge branch broken off on the ground and a tear still raw in the trunk above. She put her hands to the bark, tender as if she might heal it.

How many hundred years old do you think it is?

I don’t know, he said, looking about him, looking at the ground where he had not looked for so long. He was here with Kumiko now. He wasn’t that boy from before.