It didn’t rain in the end. Or it hardly rained at all. Not so that they would have got wet. They might just have taken their walk, and not got wet, and got back home, and everything would have been fine. But she thought that it was going to rain and she made him come with her under the trees. The clouds grew dark, the spinney darker, and then there were big drops of rain falling on the leaves, and sometimes single drops that touched them, a sound like rain beginning, and just the beginning of that smell that the ground has when the rain touches it, but the shower stopped almost as soon as it began, and instead there was the smell of nettles crushed, a peppery salady smell, and she saw that he had picked up a stick and was thrashing at a clump of nettles, by where the branch had fallen, bashing them all down. Then he was kneeling in the nettles.

What’s that?

It looks like a cross.

Why? Was someone buried here?

No. Not buried.

He saw just the tip of it at first. As if there was a grave there, two pieces of smooth wood neatly joined and set upright in the ground. So they had marked it, he thought. How strange, that someone had marked it.

If only it had rained, she would think, afterwards. If it had rained, they would have stood close, and sheltered. And when enough rain had fallen they would have got wet even there beneath the tree, or running out from the trees, and noticed nothing but their wet selves with the rain falling about them.