Her voice was like that too. Soft, with a simplicity in it, but that might have been just the way she spoke English. When they went out in the Land Rover it had been difficult to hear what she said over the sound of the engine. He had to get her to repeat herself a couple of times. So he stopped, and shut off the engine, and then it was his voice that had seemed too loud, when they got out and he showed her everything. It had been nice to be showing her things. She asked if he had learnt his farming at college but he told her how he had just seemed to know some of it, from the beginning, how he must have learnt as a child when he used to go round the farm with his father, sitting where she did, sometimes getting out, sometimes just sitting and watching out of the passenger window, learning like that. Oh that’s nice, she said, I think that Jonathan doesn’t remember his father very much. Of course he remembered, he said. He was bound to remember, wasn’t he? Because he was older. That was what he said to her, taking the opportunity to set himself apart from his younger brother who had brought this girl here. But there was no more than a vague figure in his mind as he spoke, the memory of a man’s big hands lifting from the steering wheel, pulling the handbrake, opening the door, of a tall man in a cap and a blue shirt or a worn tweed coat walking out away from him into the field. There would be a decision for a boy then, whether to watch or whether to run after, fitting his running steps to the man’s slow strides. If you wanted to see how a crop was growing you didn’t look only at the edge, on the headlands, but you walked in towards the centre of the field. You walked in and then about, this way and that, and stopped at different points. You looked where you knew the soil was light, and where it was heavier and where the water stayed. And the man did that, silent ahead of the boy – if the boy had followed and not only watched – always moving on ahead so that the boy would see his back and his hands more vividly than his face. Then he was back in the Land Rover, and if the boy had got out then the boy climbed in too while he waited, and there was that hand on the brake, on the gear, and the smell of the outside, and a little of the smell of the cigarettes that he smoked, which clung to his clothing, brought back into the cab. Of course, he told the girl. Yes, I remember him well. And so they got back in, where the doors on each side had been left open, and he put his own hand to the gear and the brake, and they drove on.