People said he was like him. He didn’t know about that. Physically he was like him; anyone could see that from family photos. Jonny didn’t resemble him at all. But Jonny was the one who had gone looking while he kept to the farm. Jonny had gone to Asia and to war, like their father. He had stayed at home and worked the farm like their father. There was no telling which one of them had come closest.

His mother was home. They had an everyday lunch like they usually did when it was only themselves at home. Bread and cheese. Not much to say. The radio, the news, the weather forecast. Dry in Norfolk; rain in the north-east. It didn’t sound good for the Lakes.

Did they say when they’d be back?

They weren’t sure.

Better that they didn’t come back, not for some time at least. Perhaps the weather would clear, in a day or two. When there was rain in the Lakes the cloud came down and there was nothing to see. He imagined them walking in cloud across the Lakeland hills, seeing nothing, the girl’s red coat showing at a distance, Jonny opaque beside her, the path fading into the mist before them. After lunch, he would go out where it was flat and bright. His mother would take her gloves, her secateurs and her trug, and go to the garden. Everything would be normal, as it had always been, or as it had been these last few years, since he had been working the farm and since Jonny went away. It was the start of July. It was a day like the days when they first came home from school for the summer holiday. When he went away to school he had wanted to come home to a place where nothing changed. That was how he had liked it. That was still how he liked it. Fixed. He remembered how it was when he came home from school. The place had to be the same place that he had remembered each day when he was away. He would come back from school and look at the room where he and his brother slept, or, later when they slept in separate rooms, his room alone, and then go downstairs and outside, walk the bounds of the place and check that everything was still there and nothing had been moved, and no one had come and meddled in it. He would go to the garden where his mother came out with her trug and her secateurs, or where she knelt weeding, and climb the walnut tree from which he and his brother could see everything at once, all around: their mother, the garden, the hedge around the garden, the house, the drive, the fields, the church, the village, other fields and woods, and the sky over it all.