Those first holidays when they came home from school the two brothers were close, though at school they had been apart, divided by age and dormitories and forms. They came home a pair and changed out of their uniforms and left them on the floor for their mother to pick up, and wore their home clothes, and often Jonny’s clothes were clothes that used to be his but that didn’t matter because they were anybody’s clothes, the clothes of a boy at home. Jonny walked behind him as he made his tour of the place. Jonny climbed the tree with him. A rope hung from the lowest branch of the tree so that they could climb. It had hung there all through the term untouched, and now they climbed it. Their father had put the rope there, and tied knots in it, one big one at the base and two others on the way up to make the climb easy. Jonny could climb the rope as easily as Richard could. They climbed onto the branch and along to where it joined the trunk and sometimes up onto one of the adjoining branches and watched. They spent hours in those first few days that they were home in the tree watching their world, astride the branch or with their backs to the trunk, watching their mother gardening, watching who came and went. They were home, but the walnut was home within the home. Like the place you called home when you played It. Where you could be seen but not be caught. Where all three of them could be seen. Because they each of them knew that any day any one of them might walk out of the house and disappear.