It slowly came to him, how they had changed. She might have been thinking these thoughts for a while, but he hadn’t noticed. He didn’t much notice that sort of thing – but maybe other people didn’t either, not when it was a question of the people they lived with. The people you lived with you took for granted, you didn’t expect them to change or even to get any older, not visibly, only infinitesimally and unseen from day to day and yet each morning looking the same. She had once read a book about a silent spring. There had been a time when everyone had seemed to be reading that book but that time was passed. It said how chemicals were destroying nature. He thought, they would have got over it by now, and besides, things like DDT had been banned; modern science had come a long way since then. But the idea was still alive in her, making her afraid of what he did. She would say, I worry, you know, about the future. She would come downstairs in the mornings. The birds, she would say, did you hear the birds this morning? That lurking possibility in her, each morning, that this day of all days the birds might not have sung. Or if they sang today, that their numbers were reducing, numbers of buzzards or sparrows, or of returning swallows, the house martins’ nests in the eaves not filled this year, not replaced, the lapwings not come to the fields. She spoke as if his work was a threat to them all, the everyday work of the farm some kind of violence. These sprays you use, I can’t stand the smell of them. She took up his overalls in her yellow rubber gloves and put them into the washing machine. The smell clings, she said, even when they’re washed.

Only it didn’t. His overalls when they came out of the machine were clean. If anything, they smelled of detergent, since she put in so much. He thought that she must have imagined the smell, on them and possibly sometimes even on himself.

He saw grey in her hair, lines on her face, a particular fine vertical pair of lines on her brow, above her nose. They must have been there for a while. Criticism in them. Some hardening where he used to think that she was soft.

Why don’t we have cows again, like we used to? We could use the shed. You haven’t torn it down yet.

He had the shed pulled down.

It was she who had sold the cows. The hurt was still there in him. The boy’s white knuckles in the grown man.

The herd