He did not seem bowed by the villagers’ hatred. He held his head up high, continued walking in his jaunty, careless way; proving them wrong, she supposed. Not a coward. It gave her pleasure to watch him move. A guilty pleasure. He’d been pale when he arrived. Now he was tanned. Muscular. His hair had grown longer but it didn’t seem to bother him when it fell in his eyes, wet with sweat. If he had thoughts that furrowed his smooth face and corroded his peace of mind, he seemed to have discarded them temporarily. He enjoyed the moment. The warm English evening, gifted after a day’s graft.

He was so different from any man she had ever met before. Different from Aubrey, different from Nathaniel. Unlike Nathaniel, he did not crave the approbation of other men. Howard was self-contained, yet unlike Aubrey he somehow seemed to avoid any suggestion of isolation, loneliness. Even when he was almost entirely alone in his view, the whole world against him, he seemed substantial enough. It occurred to her that despite having a brother, being married and having had sex with two men – twice as many as most girls of her sort ought to ever imagine – she really knew very little about men. She wondered how many possible incarnations there were. Infinite? No, she saw patterns everywhere; they were all the same. Weren’t they? Supercilious, controlling, powerful, smug.

But Howard was different, and how she could behave towards him was different too.

Like his mother, he was a free thinker. Indeed, he thought so much it scared her. Yet she intrinsically knew now that she’d probably only ever make friends with those who looked at the world contrarily. Since he thought there was something wrong with at least one system – the one that insisted men must kill one another – she began to hope that he might think there were other things that were off kilter too.

One time, late afternoon, as she walked home from a day in the fields, she came across him bathing in the lake that was just half a mile from her house. The sharp, cool blue afternoon was dissolving into sunset; the leafy trees poked the skies. The air was a liquid mauve and the colour surprised her. The pond flared and glittered. As she walked down the slope, she had a clear view; she spotted him several hundred yards before she was close to him. He plunged his head beneath the surface, totally immersed. She held her breath as she imagined the chilly water penetrating every pore in his skin. He emerged, the water cascading from his hair as he threw his head back and looked to the sky, his skin iridescent. She was a married woman but she had never seen a naked man. Aubrey had finally swapped his nightgown for pyjamas, but he only ever took off the trouser part, and then in the dark and under the covers.

She had no choice but to keep walking in his direction; she had to get home. If she turned around, she’d have to spend the night in the fields. She decided to press on but keep her eyes on the path, not glance left or right, not acknowledge him at all. Not notice his broad shoulders, glistening and tanned, nor his white buttocks, lean and muscular. Hope he wouldn’t turn around. She walked past unnoticed. The splash of his stroke in the water stirred a sudden soft pang, a beating in her heart. In her stomach. Below that.