‘It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?’ said Mary, a tear travelling down her pink and doughy cheek. She grabbed Viola’s hand and squeezed it firmly, and they stayed like that for a while, quiet, listening to the rapid, expressive undulations of a robin’s song. It was comforting, somehow, to be held so tightly, her own mother not in the market for physical affection right now, but still, Viola could feel dishonesty swelling inside of her.

Eventually, she said it: ‘I didn’t really know him.’ She gave Mary a quick, tight smile. ‘Sorry.’

Mary dropped Viola’s hand and tipped away from the girl, her whole body asking the question: What do you mean?

‘I talked to him a few times,’ explained Viola, keen to draw the woman back. ‘Usually because he was cross with me for trespassing.’

Mary stared. Viola felt herself being reassessed, reclassified.

‘But,’ Mary narrowed her eyes, ‘he said… Peter said that he was looking out for you, because your mother was…’ She glanced back at the house and lowered her voice. ‘Because she’s not so well at the moment and that I was to do the same. I was to make sure you were okay if I ever came across you, because you were often out alone and Peter was worried that…’

Viola stared back at the woman and did some reassessing of her own.

‘He was worried that something might happen to you, that someone might…’

Now Viola did feel sad; she felt awful. You reckon it’s a good idea, do you, wandering about like this? It had been concern, not a telling-off. Viola felt a bubble of something rising in her throat – grief, terrible grief – though not necessarily, not completely, for the man they were speaking of.

‘You came on a horse,’ she said quickly, diverting that bubble, making it pop.

‘I’m finding it hard to get back in the Land Rover.’ Mary sighed and looked off into the middle distance so she might not cry, a technique Viola recognised, had used many times herself. ‘It used to send me mad, all those balls of string and wire in the cab, the slips of paper and his empty Thermos flask, but now, that mess of his…’ She stopped, sniffed, licked her lips: more techniques Viola had in her own arsenal. ‘Anyway!’ Mary slapped her green thighs and forced her voice towards brighter tones. ‘Ingrid Duchamp has been helping me get better control of Dandy here, and I, in return, have tempted that Swedish ice queen out of her big glass box for a change.’ She said all this with a wry smile, as if Viola should understand what was funny.

‘I don’t know who Ingrid is either,’ Viola confessed.