It was so calm, in the way that calmness can feel transcendental, but Ned felt cold and glum. He’d missed his wife and daughters from the moment he boarded the first plane. Felt a constant ache of regret. He worried he’d done the wrong thing, while knowing the other orchardists wouldn’t have forgiven him if he’d refused. He felt in his mind for Sally’s little grasps, the fumbling hooks of Grace’s fingers. The slow blink of fresh little Harriet. Saw the eldest two shrieking under the falling water of a hose he’d turned on them in the garden. Remembered the look on his wife’s face, hard and beautiful. He thought too of the knowledge he was bringing home, and the benefits it might have for his family and his community. But it did not console him; he saw only the orchard he was not on, the daughters he was not with, and he came to realise that he was behaving in the manner of so many men he knew and had known and had rarely respected: as a work-loving loner in the false skin of a family man.

He shook his head, tried to listen to what the sailor was telling him about the wind and the currents. He couldn’t do anything for his family until he got home. He should enjoy this place while he was here. This place he was unlikely to ever see again, this place that Maggie had told him his mother had loved.

The man kept talking, pointing out rock formations on the hillsides, ancient places where armoured knights once skewered dragons, and Ned allowed himself to think of what his life might have been like if his mother hadn’t died a few months after he was born. Usually he didn’t think of her in relation to himself. He just imagined a version of her based on what he’d heard from others: a quiet, sporty woman of high talent, slanted humour, good hair. He closed his eyes and heard the name Liesel being called across paddocks, across waterways. Voices high and flushed.

It was a light sketch of a person, because that was all he had to go on. But here, on this English lake so far from home, he caught himself wishing that she was there with him, whatever the truth of her had been. He wanted to know why she’d liked it here so much. It was a striking place, but he wanted to know what exactly had struck her. Was it the rising, plummeting fells? Was it the grey-shining water? The Robin Hood forests? The Beatrix Potter villages? The feeling of timelessness? Was it Windermere she’d learned to sail on, or one of the other lakes? Was he drifting on water that had once held her reflection?