The Reverend Osbourne jogged over the grass in his mackintosh. The rain had caught him in the open, crossing the meadow beside the potato field and still three hundred yards from the shelter of the trees at Brooklands. The grass was sopping and seeds stuck to the cuffs of his trousers, but he couldn’t run any faster. He hadn’t the breath for it.

He had spent the morning at the hospital with Alice Valentine, who had suffered some manner of seizure on the previous Wednesday. It was Mrs Samson who had alerted him to it, though she had not been there when it happened, and didn’t seem to know how serious it might be. He had tried to call Alec, and when that hadn’t worked, had made enquiries of his own, finally tracing Alice to the ladies’ wing of a ward in the Royal he knew quite well. She was asleep when he went in, so he sat on the chair beside her and waited, feeling suddenly old and tired himself. They were almost the same age, and he had known her for more than twenty years, ever since Stephen’s accident when he had gone to the house to discuss the arrangements for the funeral, and had found a handsome, businesslike woman, a clear thinker, and someone rather brutally honest, telling him without mincing her words that her husband had been an alcoholic and that he had never had any time for religion, never found any consolation in it. He had promised her that the service would be brief and to the point, and that was how it was. A few words on Stephen’s work at the school, his politics (with which the reverend had some sympathy). A little of the old poetry from the King James. At the graveside, Stephen’s family had rather shunned her, but then she hardly seemed to notice them. A cold day. Frost in the shadows, and only a pair of yews to shelter them from the wind. She wore a plain dark winter’s coat with no gloves or headscarf. And though there was sadness in her eyes she hadn’t cried. Not there in front of them.

The boys had been with her, of course, and occasionally she stroked the younger one’s hair to reassure him. The other one, Larry, had taken it upon himself to be the man of the house, and though he couldn’t have been much more than thirteen at the time he did it extraordinarily well, shaking hands, putting people at ease. Everyone mentioned it. The gift of knowing what to do. You couldn’t teach people that.