He told Helen, and Anne at Rawleigh and Gates, he dressed in jeans, a pair of blue-and-white sneakers and a cap with gold lettering from the sister city in China. He drove away from the town and the sea into the downlands. He drove to an unquestioned, abiding home and as ever enjoyed the sense of ease and naturalness. Once past the irrigated closely divided flatland he was in the sunburnt yellow-glint country of bare sweeps and ridges with occasional cabbage trees, grey limestone outcrops and thickets of briar and matagouri in the gullies. A familiar landscape with few changes and infused with his lifelong association. Almost every place he passed held beneath its present hues and configuration a shimmer of memory’s possession — phantoms of personality and incident that played out for Pearly alone.

The roadside poplar trees planted by Richie had grown well, apart from one or two almost leafless and undersized. The woolshed pines and the great macrocarpa hedge before the house were dark and massy against the tawny background of hills, and a sun too bright to observe directly pulsated in a cloudless sky as if a hole had been bored in the blue metal, and a furnace raged behind it.

Pearly didn’t immediately go up to the house. He put on his Chinese cap and stood by the car to enjoy being alone, and home. So much of his time was spent with people, and usually with people to whom he owed some duty of rapprochement or professional advice. He could hear only the quarrelling of magpies and the small clicks from the cooling engine of the car. There was no noise of sheep, so the yards were empty, and no dogs came to challenge him. There were the familiar, faint scents of animals, however, and also of grass and trees, posts and hay, farm drums and listless machinery. And something else in the warm, thrumming air that was always present but which he could never place — something intrinsic to the hills themselves and the mountains beyond; some thing of rock and soil, of water and wind, of myriad small, living things that had existence and purpose quite irrespective of human disregard.