‘We’re not keen to go into town. Too young to retire completely. When the time comes we’re thinking of building a place here. Natalie’s got a palace in mind, of course! Matt and I have this idea about a stud flock, but the times aren’t great for sheep at the moment. It would be something I could concentrate on, though.’

As they walked back to the farmhouse, continuing to talk, Pearly was conscious of a shimmer of the past on almost everything around them. The macrocarpa hedge that despite a trim each year had gradually swollen through the decades so that they walked alongside the concrete path rather than on it, the wood stack beneath the pines in which Pearly had sought out hens’ eggs as a boy, the bare ground where the old kennels had been, bones still gripped by the hard earth, the tractor shed behind which he and Richie had sat smoking and with stolen bottles of beer.

‘Come out any time,’ Richie said when later, after tea and scones, he and Natalie stood by the car to see them go. ‘You could do with a few days’ helping here to get fit again.’

‘Too true,’ said Pearly. ‘I’ve become a real townie.’

‘You’d get back into it soon enough.’

‘Anyway,’ said Helen, ‘you’ve got to come in and see us first.’ The women hugged, the brothers shook hands. When the car reached the end of the long, unsealed drive and turned onto the road, Richie and Natalie remained standing in front of the dark macrocarpa hedge. Small, still figures close together.

Pearly was often surprised by the depth of childhood memory displayed by other people. Vivid and detailed scenes from the time of the pram in some cases, and increasing coherent recall subsequently. He didn’t doubt their tales, but lacked such a richness of recollection. He had only a few glimpses of himself before the age of five, and no continuous reel of experience before ten or so. The early memories were all moments of heightened emotion — pain, joy, oddity or revelation. His father slipping and falling into the sheep dip. His first two-wheeler — how bright the red paint, how brilliant the chrome. Strapped on the hand by Mosley in standard two, falling from the roof of the tractor shed and slicing his leg on the rusted harrows beneath. Sitting with his father in the maimai and watching the mallards in circling reconnaissance above the pond at dusk: the different colours and textures of gorse, and lupin, and broom becoming an indistinct amalgamation, the gun barrel a hard line against the last light of the sky.