‘No, but I will. I’ve actually caught up on a good deal of the office stuff. Tomorrow I’ve got a swag of places to look at, but you’re right, I do need to have a talk with her and make sure she’s happy with things. If she went, I’d be in real hole.’

‘We should have her round. We haven’t done the friendly thing for ages. And I like both of them.’ She was right, and his silence acknowledged it. ‘It was good Gumbo came,’ she said after a while. ‘You’ve known each other for so long. He loves to talk to you, I can tell. I feel sorry for him in a way.’

‘I’ll ask Anne for a meal then, shall I?’

‘I might pay Gumbo to dig out the agapanthus along the wall,’ Helen said.

‘They’re renovating their bathroom, she told me.’

‘He’s a good gardener. Doesn’t trample everything the way most men do.’

Their conversation was often this way, parallel verbal tracks, but they had become quite accustomed to the mode. Pearly’s thoughts drifted to Richie on the farm. Maybe he was dagging a mob in the yards, maybe doing a patch-up job on the woodshed roof. Perhaps he was carting water to the lines of poplar trees. Pearly imagined them as they would become: the strong, upward-striving trunk and branches, the turn and shimmer of the leaves in a passing breeze like a shoal of small fish. It was a good thing to plant trees in dry country. ‘I’d quite like to go out to the farm again,’ Pearly said. He enjoyed being there on autumn evenings when the last of the sun caught the ridge lines, purple shadows lay in the gullies and folds of the hills, and slow beating seagulls made their way back to the coast. Pearly remembered that his father had liked to be outside at dusk also, how he would stand leaning on the side of the old sheep-dip rail and smoke his pipe, or tinker with farm machinery before returning to the house. Pearly could almost catch the drifting pungency of the Havelock dark tobacco that was his father’s choice. ‘You never see anyone smoking a pipe these days, do you,’ he said.

‘Well, we know now they kill you,’ said Helen. ‘If you do go out to the farm soon, don’t forget to ask Richie about wood. It would be good to have it stacked well before winter.’ All their wood came from the farm. It was a ritual for the brothers each year, cutting up a tree felled the year before and bringing down another for the year to come. Richie had the skills with the chainsaw, and Pearly was his offsider.