Let them come in their thousands. It’s not their fault, individually, that they cannot read a word of the melancholy poems and novels they have journeyed here in order to topographically reconstruct. The whole culture conspires to blind them. Camilla was always very wary of my conspiracy theories; she believed she could smell in them the airless odour of ghetto fears. But we differed not a jot about this one: some rural plot it is, hatched over the centuries in countless village halls and parlours, that convinces the English there is an indissoluble connection between literature and lakes, between meaning and mountains, between poets and peasants, between honesty and haylofts. I remember one long hot afternoon, sitting with Camilla on the little wooden bridge halfway up the valley, dangling our bare feet in the water, discussing this and related topics. It must have been a very hot day because I do not take willingly to uncovering my feet. I always like to feel that I am fully dressed and ready for flight. Another ghetto fear. I think the pretext – for our discussion, not my barefootedness – was the news we’d received that morning that Lilian Stinsford, a woman who occasionally worked for Camilla at the school, had been taken into hospital and was not expected to return from it. Lilian Stinsford had been a blooming energetic townswoman brought down here, kicking and screaming every inch of the way, by a husband in retreat from the modern world. He put her in a white thatched cottage in sight of the sea, gave her advice, babies, and more advice, and scratched together a pittance himself painting birds on local slate and selling them to the tourists he abhorred. They became a familiar sight around the village, Ken and Lilian Stinsford, once their children grew up and got the hell out, he stooping to croon over some marvel of growth or colour in the hedgerows, his face contorted into a horrible simulacrum of simple pleasure, she always a foot or two behind and to leeward of him, tossing pebbles into the fields or swiping at flowers with the stick he’d carved and insisted that she carried, her hair a pure white, her eyes puffed out with the poison of unused life. ‘And not once has that man paused to consider the wrong he’s done her,’ I recall Camilla saying. ‘Not once in the thirty years he lived here. But then why should he? Who or what in this place could ever plant the idea of erroneousness in his mind? He goes out into his garden in the morning, feels the pulse of God beating evenly in the soil, detects the same unhurried rhythm in his own breast and in that of his goats and chickens, and therefore knows that his poor frenzied wife is the anomaly, not him. Women don’t have a chance in Nature, Barney. The heat and the tempo are against them. Nature belongs to men. Look at a ploughed field – have you ever seen anything more brutal or tyrannical in your life? All farmers are fascists, Barney. By instinct. The only future for women is in the cities. Not that there’s any future for poor Lilian.’