“Can we go now?” he asked, trying to restrain his impatience. “Everything’s packed. We’re all ready.”

He’s frightened I’ll make a scene, she thought, surprised by his politeness. As she followed him to the car, she felt suddenly and irrationally more hopeful. It would be pleasant to be cut off from the town for a while. Seawatching made Roger happy, and he liked being with other birdwatchers.

He had always been competitive, and it mattered immensely to him that he had seen a greater number of species than any other birder in Britain. He was famous. In every gathering he was surrounded by admiring twitchers, and he relaxed and blossomed. Perhaps there was the chance of a peaceful week, a return to the old closeness. They had spent their honeymoon in Sennen, in a small hotel by the shore. She had been young; marriage had made her feel tranquil, generous. She had thought they would be happy forever. Now she was forty and tired, and she wanted a drink.

Anne James was supervising her daughter’s piano practise. She sat on the arm of a chair looking over Lucy’s shoulder to the music. Sunshine came into the room from the open French window. Outside in the orchard the fruit was reaching its best. Like Lucy, she found it hard to give her full attention to the playing. She loved summer in Somerset, but she was worried about her husband, and her anxiety had clouded the whole day. He had been working too hard recently, she thought. He had always been too conscientious. She listened for his car on the drive. The news that he had arranged a long weekend away in Cornwall had delighted her. She felt he needed a holiday, and besides, she could savour the last of the summer better without him.

Duncan James heard the piano through the window and saw his wife and daughter from the hall through an open door. He still felt a stranger in this house, though they had been living there for more than a year, partly because it was so much grander than anything he had known as a child and partly because it was, in every way that mattered, Anne’s house. He had bought it, but she had created it. She expressed herself through it as other people expressed themselves through work or art. Sometimes he felt she considered him and the children as essential but integral parts of the house, like the crockery or the linen. She tended to them as she tended to the garden. He was not offended by that. He was only glad she was happy.

He stared at his wife and daughter, seeing them as if the drawing room was a stage set and his family characters in a play. It was a light, spacious room. Anne, of course, had chosen the furniture. There was a lot of polished wood. The play, he thought, would be Victorian, rather sentimental.