He could not remember being happy before he knew Anne. They had met at university. She had been an undergraduate, and he had been doing post-doctoral research and a little teaching. He had seen her first when he had taken a small group into some beech woods to collect fungi for identification. The colour of the beech woods and her hair and her smile still glowed in his memory. He had known even then on the first meeting that she was special. She had changed him in a month. His colleagues told him that she had made him human. Before Anne he had been notorious for his bad temper and his unwillingness to compromise. Suddenly he found a sense of humour.

Duncan did not dare ask her to marry him until she had completed her degree. Then he needed several drinks to give him the courage to make the proposal, and he had botched it with his shyness, so in the end she had proposed to him. Afterwards he had been too excited to sleep for a week. He had wandered round the university in dazed and bedraggled confusion while she made the arrangements for the wedding. If he had understood more clearly the difference in their backgrounds, it might never have taken place. In the classlessness of academic life it had not mattered. He realized that she never had to worry about money, that she had been to a boarding school, that her father had some land in the West Country, but at university everyone’s parents seemed wealthier than his had been. There had even been a certain status in being poor. He had imagined, if he thought about it, that her father was a farmer.