Through the back door, up the path, over the granite stile. Beyond is a half-wild field, a newtake walled off from the moor centuries ago, in which granite juts out of the rough, yellow-brown grass and a small spinney of wind-bent hawthorn hides a busy rabbit village. One outcrop forms a sort of platform, a raised stone armchair from which the whole of the valley can be surveyed, the lower hills towards the coast, the straight edge of the sea. Though it isn’t a private place, it is somewhere that feels intensely private, and Tom comes here often to think, to draw and daydream. His brother and sister haven’t discovered the rock yet, so it is his own. Sitting on the rough granite, which is covered, like an old cheese, with a crust of yellow lichen, he can look ahead into empty space.

He sits for a long time, staring into the blue, watching a buzzard wheeling high overhead. He doesn’t really know what to feel. Something is twisting in his stomach but the truth is that it is more like guilt than grief. Guilt, because there is a certain sense of relief. Daddy has gone. That should be an awful thing, he thinks. A shameful thing. He had been all too aware of the disapproval in Mrs Meade’s face when she had told him that his father wouldn’t be there to collect him. Daddy has that effect on people. They either like him a great deal – these are a certain type, horsey, county, loud – or they don’t like him at all. People like the Meades. The vicar down in the village. His grandfather. Or Mum’s friends. They all dislike Daddy with a passion, and Daddy returns the favour.

Tom sighs and lights another cigarette. When he closes his eyes he pictures Daddy, his smartly combed-back hair, his grey eyes, his neat cavalryman’s moustache. Daddy standing next to some tall, beautiful horse, lost in his own world, one in which he has never made the slightest attempt to interest his son. He has never taken Tom riding except for that one awful day with Vulcan the pony. Tweed suit from Huntsman – ‘I dread to think what that must have cost,’ Mum says, whenever Daddy returns from London with a new item for his wardrobe – and shoes from Lobb’s, always muddy. Tom has been getting a ha’penny to scrape horse manure off Daddy’s shoes and boots for years, to pick it out of the broguing, polish them up to a slick toffee sheen.