They have not met, these three, since their little Italian holiday in the lakes, which they now celebrate. They reminisce, and promise themselves that they should meet more often. Husbands and grandchildren and illnesses and affairs of state must not be allowed to sunder them. Why do they not arrange to take another little holiday? This year is bespoken, but next year, why do they not take a break together? Why do they not go for a walk in the country, as they used to do in the old days? In the old days, they had talked of a walking holiday. They have never done it. If not now, when? And where should it be?

One can go on such holidays in France, in Italy, volunteers Esther. They book your hotels and carry your bags. Liz says she has had enough of abroad, why not try England? Because of the pissing awful weather, says Esther. I mean, look at it.

They gaze out of the window at the dark purple sky, the thunderous lilac, the ghastly battered hanging pallid grape-clusters of the wisteria. It is beginning to rain again, heavily. Thunder rumbles in the distance.

‘Still, I do fancy England,’ says Alix. ‘There’s nowhere quite so good for walking. We always used to say we’d do the Devon Coast Path. Or the Ridgeway. Why don’t you all come up and stay with me, and we’ll redo the Pennine Way? Or we could do the Three Dales Walk. Ryedale, Dovedale and Glydale. It’s wonderful country.’

The idea attracts them. Yes, they agree, they will pursue it.

‘I mean,’ says Liz, ‘we’re not getting any younger. We’ll get out of practice, if we don’t go soon. We’d better not leave it until we’re seventy.’

She has forgotten all about her bad ankle. Despite her words, she has forgotten all about ageing and death. They have all forgotten. They may not be getting any younger, but they are not getting any older either. Time is an illusion, they can arrest it. Yes, they will defy the English climate, and make a plan. Their spirits rise.

As they sit there in a kitchen piled high with unwashed glasses and plates, they are not to know what the next year has in store.

They are not to know that the weather of England has changed utterly, and that the summer of ’89 will bring them blue skies and unclouded sunshine, an unimagined and unchanging radiance. They will be rewarded, as they walk along the green ceiling of the limestone and by the singing river, with the glory of Paradise. It will beat down upon them and reprieve them from mortality, as they sit on the short starred sheep-cropped turf and eat their egg and anchovy sandwiches, as they greet a bent old man by a gate, as they drink from a mossy stone fountain in a village square, watched by a lonely young Oriental furnished with a rucksack and a pair of binoculars. He will watch them with envy, the three women, as they laugh by the fountain, and drink the ancient water. Is he a Japanese Brontë scholar, or a Korean ornithologist, or a palaeontologist from Brandipura? Shall they invite him to join them? One might expect it to be Alix who will wish to take pity on his solitude, but in fact it will be Liz, who, briefly, will meet his eye and smile: for she will still be subconsciously searching, will indeed for ever search, for the lost Mitra Akrun.