What Wade pictures is him and the Englishwoman hiking up to one of the flat alpine meadows in the mountains above his brown-shingled house in Mason.

The two of them tucking into a picnic of cold grilled chicken sandwiches with mustard mayonnaise on thick slices of fresh rye bread. Some cold beers. A few slices of apricot Danish from the bakery over in Marbleton. Maybe some crumbly Canadian cheddar and a box of hand-made chocolates.

Then both of them shedding all their clothes – his khaki pants and his peppermint shirt, her padded trousers and her sweater and her quilted waterproof jacket – the two of them together out in the open air in Wyoming on top of a mattress of tough flattened grass with the remains of their picnic around them; he, Wade Abello, doing everything perfectly – knowing, somehow, exactly what to do; the Englishwoman called Sibyl Hadley throwing back her head and yodelling with pleasure and delight and a low deep-throated shudder of relief.

With her hand curled around the money in her pocket Sibyl runs through in her head the words of her short but, she hopes, clear speech.

She goes over it several times, making various changes and corrections, hesitating over whether to use ‘je veux’ or ‘je voudrais’, I want or I would like, and then she stops.

The boy is in his hut now, leaning against the frame of the open door. He has finished putting up his umbrellas and is smoking a cigarette.

Sibyl looks at him, watches the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the movement of his lips, and slowly her fingers uncurl from around the money in the pocket of her coat. The folded notes slip free of her empty hand, and for the second time today her eyes fill with tears. She knows that it is beyond her to ask him, that she cannot possibly do it, and it comes to her then, to Sibyl, in almost the same moment and with all the clarity of a vision or a prophecy, as she sits alone in her rented deckchair on the beach in Trouville in the last week of an unseasonably cold August in the summer of her sixty-seventh year, that the only event now of any importance she can reasonably expect to experience in what remains of her life is likely to be her own death.

It’s a terrible thought – it’s a terrible thought and it is, you may remember, a windy day.