By the time they break for lunch, Jack’s palms are sore with fluid-filled blisters, his skin chafed by the billhook’s wooden handle, but he makes no complaint. Instead, he helps the farmer gather the rubbish into a heap. Jim sets it alight with a match and it crackles and pops as the fire takes hold. He roots around for a long stick and when he finds one that pleases him, he unwraps the Spam sandwiches that Muriel has cut for them, and skewers one on the end to toast over the building flames. When it is cooked to his satisfaction, he pulls it free, juggling it like a hot potato as he offers it to Jack, amused by his dubious expression. The bread is a little charred, Jack finds, as he takes his first tentative bite, but the overall effect is surprisingly tasty and soon he is enjoying the hot sandwich with gusto, grinning sheepishly at the farmer’s teasing taunts of ‘doubting Thomas’.

Jim leaves him alone just before four, charging him with completing the task while he returns to the farm for the afternoon milking. Jack works consistently, pausing every so often to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm, squinting up into the blue sky at a bird of prey he is unable to identify. As it wheels above him, he marvels at the unfamiliar peace of nature – the soft rush of rippling leaves, the warbling bird song, the thrum of bees crawling over the speckled petals of bramble blossom. For a moment, he is captivated by the fluttering dance of a butterfly, so blue it is as if a fragment of sky has fallen to earth to play upon the gentle breeze. For the first time since leaving Newcastle something settles inside him, filling the emptiness in the pit of his stomach, and the ever-present pain in his chest that has threatened to consume him recedes a fraction.

But it proves a false respite. Jenny requires no invitation to invade his thoughts, because she is already there, lingering in the dark recesses of his mind, a ghost he can sense if not see. Just as he is beginning to take succour in the new marvels that surround him, her spirit, unbidden, whispers into his consciousness and he finds himself thinking how she would have delighted in this bucolic scene. His vision blurs as an image of her tipping her freckled face to the sun burns itself into his mind’s eye. In an instant, with a flood of anguish and remorse, his quiet contentment is destroyed. He is grateful then that he is alone. As the sun becomes lost behind a cavalcade of cloud the raptor plummets upon its prey, and sobs wrack Jack’s body as he weeps for all that is lost and for acts that can never be undone.