The thought of the stream gliding through the woods with the shafts of sun cutting it, like long fingers through the ice-white mist, appealed to Will’s romantic side. His mind had been in free fall since noon yesterday, and he needed the calm of the river. As he crossed the A30 he noted another car had turned in behind him, and he pulled away without effort. He passed under the A303, and the road rose again before dropping along a slow bend to the valley floor, and home.

This was home more than ever at the moment. He didn’t have a new flat of his own in London yet, and he’d let Siân remain in his old flat, having paid the three months’ rent for her first when they’d split a few months before. A lot of his material self was still there; he’d have to sort things out more permanently and get a London base again. He couldn’t keep crashing at Alex’s place. But although his home was in Hampshire, had always been here along with his darkroom and his books and most of his music, there were wounds that hadn’t healed with Henry, his father, since the loss of his mother. He’d run away in June, from Henry and from Siân; he had to face it now and clean up all his relationships.

The autumn sun was now up, slightly over his right shoulder to the southeast, but as he breasted the hill he saw the valley below shrouded in a thick blanket of fog that the sun had not yet touched. “Season of mists” was putting it mildly; “blanket fog” was more like it, he thought—if more prosaic. From his vantage point on the bike, the road bent steeply downward in a gentle curve, disappearing in a wall of swirling white topped with yellow where the sun touched it. Will swiftly dropped the bike to a lower gear to radically reduce speed. As he did so, the white cloak embraced him in a bright luminous light, reducing his vision to a few yards in a matter of seconds. It was like being in the Chartres labyrinth again. He smiled quietly to himself as he stared into the mist from inside his helmet. He knew the route like the back of his hand: at the end of the hill the road crossed a bridge, then straightened past the fishing lake and on to a second bridge, passing some cottages further on and then into the village at a T-junction. An easy right toward their own end of the sprawling three miles of Longparish brought him to the house that had been in his mother’s side of the family for centuries, and he wanted to get straight into her books and her garden.