John’s face was in profile, the same face it had always been. Handsome, large featured; the hair receding but still thick, stubble glistening around the jaw. Only now, there was something resigned in the slouch of John’s shoulders, the way his head was inclined forwards on his neck.

They stood for a moment, looking out, and then the girl said: ‘My hands are cold.’

John said, ‘Put these on, Lucy,’ and held up his gloves, and the girl replied: ‘I don’t want them,’ and swatted his hand away. A brief argument followed, the two of them bickering in a friendly, half-hearted way; an easy way that John had never had with Marnie.

The pony stretched one leg forward and leaned its head down to scratch its knee. The girl looked down and saw Will lurking beneath the wall. She stared at him for a moment as if trying to place him, and then grinned. It was a smile Will hadn’t seen in decades, the smile that Marnie used to smile before her mother died.

‘Hi,’ the girl said.

‘Hi,’ said Will. Before John had a chance to recognise him, he put his hands in his pockets and he turned and walked away in the opposite direction, along the edge of the wet grass.

42

The rain had blown in by the time Marnie returned to Severn Sands, great grey curtains sweeping across the estuary, and the tide was in too. She wouldn’t be able to go to the cave that evening. The sun was washed out, sliding down a glowering sky.

Marnie noticed the curl of wood-smoke emerging from the chimney pot as she pulled the car up on the drive outside her cottage. That meant that her father was there.

Rather than face him straight away, she pulled up her hood and hurried round to the stable where she found Lucy brushing Scrumpy, who was eating hay from a net. He whinnied a greeting to Marnie and she scratched his whiskery chin. Seashell watched from her stall, one back hoof tilted in a relaxed posture. Lucy had put the heater on and it was cosy in the stable; the smell of hay and horses, the rain pattering on the roof and windows. Tessy sighed, turned round three times, and settled on the rug in front of the heater.

‘How did you get on?’ Lucy asked as Marnie shook raindrops from her coat.

Marnie held up two blue rosettes, two second places, and then added them to the stash of ribbons pinned to the corkboard at the back of the stable, won by mother and daughter at dog and pony shows.

Lucy paused, brush in hand. ‘Well done, Tessy! Clever Mum!’

Marnie kissed her daughter’s cheek, then picked up a blanket and began to fold it, tiny shards of hay floating in the air.