Simone shifts restlessly, inspecting the palms of her hands.

‘I think we’ve got a decision to make,’ I tell her. ‘We either leave with the rest of them, or we dig in here.’

‘I won’t leave,’ she says, folding her arms defensively. ‘I won’t leave him.’

‘We wouldn’t be leaving him, we’d be leaving this place.’

‘I can feel him here.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I can feel him here.’

She sits on her knees among rows of pockmarked peppers and tomatoes. I notice for the first time that the vegetables are all slowly succumbing to blossom-end rot. I pick one up and hold it in my hand, its base sunken, its skin discoloured, and it’s only then that I realise the significance. The cause of her anxiety.

Each year she would harvest the vegetables with Phineas. They would sit together in the kitchen and squeeze the pulp into Mason jars. When the juices fermented they would sieve them through and collect the seeds, ready for the next season. It was Phineas’s favourite part of the entire process. He would label each jar with jagged lettering and she would keep them stacked in the pantry. The crop had been born from the last of those seeds, and now the heat was trying to take them from her.

‘It will be here soon,’ I tell her. ‘Do you not understand?’

‘Just go if you want to,’ she says. ‘Leave. Go on one of your drives.’

She turns her attention back to the vegetable garden. I stare at her incredulously. She seems to have resigned herself to her fate. As the rest of the country fights for its survival she instead chooses to stay and languish. She is sick, I tell myself. She is sick but she makes no effort, no attempt to get better.

‘Don’t do that. Don’t make me out to be the villain. I’m not callous. Do you think I want any of this? Do you think I want to leave?’

‘I think that’s exactly what you want.’

I grit my teeth so hard that I can hear them grinding in my skull. For a moment I imagine wrapping the garden hose tightly round her neck. I imagine her fingernails raking my skin, digging into the tops of my thighs as she tries desperately to relieve the pressure round her throat. How long would she suffer, I wonder? Would she apologise in her final moments?

‘I am not leaving,’ she says again. ‘I can feel him here. I feel his presence.’

‘Well, I feel his absence. It’s like a stain on this place.’

I leave her and skulk round to the side of the house. I walk along the stone path where Phineas first learnt to ride his bike. I pass beds full of plants slowly wilting in the heat, their stems hunched, their petals drooping. I turn on the spigot, kneel down and place my head beneath the freezing water. It soaks my hair and runs down the length of my back and for a moment the afternoon heat abates.