‘Come in where it’s nice and shady,’ she told Charlie now. ‘We’ve got a plate of beef leftover from Sunday if you’re hungry. I assume you’ll let me make a sandwich, in my vulnerable condition?’

‘I’d forgotten what a stubborn streak you have,’ he said. ‘A sarnie would be lovely, thanks. I’d take a glass of water, too. That bus was like a kiln.’ His head was angled slightly and he seemed a little pained when his eyes landed on her next. She felt as though she were a wardrobe being sized up for a doorway.

‘Charlie Savigear, you’re giving me that funny look again.’

‘Am I?’ he said, beaming. ‘It’s just nice to see your face again, that’s all.’

As they reached the porch, her husband’s head emerged above the sunflowers in the east field, skimming through the high stalks in his hat. He was still waiting for their petals to dry out and turn a shade of brown – according to the booklet he’d been quoting on their cultivation, which he carried round as though it was a holy text, September was the time to gather and extract the seeds. This didn’t quite explain why he insisted on inspecting them so often. It seemed to her that most of what he did these days was an adjournment of the work he ought to have been doing.

Since she’d told him she was pregnant, he’d been focusing his efforts on the farm, in the hope that they might turn the land to better use, if not a profit. Every morning, he’d been in the fields by five o’clock or fixing something in the yard. He’d transformed Charlie’s room into a nursery and made a simple cot from offcuts of good oak and a lovely stand to hold a Moses basket. He’d built a greenhouse on his own inside a fortnight and he hadn’t even let her paint its frame, claiming the strong fumes were harmful. Well, they’d grown the best tomatoes of their lives and now he’d got it in his head to make a set of cold frames for the winter, but she missed him in the draughting room. She couldn’t coax the same enthusiasm out of him for competition projects or phoning round their old contacts to scout for new commissions. Month by month, she’d leafed through journals they subscribed to and discovered opportunities promoted on their pages. Twice, she’d found him at his draughting board, in the beginning phases of designs, but when she’d asked him later how his concepts were developing, he’d given her two flippant answers: ‘It developed itself straight into the bin,’ and, ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you check the compost pile and see if it’s improved?’ The prospect of their child had bolstered him in many ways, except the most important: to their livelihood. He’d given up on architecture once before, and she was sure that he’d return to it again. But it was proving harder this time round to reassert her faith in why it mattered.