Around that time, he’d seen her going off to post the Mayhoods’ letters. It would’ve been a Friday morning, as he liked to save the niggliest of jobs till then and he’d been sawing off an overhanging branch along the driveway that had scraped their last delivery lorry. That’s how come he’d spied her from his perch up in the tree as she’d come out, not realizing he was there. A short while after, she’d trudged back again, while he’d been gathering the cuttings from the ground. There’d been a parcel in her hands. Brown paper and a lot of packing tape. No sooner had she spotted him, she’d shoved it in her coat. It looked peculiar. ‘Been ordering from the catalogue?’ he’d said, and might’ve simpered at her just a bit. She’d stopped right next to him, stared back without a twitch. ‘It’s a present for a friend of mine. I didn’t have enough on me to post it, did I?’ she’d explained. ‘It’ll have to wait for payday now.’ With that, she’d wafted at the air as if it reeked. ‘Phew, Geoffrey, that won’t do. A stink of booze like that before it’s even noon – you’ll get a reputation.’ All right, so perhaps he might’ve had a drink the night before. No more than usual. ‘I’ve not had a drop for days,’ he’d answered, flummoxed. ‘Calm down, I won’t tell,’ she’d said, and carried on towards the house. ‘You’d better not go spreading lies about me,’ he’d called after. She’d given him the shrug-off. But, since then, he’d taken care to suck a peppermint each morning on his walk to Leventree. No further wisecracks had been uttered.

Two weeks extra. That was how much longer it’d taken for the tractor to be mended than he’d planned for, but it hadn’t set them back too much. Ploughing had gone well this Tuesday. There’d been one rough moment when he’d felt the blades hit something solid early on – he’d feared it was a rock, so when he’d found a chunk of rotten fencepost jammed in there, he’d almost cheered; the thing had come out with a bit of pushing and the blades weren’t even damaged. Crack of dawn this morning, they’d been winnowing the seeds, with Florence high up on the ladder, dropping handfuls, watching all the chaff float westwards on the breeze, while Joyce and Charlie held the sheet out underneath to catch what fell (a task even a simpleton could do). And Mr Mayhood – well, he’d stood there in the yard and filmed it all for reasons that escaped him. Not a day went by at Leventree without that little wind-up camera being pointed in somebody’s face and Mr Mayhood telling them to act as though he wasn’t there. Which wasn’t easy, given that he had to clamp the thing between the pincers of his dummy arm to operate the focus with the left, and he kept cursing the contraption every time it didn’t do what he was asking. Hollis had begun to wish that he could drop it in a ditch.