‘I wonder what’s through here,’ she said, stepping through the door and out into a long room, full of letters and trinkets behind glass. I left her to it after a while, and wandered downstairs to the shop and then out onto the lawn where I sat on a bench and looked up at the front of the house. It was still drizzling. I put my hood up and felt damp creep into the seat of my jeans. There was more of an aura here, looking at the famous parlour from outside, where we would always be. I imagined the industry on the other side of the window, anger finding form, the money invested in the boy who was eclipsed by his sisters, whose achievements he never once mentioned in a letter, and which might have been kept from him. But of course he knew. I imagined being on the other side of the glass. Looking out at the bleached days of winter when the trees were stripped clean. The hope of the new bloom and the light. The feeling of being on the verge of some great unveiling, some beauty arriving to make sense of all the deaths and scarcity. Bitterness taking weight, itself and its cure, something to shape and send out.

*

I’m not very good at reading maps. Or playing chess. I have the ability to do both. But I’m impatient. I want to trust to instinct. So I move quickly. I lose. I get lost.

We were trying to find Wuthering Heights, surrounded by lambs and rams and broken walls. Emily was gingerly stepping around little balls of sheep shit. I wasn’t sure I knew my way back so it was best to keep going onwards. The sun had come up glorious. We had stripped off our coats and jumpers.

Then we came to a gate in a large pool of water. I was wearing the waterproof walking trainers that I took to music festivals; Emily’s mesh trainers would be soaked through in an instant.

‘I’ll carry you.’

‘You will not.’

‘Seriously, otherwise you’ll have soaking feet and will want to go straight back. You’re only a slip of a thing.’

‘I am not.’

‘You are. And I don’t like to talk about it, but I possess enormous physical strength.’

‘No way.’

‘Come on. We’ve gone on holiday to the nineteenth century. Gentleman are always carrying women over obstacles. Think of Persuasion.’

‘She slips and they become convinced she’s dead.’

‘But it all works out for the best.’

And with that I put a hand under one arm and one under a knee and picked her up.

‘Put me down.’

I slopped into the water. ‘Open the gate.’

She fumbled with the latch. I walked through and set her down in the dry.

‘That was assault,’ she said.

‘It was our dignity or your feet’s dryness.’