“The top of the roof’s okay. The hole is in the side. Can you fetch me my penknife? It’s on the chest of drawers in my room.”

“No, I bloody can’t. You need to come down, Dad, you’re freaking me out. Can’t you see it’s dangerous?”

“Only comparatively.”

“Fetch your own penknife. I’m going to make breakfast. When you’ve stopped being a berk, you can come and join me.”

He stomps off. I clamber down, fetch my own penknife, and heave myself back up again. Crawling forward on forearms and knees—I want to spread my weight—I reach the pile of debris and drag out a broken rafter. The mound slides and topples. Even this minor collapse makes the most tremendous din.

My blade goes into the wood like butter. I pick up a second fragment. The surface feels strangely thready. When I hold it up to the light from the hole, I see that the wood is laced with white tendrils.

The only timbers I checked were those we uncovered when we were out on the roof. I should have come up here first. Examined every single batten and rafter and beam from the inside. Through the hole, the clouds sail indifferently by.

“Bloody shambles,” I whisper.

—

By the time I get clean and respectable, Tom has fried four eggs and made toast. He dishes up two plates and hands me a mug of milky instant coffee.

“I’m sorry about earlier, Tom. You’re right, I shouldn’t have gone up there.”

“Oh, why not?” he says with his mouth full. “After all, it was only comparatively dangerous. Don’t come running to me when you’ve only comparatively broken your neck.”

“I wouldn’t be able to, would I.”

He growls with exasperation. I tuck into my eggs.

Stan Rail is still unavailable. I ring Frobisher, who is also absent, but tell his secretary about these unexpected alterations to the architecture of Upton Vicarage. Tom spends the morning sitting by the range with Bailey on his lap, thereby availing himself of the only two sources of heat in the house. A further fruitless call to Stan Rail makes me wonder if I should try someone else farther afield. I trust Stan, though, and want to give the work to him.

I have a terrible suspicion that my roof is full of dry rot.

—

In the late afternoon, after some steady hours at my typewriter, I track Tom down in his bedroom. He’s sitting on the floor with Bailey, reading another of Yvette’s notebooks. La Géographie this time.

“Have you seen her maps of the climates of Egypt?” I ask him. “Arid, semi-arid, and tropical? Wonderful drawings of plants and wild animals.”

He’s silent. There’s a distance in his eyes that I’ve seen many times before, when he’s sunk in deep thought.