Seven months later, he crashed his car into hers at the half-blind junction outside the arts college where he went to talk about woodcraft one afternoon a week. Nobody was hurt and he admitted liability. He was so instantly attentive, so patently repentant and worried about the mistake he had made, that when he arrived at the driver’s-side window after running across the road to her from his abandoned, fishtailed hatchback, she did not instantly equate his face with the jaded peanut hogger of the previous winter, even though the mouth and eyes seemed immediately familiar. He recognised her more quickly and they exchanged details for insurance purposes but it was not until the following week that she strolled out of the wallpaper of his days and became lifelike. That was in the garden centre. The nice one, with the mossy hanging baskets and the old man with the calculator. Not the big one, with all the weedkiller and all the screens that barked at you to buy stuff that would change your life as a gardener. He had his headphones on, was half-listening to a podcast about the building of early tanks and wondering why ferns were so expensive when you could just find them everywhere in the countryside around here anyway, when he realised a woman was staring at him, mouthing a word, over and over again. He removed the headphones. ‘Car, car, CAR!’ she said. And now he saw her. He saw empathy and rain and second-hand wool and an excellently cantilevered nose and forbearance and independence refusing to transmute into misdirected fury. He helped her transfer the Trachycarpus she’d purchased to the boot of her car but he got the angle wrong and one of the branches snapped. By way of apology, he bought her carrot cake at the tea room next door. Here she began to learn that what she’d met seven months earlier had been not so much a man as a set of trying recent events: a winter where he’d been assailed by a lost job and a lost parent, the last one he had. Things were slowly improving for him now. His time was divided between various endeavours involving wood. He had found the time to read four more John Irving books since February. He’d thoroughly enjoyed three of them.