Who even was that goblin who’d sat in the comfiest armchair in Jane’s living room back at the beginning of the year? Bob’s face had softened unrecognisably since then. She sometimes even forgot he had a beard and certainly forgot that beard looked like grey wire, even though it did. As they became Sally and Bob – always Sally and Bob to all who knew them, never Bob and Sally – she was the one who often had to step in to stop him trying to do too much for others, to stop his gentle surface being trampled on. Back then she was in the cottage in Underhill with the piano, and he was in the long house on the hill five miles away, behind the wall, with the town address even though it was outside the town, and outside the town’s mains drainage network. He only rented a fifth of the long house, and a small courtyard adjoining it, which was a shame, because a colleague at the college had recently offered him a rescue turkey and he’d had to reluctantly say no due to space limitations. His house was an afterthought on the end of the long house, like something the long house had been meaning to say to support an argument but couldn’t be bothered to properly articulate. Its windows never seemed quite right. Newts came in through the tiny lean-to in early spring, the side of the house which had, two centuries before, been the site of a large natural pond. The other four fifths of the building, and a couple of acres of adjoining land, belonged to Anita and Jac, a couple in their thirties. Bob never asked what Anita and Jac did for a living but he fed their pigs and chickens and cats while they were away, which was often, and took delivery of their online shopping packages, which were countless. When they were home, he listened uncomplainingly through the walls to their shouting matches, their reconciliatory humping, their unrelaxing Ibiza chillout albums, Jac bashing his drum kit in their conservatory and the piercing garden tantrums of Sorrel, their toddler.