And then she got really ill, and was admitted to hospital. And he felt terrible that she was gone, and then he felt additionally terrible on top of that that he felt some relief about being able to be in the house without wondering where she was and where her mind was drifting to and what the next thing would be that she would set fire to. After the end, people talked to him like she’d been snatched from him but, although he never verbalised it, what he felt was that she’d been snatched from him a long time before that. Which was another thing that made that final instruction – that last burst of clarity and passion, when he almost saw who she used to be for a moment – so startling.

There had been a lull between the wooden posts first going in and the lodges beginning to go up, but now the construction work had begun, it was happening quickly. Within a fortnight, eight A-frames were up. Within a month, twenty. The foam on the edges of the river became different, tinged with pinks and blues. He did not see David Cavendish on the building site and did not expect to. Cavendish had not been interested in the field as a physical entity before and would probably be no more interested now, with the exception of the financial side of affairs relating to it. Bob wondered about his motivation, what could possibly come of this investment that would make the ultraworld the rich quasi-agriculturist lived inside more pleasurable and decadent. The pursuit of money for such people, past a certain point, seemed to be most of all a strident denial of mortality, and the more they were able to abrogate the nitty gritty of life via technology, the more emphatic that denial became. They used their wealth to protect themselves with bigger cars, to build more secure fences and walls to protect their three-dimensional living spaces, to build a digital wall around themselves to protect them from other parts of life. Finally, they seemed to want to use it to protect themselves against the banality of death, as if the cushion of power they had gained would secure a deluxe executive afterlife for them. But despite all science had achieved, and for all the money many had put into researching the idea, nobody had yet discovered how to live forever. In the end, the dust that would be David Cavendish would be no more exclusive or elite than the dust that had been Sally, the dust he had scattered on the hillside facing him two years ago. Dust that had immediately been washed into the river by the combe’s heavy rains and, if some of it had remained on the grass and was now beneath the lodges, had surely now sunk deep into the earth.