The changes in building regulations and planning permission introduced by the government in the second and third decades of the century had been devastating for natural habitats on the edge of the moor. Underhill – and, to an extent, its surrounding hamlets – had expanded rapidly, but a lull followed: nobody had built anything new around here for several years. This perhaps made people in the valley a little complacent, slower to realise what was happening with the lodges and the impact they might have. Martina Whittaker had been over to tell him there was a residents’ committee meeting scheduled to protest the development, to see if anything at all could be done at this late stage. He knew, because Sam had been over to invite him to the same meeting a day earlier. Bob said he would be there but when the night of the meeting arrived he found himself instead not at the meeting but on the balcony, a glass of whiskey in hand, watching the river. It was so full all the time now but tonight it was not angry. Its sound was more like the hushed chatter you get in an auditorium where people are waiting for an important announcement. Because the water level was now higher, more moss had begun to grow up the walls of the house, grey-green wiry wavy stuff. Autumn was happening and autumn never stayed long so you could more or less say it was winter and on winter’s darkest days the combe let in so little light, it was like living down deep in the gap between two sofa cushions. Days soon became all beginning and end, a couple of bookends you convinced yourself was life. The sun found it difficult to get down in the gap between the cushions and kill the frost there. To maximise the last of the daylight before it all happened, he opened windows and doors all over the house. The through-draught stirred up more hair. There was ever such a lot. It showed him that maybe he hadn’t really cleaned properly when he thought he had. Such a hairy place, the deep south west of the country. He thought of a film director, the only one he ever interviewed in his time writing for the magazine. Lived on a corner plot of land, a jutting elbow of salt soil, like a smaller replica of the far east elbow of the country where it was situated. Bald man. Immaculate house. No hair in it anywhere. But here, by contrast, you got hair on your walls, hair in your piano. One night in November there was a storm and Bob closed the windows. A long, sharp piece of concrete render fell from the roof, smashing outside the front door. If he’d been standing there, that would have been it for him, but he wasn’t. The A-frames withstood the storm. Martina Navratilova – the lady who’d invited him to the meeting; he thought that was her surname but couldn’t remember for sure – saw him when he was down the lane, looking for kindling. Her granddad had once punched a bull who charged at him. That’s what Sally, who’d heard the story from Fleur, had once told him. Martina Navratilova said they’d all been disappointed not to see him at the meeting last week. Whittaker! That was it. Not Navratilova. That was someone else. He opened the gate leading to the field. He didn’t like the latch on it: it was one of the ones with a coil, not yet bestowed with character by time. The wood made a nice sound but not the metal. He could see the highest of the lodges poking out over the hillside. It wasn’t the most ugly set of buildings. You could convince yourself it was all quite rustic and pleasant if you blocked out all the beetles and dormice it had slaughtered. It was quiet now, no drills or hammers or diggers for several days. Some men in hard hats still wandered about with clipboards, not doing much. As, back at home, he pissed into the toilet with the blind up on the window facing the river, he saw one of the men looking straight at him from across the water. It might have been Jac but it was hard to tell due to the condensation on the glass. The man continued to stare and Bob continued to piss and then the man turned away and right then Bob knew Bob had won.