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Lodge Howard had known, deep down, that he owed her: that despite his affection for their scruffy, gobby corner of north London, their time there was coming to a close. And would it be so bad, a fresh start somewhere new? Without the business to run he could really get into the radios, give it some proper time. And it wasn’t as though he went out much in London any more. He was practically a pensioner, for God’s sake. Not that he felt it.
    The Lodge was very handsome; even he could see that. The previous owner, a Mr Grainger, had sold it to pay for his care fees but prior to that it had formed part of the Manor House’s estate, although these days a conifer belt stood between its back garden and the Manor House’s remaining two acres. It wasn’t as old as the big house, and dated from the time when it was being remodelled; it had probably been intended for guests or, perhaps, the gamekeeper. It was built of warm red brick, with three pointed gables and two sets of ornate chimneys;  Virginia creeper covered a third of the facade up to the gable, green in spring but deepening to crimson every autumn before falling away to leave a ghostly tracery on the bricks. Their surveyor had advised them to get it stripped, but Kitty wouldn’t hear of it.
    She had gone to a series of local auctions when they’d first arrived, buying old furniture she wouldn’t have looked twice at in London but which, Howard had to admit, seemed to work here: a Welsh dresser, two battered oak chests, a semicircular hall table with spindly legs. She’d also picked up half a dozen pictures in old-fashioned frames to fill the extra wall space they now had: botanical prints, a county map and an oil painting of someone else’s ancestor who looked down disapprovingly at Howard while they ate. ‘It fits with the house,’ Kitty had said, shrugging. ‘It’s got history.’
    She was right. There was a proper scullery with a chipped butler’s sink, a coal hole with a lead chute cover by the back door and, until they’d had it repainted, a series of marks on the kitchen door showing the heights of what looked like generations of little Graingers – probably including the old man they’d bought the house from. But now it was theirs, and it was clear that Kitty loved it fiercely, and the countryside around it. She was happy now; anyone could see it. It was what she had always wanted.
    Now Howard stood on the drive in the dark, an empty tumbler in one hand, a cigarette in the other, as the parallelogram of yellow light cast on the gravel by her bedroom window disappeared and made the darkness press closer around him. He didn’t smoke any more, not really, but every so often he had one outside, after Kitty had gone to bed; and even without one he liked to come out for a moment in the fresh air before sleep. Now and again as he smoked he could hear the distant whine of a car changing gear far away.
    Did he love it here? He wasn’t sure. Manor Lodge was an achievement, certainly; something to show for all those years building the business up. It was proof that he’d made something of himself: he, Howard Talling, who’d left school with four O levels and had started his career as a jobbing roadie for bands nobody now had even heard of. He thought about the invisible village around him: the old people in their beds; the half-dozen families; the rich people who lived at the Manor House, who nobody ever saw; the unguessable farms. Did they all have a proper reason to be here, more reason than him?
    A breeze drew a sigh from the massed leaves of Ocket Wood, and two hunting bats rode a breath of wind over the house into Lodeshill. Howard saw them flit across the flung stars of the Milky Way above him, their tiny calls, like a wet finger on glass, inaudible to him as he slipped the cigarette butt back into the box and went inside.

3
    Wild garlic, dog violets, sycamore bud-burst. A cuckoo calling.

    Jack could cover twenty miles in a day when he wanted to,