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stand here until time dragged them from their mounts and covered them with dust.
    "Oh, shit," Cordell says. I come to a standstill beside him, our arms touching, and stare at the motionless motorbike.
    It rests on its stand a hundred feet up the lane. It has been left at the side of the road, its motor ticking over, wheel turned to prevent it from rolling backward down the slight incline. The hedge beside it is evergreen, tall and full, and Michael knew that none of us would be able to see it from the Manor.
    "It's just like he said he found it," I say.
    Cordell walks to the bike and looks around: the ditch, the hedge, across the lane at the lower hedge on that side. "We have to look for him," he says. "He may have fallen off."
    "And left the bike on its stand?" the Irishman says, lighting a cigarette.
    The others are here now, forming a line across the road as though unwilling to move closer. I walk up beside Cordell and help him look, knowing all the while that we'll find nothing. "Help us, then!" I say. The others spread out, climb a gate into the field, walk along the road's scruffy verge, head back downhill in case he has crawled that way, injured or dying.
    We search for half an hour. For some reason no one wants to switch off the motor. As the sun clears the trees to the east I turn the key, and the silence is shattering. "He's gone," I say.
    "Why did he leave the bike?" Jessica asks. No one answers, because no one knows.
    "Let's get it back to the Manor," Cordell says. "It might come in useful."
    "When we leave?" Jessica says.
    I look around at everyone, see the mixture of fear and confusion. "Let's just get back where we can talk," I say. This is the first time in six months we have all been away from the Manor at the same time, and it feels strange. It's as though by coming out here we have abandoned the place, if only for a few minutes. We all need to get back.
    Walking through the gates, seeing the Manor and the folly up on the hill touched by the sun, it suddenly looks like nowhere I have ever been.
     
    I go straight down to the cellar to see what we have left. It's a comfort thing. Everyone understands, and the Irishman accompanies me.
    "So what is your damn name?" I ask him.
    He runs his fingers along a shelf of bottles, slipping from label to label, name to name. "All I have left."
     
    I remember sitting in The Hanbury's garden in Caermaen drinking Marston's Double Drop, a golden ale with a fruity malt aroma, a bright and yeasty taste with a bitter, caramel finish, cool going down and calm as it dulled my senses, while all around us families ate basket meals and bickered, kids scraped their knees hiding beneath the heavy timber tables, mothers fussed and spread sun cream and fathers ruffled their sons' hair and smiled as their daughters ran off to find other girls, sit in the shadow of the hedge, play with their dolls and pretend to be mothers themselves.
    Ashley and I had been talking about starting a family, and I knew from the look on her face what was to come next.
    "Does all this noise bother you?" she asked.
    Yes , I thought. I like drinking in peace . "'Course not," I said. "Kids having fun. What better noise could there be?"
    She stared at me, then the corners of her mouth turned up in that coy Charlize Theron smile. She leaned in close. "You fuckin' wit' my head?"
    "Not your head, no."
    "Hey, later, we've only just got here."
    We sat in silence for a while, the noise breaking around us like a fast-flowing stream parting around stones. Children . In many ways I wanted that, but there was something sad and intimidating about leaving behind everything we had; the freedom, the lack of responsibility. We were fighting against the tide of Ashley's body clock and struggling against the persuasive storm of evolution ringing through our blood. Soon, we would go with the flow.
    I looked into Ashley's eyes, and she read me like a book.
    "It won't be so bad," she said. She looked at the kids causing chaos around