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of bands, did session work whenever he could get it.
    “A living? Half a living. You’re out at The Old Forge, ain’t ya? Wife and kids. Four kids.”
    “Yeh.”
    “You were here on Christmas Day. I saw you. Sat outside. Too scared to come in.”
    “Yeh.”
    Richie drained his glass and gave himself a refill. Almost as an afterthought he got up and carried the bottle over to Peter, splashing another measure into Peter’s glass. He put his cropped, bony gray head dangerously close to Peter and jabbed an angry finger. “You’re a fucker! A fucker! You hear that? A fucker, not speaking to me in all this time. Fucker.” He went back to his own seat, crashing back into the leather upholstery.
    Peter wanted to say that it takes two to make a silence work. Instead he said, “You feel better now?”
    Richie offered him a carnivorous smile. “Yeh, I do, actually. I feel much better. I’m quite relaxed now.”
    “Well, that’s good, ’cos I have something to tell you.”
    Richie blinked.
    “Tara came back.”
    Richie stared hard at his former friend. He said nothing. After a moment he took off his spectacles and polished them on the hem of his shirt, put them back on again, and looked at Peter some more.
    The two men sat in silence, sipping whisky.

CHAPTER FIVE
    It is strange and weird that I cannot with safety drink ten bottles of champagne; but then the champagne itself is strange and weird, if you come to that. If I have drunk of the fairies’ drink it is but just I should drink by the fairies’ rules.
    G. K. CHESTERTON
    We’ve never been back here since you went away.”
    “No,” said Tara. “Mum and Dad said you stopped coming. But I still love this place.”
    Peter shook his head. “It was too painful to come here.”
    The Outwoods is a hundred acres of oak, rowan, and birch, of holly and yew, trembling on the lip of an ancient volcanic crater and peering out over the Soar Valley, a timeless pocket of English woodland inside the boundaries of Charnwood Forest. Its rock formations contain the oldest of fossils. In its mineral soil rare plants flourish. The inspirational red-and-white-spotted fly agaric mushrooms spore and fatten around the gleaming silver birches, sucking sugars from the roots and feeding back minerals and water. The trees conduct and transfer energy around the woods. The land is a mysterious freak, where the air is charged with an eerie electrical quality, alternately disturbing and relaxing. The earth echoes underfoot.
    It is a place to go, Tara would always say, when there is a fire in your head.
    Or all of this is just fanciful talk and the Outwoods is just an ordinary stretch of ancient woodland. But even the most unimaginative visitor would have to be overwhelmed at one particular season of the year, because thrilling are the bluebell woods in May.
    “Did you never come back to see the bluebells?”
    “No,” said Peter.
    They were walking with the two hounds, just Tara and Peter. Genevieve had decided for Peter that she wouldn’t join them but would instead spend New Year’s Day at the cottage with the children.
    Tara wore a long woolen coat that Peter thought familiar, and a ridiculously long multicolored scarf that he had never forgotten. He was right: it turned out that Mary had kept all Tara’s clothes, wrapped in polyethylene, in the attic. Untouched, all these years. A polyethylene shrine in a dark and silent place. Peter would have burned them all.
    The Peruvian hat with its earflaps and tassels, though, was new. “Do anything special,” she asked him, “for New Year’s Eve?”
    “Stayed at home.”
    “Really?”
    “Quiet night in. Opened the doors at midnight. Brought the coal and a penny inside. Job done.”
    “Not like you. Last year you were out whooping it up. You didn’t come home for three days. Three days!”
    He stopped. “Last year?”
    She stopped in her tracks. Her mouth opened and then she quickly looked away. “I meant last time.” She picked up