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damp on her bare feet.
These are the days when skies put on / The old, old sophistries of June, – / A blue and gold mistake
. She wasn’t entirely sure why those lines had popped into her head. November and still so mild. Deceptively mild, perhaps. Blue and gold, but a mistake. There were two rubber boots on the doorstep. She turned round and didn’t close the door. The man was sitting at the kitchen table as if he came for a coffee every morning. He had folded up the map and was calmly drumming his fingers.
    ‘
Bore da
,’ he said.
    ‘What time is it?’ she asked.
    He gestured over his shoulder with a thumb.
    She looked at the clock: thirteen minutes past nine. She couldn’t remember what time it had been stopped at all these weeks.
    ‘Have you been here for a quarter of an hour?’
    ‘Yes.’
    All she had on was the baggy T-shirt she used as a nightie. It came down to just above her knees. Was it too late to go back upstairs?
    The man stood up and extended a hand. ‘Rhys Jones.’
    If he hadn’t stood up, she could have excused herself. She pulled the neck of the T-shirt up a little and held out her other hand. ‘Good morning,’ she said without giving her name. She filled the coffee pot with water and coffee and raised one of the lids on the big cooker. She heard the farmer sit down again, the chair creaked.
    ‘Indestructible, that is,’ he said.
    She looked out of the window. ‘Milk?’ she asked, keeping her back to him.
    ‘Yes, please. Milk and sugar.’
    She raised the second lid, took a plastic milk bottle out of the fridge and poured the milk into a small saucepan. She picked the whisk out of the cutlery tray, which was on the worktop. She saw that her hand was shaking. ‘I’m just going upstairs,’ she said, not budging.
    The man didn’t react.
    ‘I’m going to get dressed. I overslept.’
    ‘You don’t need to on my account,’ said Rhys Jones.
    She faced him. ‘Wasn’t the door locked?’
    He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a key, which he laid on the map. ‘I have a key.’
    ‘Which you are now leaving here?’
    ‘If you’d rather.’
    ‘Yes, I’d rather.’ She turned away again to stir the milk with the whisk, feeling her bum rocking slightly beneath the thin T-shirt material. ‘There is cake. Would you like a piece of cake with your coffee?’
    ‘Lovely.’
    The coffee pot started to splutter. ‘Did you write the instructions?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You did it very well then. I can manage the Aga now.’
    ‘The oil tank’s been filled. It’ll last you months.’ He slid the map to one side. ‘Mrs Evans liked the idea of me having a key.’
    She poured the coffee into two mugs and added milk to one. Then took the cake out of the fridge, cut two slices and laid them on plates. She slid the cake and coffee over to him and, before sitting down and as inconspicuously as possible, held the hem of her T-shirt against her thighs.
    Rhys Jones looked like a caricature of a Welshman: a broad face, thick greasy hair, watery eyes, unshaven. She thought she could detect a faint smell of sheep, but it could have been last night’s beer. The nail of his right thumb was blue and torn. He finished the piece of cake in five bites.
    ‘You’ve been down with the geese,’ he said.
    ‘What was the arrangement you had with the woman who lived here before?’
    ‘Regarding the sheep?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Free pasture. Mowing and haymaking once or twice a year. And a lamb in autumn.’
    ‘A lamb?’
    ‘Butchered.’
    ‘And that lamb? I get that too?’
    ‘That’s right. You’re living here now. My sheep are grazing the land you’re renting. The arrangement’s the same.’
    ‘And if I don’t like lamb?’
    ‘You still get it. I can’t supply pork or beef, but the lamb is excellent.’ He stared at her. ‘Zwartbles.’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘They’re Zwartbles sheep, a Friesian breed. From your own country.’
    She looked at her cake and knew she wasn’t going to eat it.