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warning.
    Leila nodded. ‘Now and again. They don’t gallop about as the sign shows. A lone one will just stalk across the road, very dignified and snooty. That’s why motorists need to cut speed. Let’s go through that gate and strike off into the woods, then we can work back in a circle.’
    The roundabout route took a good hour and a half, including a twenty-minute lounge on the sunbaked grass of a large clearing. Then they climbed steeply between silver birches and oaks to a wicket gate in a barbed wire fence. Beyond it were signs of a community presence. An asphalt path, shaded to one side by an avenue of tall lime trees, opened on the other to a sports field where a cricket match was in progress.
    â€˜Bless my soul!’ declared Charles as a fielder came streaking towards their boundary, hands cupped for a catch. ‘Surely that’s a …’
    â€˜A woman,’ Janey completed. ‘They’ve picked a mixed team. I wonder how well she bats.’

    â€˜We’ll never know. According to the scoreboard this is the second side in.’
    They strolled around two sides of the field to bring them close to a tiny pavilion. About twenty relatives and friends were sprawled in deck chairs or on the grass to cheer on what were clearly scratch teams kitted out in a wide variety of whites. On folding tables among the spectators were scattered the remains of a picnic lunch.
    The scoreboard, a clumsy, wheeled affair with slots for figured cards was being managed by a plump girl rising on tiptoes to record the runs. ‘Nineteen required to win,’ she shouted and the little crowd ad libbed with cheers or groans.
    â€˜Theess,’ said a tall, rangy young man in a battered panama, carefully placing tongue between teeth to achieve the unnatural Anglo-Saxon double consonant, ‘ees a crehzy ghem.’
    Leila smiled at him. He had a long, droll, sad-clown face with a hint of crescent-moon to the profile. When he was older, she imagined, nose-tip and chin would grow closer, with the wide, loopy grin trapped in between. A humorous Mr Punch with an Inspector Clouseau accent, almost too Gallic to be true.
    He rolled his eyes at the newcomers, waving an arm towards the field. ‘Can sohmwohn explehn to me pleess ow it works? I think per’aps there are some roools about the weather. But today it as not rhenned and so the ghem goes on forever.’
    â€˜It just feels like that, Pascal,’ said the plump girl briskly, and as a shout went up from the field, ‘Oh Lord, was that a four or a six?’
    Flat-bellied, in baggy cream flannels of ancient vintage stopping two inches short of his ankles, and topped by an immaculate white silk shirt, the Frenchman must surely be dressed for play. ‘How many did you make?’ Leila enquired of him.

    â€˜Do not ask. I just ‘it at the ball when I see eet and I nearly knock out the uhmpire.’
    â€˜He got forty-seven,’ said the plump girl kindly. ‘He went in as number five and he may have saved their day.’
    But he hadn’t. As they watched, his team’s score rose bravely by singles and a couple of fours until with a howl from the watchers the heroic schoolboy batsman was run out.
    Their last man stomped in. He must have been eighty but he squared his shoulders, hit out low and took a single, leaving the other batsman to lose the match with an easy catch to square leg.
    â€˜So who is playing?’ Charles demanded amid the applause and cheerful commiserations.
    â€˜Acrefield Way,’ said the plump girl. ‘We have this match every year in June, and a return one in September. One side of the road plays the other; the odds against the evens.’
    â€˜And which has won?’
    â€˜We did,’ she said, total partisan. ‘Evens, of course.’ Stumps were being drawn as batsmen and fielders came streaming back to surround them.
    Charles was grinning as he poked Aidan in the ribs.