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the table, where she seemed to be putting the strangest things in the compost bin. Felt-tip pens? Bubba was only just getting to grips with the whole compost scene —she and Tomasz had had more conversations about it than she would like to remember—but she was pretty sure you couldn’t compost a felt-tip pen. Still, they were all farmers round here. They must be greener-than-one, she supposed . But you’d think: Felt pen? Toxins?
    â€œOh, sorry,” she said to Georgie’s back. “Am I the first? What can I do? Chop something! Let me chop!” She looked around. It was funny, but it seemed, oddly, foodless …“Isn’t this lovely?” She and Kazia always had everything out by this stage in the proceedings.
    â€œChop?” Georgie turned round. She was pink from the exertion of composting all those toys and so on, her hair was on end—she looked, in Bubba’s opinion, seeing her in her home environment for the very first time, really quite bonkers. “We’re not quite at the chopping stage, thanks anyway. More at the—um—picking stage. Will, can you entertain…” her mouth opened, flapped like a codfish, but nothing came out, “for me, while I just nip out to the greenhouse?”
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    There were two things in this life that gave Georgina Martin a profound sense of existential contentment. One was walking around with a child—one of her own, obviously—tucked into her hip. The other was the growing and picking of her own fruit and veg, on her own patch of land, for immediate cooking by her and consumption by her loved ones, in her very own farmhouse kitchen. She wasn’t quite sure why. She didn’t really these days have the time required to think this kind of stuff through. She guessed it was to do with anchoring herself—vertically to the landscape beneath her feet, laterally to the generations that flanked her; establishing her position in the cosmos, her connections to the past and the future.
    Humming quietly, she walked back through the yard with a basket full of future lunch. She was completely engrossed in totting up the elements she had—pitch-perfect cherry tomatoes, purple basil, figs, plus tiny beetroot, thyme, shallots and garlic—and how they might be combined together to form a coherent whole. Those that can, cook; those that are completely hopeless need a recipe book—that was her philosophy. She remembered the blackberries that the kids had picked and the mascarpone in the fridge. Simple, stylish, delicious. Hamish could have the leftovers. Perfect.
    So she was actually, consciously, smiling when she looked up to see the cloven hooves of a flock of mutton dressed as lamb clip-clopping across towards her. Sharon, Jasmine, Heather—well, Heather was, to be fair, more mutton dressed as mutton…But who the hell was that with her? Colette? Colette, in her yard, done up like she was off to some sodding cocktail party…
    OK. That was it. She was the victim of some hilarious bloody practical joke by Bea, and she wasn’t putting up with it for another second. If they thought she was giving houseroom to every loser and loony with a kid at St. Ambrose they had another think coming. “Oi!” she was about to say. “Hop it! Bugger off out of here!” But Will, unfortunately, got there first.
    â€œHey, Heather.” Kiss, kiss. “Great skirt.” He was having a high old time. And: “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Will Martin,” he swung round with a gesture of openness towards the back door, “and you are very, very welcome.”
    Georgie thought she might actually hit him.
Drinks
    Jo’s bottom—not an insignificant thing, everyone agreed, but as that didn’t seem to bother Jo it didn’t seem right for anyone else to add it to their burden of worry—was protruding from the cupboard under the sink. Hamish’s little