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itself with a click. There was no other sound in the fragrant shade of the Scots pine.
    Except... except... another sound I hadn’t heard for more than a year. A favourite of mine, which I didn’t know I’d missed so much during my sultry perpetual summer in Borneo. A favourite sound of an English summer.
    The swifts. I peered up and up through the branches of the pine. High in the pale blue sky, the swifts were hurtling and screaming, screaming their lungfuls of screams in giddy, madcap flight.

Chapter Six
     
     
    ‘Y OUR FACE IS better.’
    I was in the kitchen with Juliet. She’d made me coffee and toast for breakfast and she was doing some baking. She’d taken two rings off her wedding finger and dropped them into an egg cup on a shelf behind her, and she was spreading flour all over the big wooden table. She’d already managed to dab her face with powdery smudges, and now she was starting to make her mixture in a glass bowl.
    I hid a smile in my mug of coffee. Everything she did, since I’d first met her dangling out of the tree with moss and pine needles in her hair, seemed childishly untidy and slapdash, in the way that a puppy or a very young kitten might leave its own trail of untidiness. But nice. I liked her and I liked the house, its carelessly comfortable, lived-in feeling. And now, in her country-kitchen, as she stood at the wide table and swept it with flour, she looked again like an elf or a pixie of the household, somehow too small for the place, but busy and quick and... and messy. I couldn’t help smiling, managed not to burst out laughing, at the way she pushed the hair out of her eyes and left her forehead ghostly with flour, her hair like a mist of cobwebs. And yet, despite the mess she was making, there was a cavalier expertise in her movements... she’d done it all many times before, and the end result, the scones she was assembling, would no doubt be delicious.
    She blinked at me, frowned. She knew I was amused. ‘Your face is better,’ she said, to change the focus of attention from her to me. ‘It was just a scratch. Could’ve been a lot worse, if you’d got some glass in your eyes...’
    She crossed the kitchen towards me and peered closer. She had flour on her lashes. ‘You’re alright now. But I don’t suppose you’ll ever get the windscreen fixed, will you? I mean, how do you find parts for a car like that? What year is it? Something from the 50s or 60s?’
    ‘Don’t worry about the car,’ I said. I finished off my coffee and toast and carried the mug and plate to the sink. I was going to go upstairs and try to engage Lawrence, or at least see if he was awake and out of bed. After all, it was a bright morning at the end of May, it was going to be a hotter and hotter day, and that was why I was there, in Chalke House in Lincolnshire, to engage a troubled teenage boy and be some kind of mentor for him. I couldn’t just sit in the kitchen watching an attractively fey, dizzy woman making scones. ‘Don’t worry about the car. It’s not going anywhere, not at the moment. And my father’s never going to need it again.’ I added, to smooth over any guilt she might be feeling about the damage she’d caused and also just to sound helpful, ‘You must have a car here, if you ever want me to run out and get anything…?’
    She’d made the scones and put them on a tray, into the oven. She said, ‘It’s round the back of the house. I go out as seldom as possible, just to do a big shop that’ll last us for weeks. I don’t want to go out, nor does Lawrence. And anyway, the car’s a mess.’
    As I rinsed my mug in the sink, she stood beside me and rinsed the flour off her hands. We shared the same flow of water from the cold tap. Our hands touched. Our hips touched. A bit awkward, so I thought of something to say, ‘I could take a look, if you like? Check the oil and water and stuff?’
    ‘No.’ She said it too sharply. ‘No, don’t.’
    She turned away. I watched her as