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    unsullied by the experience of so many years as a teacher.
    Feeling more cheerful he got to his feet and set off again; he passed a farm and came to a

    T-junction where he turned left towards a bridge over a river. Beyond it there was the

    village he had been looking for. A village with a pub. Wilt hurried on only to discover

    that the pub was shut for refurbishment and that there were no cafés or B&B

    guest-houses in the place. There was a shop but that too was shut. Wilt trudged on and

    finally found what he was looking for, an old woman who told him that, while she didn’t

    take lodgers in the normal way, he could stay the night in her spare bedroom and just hoped

    he didn’t snore. And so after a supper of eggs and bacon and the down payment of £15 he

    went to bed in an old brass bedstead with a lumpy mattress and slept like a log.
    At 7 the old woman woke him with a cup of tea and told him where the bathroom was. Wilt

    drank the tea and studied the tintypes on the wall, one of General Buller in the Boer War

    with troops crossing the river. The bathroom looked as if it had been around during the

    Boer War too but he had a shave and a wash and then another apparently inevitable

    helping of bacon and eggs for breakfast, and thanked the old woman and set off down the

    road.
    ‘You’ll have to get to Raughton before you find a hostel,’ the old woman, Mrs Bishop,

    told him. ‘It’s five miles down thataway.’
    Wilt thanked her and went down thataway until he came to a path that led uphill into

    some woods and turned off along it. He tried to forget the name Raughton, perhaps it was

    Rorton, and whatever it was he no longer cared. He was in the English countryside, old

    England, the England he had come to discover for himself. For half a mile he climbed up

    the hill and came out on to a stunning view. Below him a patchwork of meadows and beyond

    them a river. He went down and crossed the empty fields and presently was standing looking

    at a river that flowed, as it must have done for thousands of years, down the valley, in the

    process creating the flat empty fields he had just crossed. This was what he had come to

    find. He took off his knapsack and sat on the bank and watched the water drifting by with

    the occasional ripple that suggested a fish or an undercurrent, some hidden

    obstacle or pile of rubbish that was sliding past under the surface. Above him the sky

    was a cloudless blue. Life was marvellous. He was doing what he had come to do. Or so he

    thought. As ever in Wilt’s life he was moving towards his Nemesis.
    It lay in the vengeful mind of a justifiably embittered old woman in Meldrum Slocum.

    All her working life, ever since she had entered the service of General and Mrs

    Battleby forty-five years before, Martha Meadows had been the cleaner, the cook, the

    housekeeper, the every help the General and his wife depended on at Meldrum Manor. She

    had been devoted to the old couple and the Manor had been the centre of her life but the

    General and his wife had been killed five years before in an accident with a drunken

    lorry driver; the estate had been taken over by their nephew Bob Battleby and

    everything had changed. From being what the old General had called ‘our faithful

    retainer, Martha’, a title of which she had been exceedingly proud, she had found

    herself being called that ‘bloody woman’. In spite of it she had stayed on. Bob Battleby

    was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that, but she had her husband to think of. He’d been the

    gardener at the Manor but a bout of pneumonia followed by arthritis had forced him to

    leave his job. Martha had to work and there was nowhere else in Meldrum she could find

    employment. Besides, she had hopes that Battleby would drink himself to death before too

    long. Instead he began an affair with Ruth Rottecombe, the wife of the local MP and

    Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. It was largely thanks to her