that were scratching at my boots as I walked towards a small copse that didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. Sometimes when I lived in London I would feel oppressed by all the billboards, shop signs, house numbers, street names, area codes, vans bearing legends ‘Fresh Fish’ or ‘Friendly Movers’, neon letters flashing on-off-on in the orange sky. Now I didn’t have the words for anything at all.
I came to a barbed-wire fence which separated the marsh from what looked like something farmed. I held the wire firmly down with the ball of my thumb and swung one leg over.
‘May I help you?’ The voice sounded friendly. I turned towards it, and a barbed prong embedded itself in the crotch of my jeans.
‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’ I managed to get my other leg over. He was a middle-aged bearded man, in a brown quilted jacket and green boots. He was smaller than me.
‘I’m the farmer.’
‘If I go straight across here, will I arrive at the road?’
‘I own this field.’
‘Well…’
‘This is not a public right of way. You are trespassing. On my land.’
‘Oh.’
‘You have to go that way.’ He pointed gravely. ‘Then you’ll come to a footpath.’
‘Can’t I just…?’
‘No.’
He smiled at me, not unpleasantly. His shirt was wrongly buttoned at the neck.
‘I thought of the countryside as something you were free to walk around in.’
‘Do you see my wood over there?’ he asked grimly. ‘Boys from Lymne’ – he pronounced it Lumney – ‘started riding their pushbikes down the track through the wood. Then it was motorbikes. It terrified the cows and made the track impassable. Last spring, some people wandered across my neighbour’s field with their dog and killed three of his lambs. And that’s not with all the gates being left open.’
‘I’m sorry about that but…’
‘And Rod Wilson, just over there, he used to send calves over to Ostend. They started with the picketing of the port at Goldswan Green. Couple of months ago, Rod’s barn was burned down. It’ll be somebody’s house next. Then there’s the Winterton and Thell Hunt.’
‘All right, all right. You know what I’ll do? I’ll climb back over this gate and head in a huge circle around your land.’
‘Do you come from London?’
‘I did. I’ve bought Elm House on the other side of Lymne. Lumney. You know, the one without any elms.’
‘They’ve finally managed to sell that, have they?’
‘I came to the country to get away from stress.’
‘Did you now. We always like visitors from London. I hope you’ll come again.’
Friends had thought I was joking when I said I was going to work at the hospital in Stamford and live in the countryside. I’ve only ever lived in London – I grew up there, or at least in its trailing suburbs, went to university there, did my pre-med there, worked there. What about take-aways?, one had said. And, what about late-night films, twenty-four-hours shops, babysitters, M&S meals, chess partners?
Danny, though, when I’d summoned up the courage to tell him, had looked at me with eyes full of rage and hurt.
‘What is it, Sam? Want to spend quality time with your kid on some fucking village green? Sunday lunch and planting bulbs?’ Actually, I had imagined a few bulbs.
‘Or,’ Danny had continued, ‘are you finally leaving me? Is that what this is all about, and is that why you never even bothered to tell me you were applying for a job in the sticks?’
I’d shrugged, cold and hostile in the knowledge that I was behaving badly.
‘I didn’t apply for it. They applied to me. And we don’t live together, Danny, remember. You wanted your freedom.’
He’d given a kind of groan and said, ‘Look, Sam, maybe the time has come…’
But I’d interrupted. I didn’t want to hear him say we should live together at last and I didn’t want to hear him say we should leave each other at last, although I knew that soon we would have to decide. I’d put one hand on his resistant shoulder. ‘It’s only an hour and a half away. You can come and visit me.’
‘Visit you?’
‘Stay with me.’
‘Oh, I’ll come and stay with you, my darling.’ And he’d leaned forward, all dark hair and stubble and the smell of sawdust and sweat, and yanked me to him by the belt that was looped through my jeans. He’d unbuckled my belt and pulled me down on the lino of the kitchen, warm where a heating pipe ran underneath, his hands under my cropped head saving it from banging