New Year’s Day, 1947

The following morning dawns colder still. The channels of condensation on the inside of the windowpanes in my bedroom have frozen fast. Even lying in bed in my clothes I shiver. Deciding to give up on sleep, I sling on a dressing gown and, grabbing a blanket off my bed for good measure, hurry downstairs in search of a cup of tea or a glass of whisky – anything to warm me up. I’ve always liked being the first awake in a house full of sleepers. I know that one day Hartgrove Hall, along with her third-rate furniture and mouldering pictures, her farms and rivers, will go to Jack, but in those moments before anyone else is awake, she is mine. Even when he is master of the house and married with fat children squabbling through the halls, he won’t be able to inherit these moments. As a boy on my first morning home from prep school for the holidays, I’d get up before it was light and revisit every room, staying long enough to throw off the sensation of unfamiliarity, the stranger returned. I’d stray outside onto the lawn in my pyjamas and bare feet, feeling the dew between my toes, and watch dawn fire along the river.

I hurry into the kitchen and find to my regret that I’m not the earliest riser this morning. Chivers is trying to shoo George and Edie from the kitchen. Before the war none of us would have dared to venture this side of the green-baize door. We may not have had the staff nor the wealth of our pals, but we kept up the pretence as the least we could do. The upstairs might have been very nearly as shabby as the downstairs, but we maintained the illusory barrier. It was expected, after all. Now, by silent accord, Jack, George and I simply can’t do it any more. There’s a shortage of bedders at Cambridge, so it seems perfectly ridiculous to pretend that I can’t brew a simple pot of tea. Standards have fallen, and Chivers and the General are the only ones who wish to see them reinvigorated.

‘Sir, miss, I believe you’d be much more comfortable in the morning room. I’ll ask one of the dailies to light a fire.’

Chivers attempts to conceal the note of pleading in his voice but he’s the last man standing in Camp Civilisation and it’s been overrun by us Champions of Informality, and he knows it.

George waves him off. ‘They won’t be in for ages yet, Chivers. It’s bloody freezing in the morning room and it’s toasty by the range.’

The aged butler sighs and retreats to the far side of the kitchen. It’s true. The daily girls won’t be in for an hour at least. Gone are the days when fires were lit before the family ventured downstairs.

‘Thank you, Mr Chivers,’ calls Edie. ‘It’s very kind of you. We don’t mean to put you out.’

For the first time, I grasp that she isn’t quite one of us. She doesn’t realise that her polite apology, her ‘Mr Chivers’, will be taken by the man as an affront to his dignity.

‘Tea?’ asks George, hunting for the kettle, and at that poor Chivers withdraws to his pantry, unable to bear witness to standards having slipped so far that one of the young masters is brewing his own pre-breakfast cup.

‘Oh, good morning, Fox,’ says George, spying me at last. ‘Bloody cold, isn’t it. I went for a piss and the bloody bog’s frozen solid.’ He pauses, remembering Edie. ‘Sorry.’

She waves away his concern and shudders with cold. Looking down, I see that she’s wearing several pairs of Jack’s old army socks and no shoes.

‘Here, have this,’ I say, offering her the blanket.

‘I’ll share it with you,’ she says and comes to stand right beside me, draping the blanket around both our shoulders. I’m acutely aware that I haven’t washed since early yesterday and I smell of brandy and fags.

‘Have you seen Jack?’ I ask.

Edie smiles. ‘He’s still asleep. He can sleep through anything. Bombs. Irate landladies. Arctic bedrooms.’

I glance at George and try to appear nonchalant and sophisticated, taking in that Edie has admitted not only to sleeping with Jack – which we suspected – but to having actually shared his bedroom here at Hartgrove Hall. I’m torn between dizzying, hopeless envy of Jack and intrigue. I hope she’s more guarded around the General or the morning will be very interesting indeed. It was jolly good luck that Chivers had made his exit before her confession or he’d have dashed straight upstairs and told him everything. There are no secrets between those two. They’re worse gossips than the old women in the village.

The three of us lurk beside the ancient range, watching the light ripen through the high kitchen windows. I want to go outside onto the terrace, watch the morning slink across the white fields and count the sets of footprints dimpling the lawn, then choose a journey to follow into the hills – a deer, or a hare perhaps – but I don’t want to break the spell. I like standing here with George and Edie, my back warm from the range fire, the gurgle and hiss of the boiler. It’s a comfortable quiet, an orchestrated rest between notes, and automatically I count the beats. Edie’s laugh punctures the pause.

‘Are you counting time, Fox?’

‘Yes.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘He’s always done it,’ says George, laughing. ‘Conducts us all like we’re a ruddy orchestra.’

‘I don’t. I’m marking time to something I hear in my head.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘No. It’s not the same thing at all. I don’t even mean to do it.’

Edie’s staring at me and she doesn’t find it funny. ‘What are you hearing now, Fox?’

Suddenly self-conscious, I don’t hear anything any more. The silence rings and the moment is quite broken.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ I say.

As I leave the kitchen I hear George making jovial remarks about the cold and the likelihood of my freezing my balls off. I wish that for once he could remember he was talking to a girl and not to Jack or me or some fellow in the mess.

—

Snow has fallen through the night and in the early light the gardens and hills glint a weird and unearthly white. The lake is frozen solid, its surface a flawless expanse. The slate sky stoops low, brimming with snow yet to come. The cold is fierce and I can hear the creak of ice. The trees are ringed with white, branches tinselled with hoarfrost. Her imperfections concealed by the fresh blanketing, the house and garden appear as elegant as a debutante. The white lawns are smooth and perfect, the weed-strewn beds quite hidden. The broken statues on the loggia appear to float, lost in some kind of macabre, injured dance.

I’m pierced by longing – if only the house could always be like this. When we were children, Jack and George used to tell me that before Mother died the gardens looked rather smart. Then the formal ponds had not been drained nor their stone linings smashed, but were kept stocked with squirming golden fish. The lawns were rolled and cut every other week. They teased me with stories of summer drinks parties on the loggia where Mother held court; the General had even been known to laugh and neglect to wax his moustache. It all seemed frightfully unlikely – a distant bedtime story – and I’d once made the mistake of telling them so, at which they’d closed ranks and stopped talking about that time altogether.

And yet perhaps it’s out of kindness that they don’t talk about her any more, not wanting to rub it in that they remember her and I don’t. I know they pity me for not having any memory of our mother. I was barely three when she died – from complications arising from diabetes. The truth is that I’m sorry for them. They know what was lost. They remember the house and those days before the fall. The present can only ever be some sort of sad imitation. For me it’s a relief not to be weighted with such sorrow and regret. I don’t miss her. I have no memories of grief.

At the far end of the garden, the ugly corrugated Nissen huts erected by the army are buried under a foot of snow so that they’re more like witches’ cabins. Mist hovers like steam above the river. I’m cold from standing still and, shaking the stiffness from my arms, I stomp across the lawn. I want to be the first one to mark it. It’s a childish satisfaction – like dashing red crayon across a white page. This morning a fox has beaten me to it; there are the slinking pads of his feet and here the tick-tick tracks of a bird. Then I notice footprints. Someone with small feet has been out before me this morning. I picture Edie standing in damp socks beside the range and I wonder whether it was her. I decide it must have been and choose her tracks to follow. It feels strange to trace a person’s journey rather than that of a fox or a hare, a little like spying. I suspect she wouldn’t like it, but somehow this doesn’t stop me.

Her footsteps travel straight across the lawn towards the shrubbery and then, rather than slip-sliding down towards the river, she veers sharply upwards towards the ridge of the hill. Her prints are even and steady – she seems to know precisely where she’s going and she hardly ever pauses to catch her breath or to stop and admire the view. After a mile or so, I’m surprised – she’s travelled quite a distance. I stood beside her in the kitchen watching the dawn less than an hour ago so she must have been out walking through the dark.

I trace her into the woods. Half the trees were felled for fuel during the war – but the oldest part remains. Great thick-trunked Durmast oak and slim alders stand silent amidst the endless white, masts of an armada adrift on an arctic sea. I like the sensation of being alone amongst the trees but this morning I’m uneasy. The snow has muffled the world – I hear a rook call echoing through the trees but it’s distorted and strange.

I nudge further into the heart of the wood. The glare of snow and the clear, leafless sky makes it weirdly bright, brighter than the boldest summer’s day. There are no berries left on the branches; the birds have picked them clean. It seems that all colour has leached out of the landscape and then I glimpse the streak of a fox’s brush, a smear of orange on white, as it slides between the trunks and vanishes. It’s more sheltered in the wood than out on the bare back of the hill, and the trees themselves dispense a tiny sliver of living warmth. The bracken and brambles grow more thickly the deeper I go and I struggle to trace Edie’s footprints. I lose her for a minute under the greenish shade of a yew, only to find her again in the well of a badger path, then she’s gone again. I cast about but can see no more footprints. It’s as though she’s walked out into the woods and disappeared.

Irritated now with the game, I turn for home, ready for a decent breakfast and a pot of coffee. I have an unpleasant sensation of being watched, that something is waiting out of sight. I hum a Bizet ditty to drive away the feeling but my voice is thin. I don’t want to look for more prints. I don’t want to know what I might find. I’m well on the way to frightening myself and I’m angry at how ridiculous I’m being, brimming with schoolboy terrors.

Suddenly I hear a crashing nearby and my blood is electric, stinging through my veins. I start to run, leaping over felled stumps and knotted roots, but I’m not as fast or as fit as I’d like. Yesterday’s brandy bubbles up into my throat and pools there, burning. I’m forced to slow, and then stop. I bend over, wondering whether I’m going to be sick. I hear the jangle of bells. Rushing bodies smash through the undergrowth. My heart thunders in my ears. Slamming myself flat against a beech trunk, I look up to see half a dozen men weaving through the wood, great pairs of antlers strapped to their shoulders, encasing them like a cage. Others join them. At the sight of me, they halt.

‘Happy New Year, young Master Fox-Talbot,’ says one, reaching up to touch his cap, but on finding only antlers he chuckles.

I remain leaning against the beech, quite spent, adrenalin seeping away. ‘And to you all. I’d quite forgotten you’d be coming. You gave me quite a scare, I must say.’

At that the men roar with laughter, clearly delighted.

‘It’s a good thing, to have yer all back in the big house, sir,’ says a cheery fellow, and I wonder whether our principal role is to provide entertainment for the village.

‘We’re jist on our way to the Hall.’

‘You go on. I’ll follow in a minute. Don’t start without me.’

‘Right you are, young sir.’

I watch for a minute as they weave through the holly and ash, somehow managing not to tangle their antlers in the branches, the bells strapped to their ankles crying out shrilly as they run. I follow them, emerging from the wood to see them careering down the slope, half men, half stags, racing through the snow. I’m struck with nostalgia for things I’ve never known. I yearn for a world unmapped, filled with hidden places and wild things, where there are still dark places concealed deep in the woods where people dare not go. A place of long-forgotten songs.

We all gather in the porch to watch them. Jack is thick with sleep. He’s wearing his overcoat but the blue stripes of his pyjamas are still visible underneath and the effect is natty. I expect he’s about to start another trend. His arm is draped around Edie and they’re sharing a cigarette. The General is washed, shaved and immaculately dressed in his uniform, although I can’t imagine why. Several girls and a couple of chaps have slept here after the night’s festivities and they shake with cold, bleary-eyed, in last night’s party clothes and borrowed boots, wondering what on earth they’ve been summoned outside to witness.

I’m restless with excitement. This is the first horn dance since the war. Or the first we’ve been here to witness, at any rate. I’m curious as to whether the villagers carried on doing it without us. It seems rather presumptuous to assume they stopped simply because we weren’t here to watch and tip them a few shillings. There are twelve men, six of them shouldering the vast pairs of antlers, and one holding an accordion. They stand on the white lawn in their hobnailed boots, half human, half animal, pawing at the snow, waiting.

At last, with a nod from the leader, the accordion player strikes up. It’s an uncanny tune and one I don’t recognise. The dancers pause for a moment, seeming to sniff the air before they move into the dance, slipping into serpentine patterns. The knock of boots on the iron ground is a counterpoint to the melody. The pace quickens into a clattering run, and they break apart into two lines, surging forwards and then back again, horns scoring the sky but never touching one another.

I study the leader, our gardener Benjamin Row, who sports the largest pair of antlers, which are so knobbled and ancient, so black and solid, that they look more like stone than horn, and I speculate about the beast who shed them. It seems impossible that such a creature haunted the woods in this green and pleasant county of smooth hills and dappled woods. Despite the cold, fat beads of perspiration speckle Benjamin’s forehead and drop onto the snow. The dancers shout and stamp, and the wail of the accordion oozes around us and drifts out into the morning, sinking towards the river where it will be carried out to sea.

The dance is hypnotic and strange. I turn to see what Edie is making of it all and I observe that her face is flushed, her eyes bright, her expression rapt. Jack is proffering her his cigarette but she doesn’t notice and, when she does, she bats away his arm. Jack stifles a yawn and I turn back to the dance suffused with irritation.

The lawn is a churned-up mass of grubby white as the horn-men alternate back and forth in their two lines, grunting and red faced from exertion. I watch them surge and fall and it seems to me that they’re slipping forward and then further back in time, back and back towards the beginning of things. I picture the woods rise up and bloom across the hills, until the back of Hartgrove Hill is darkly forested. The ground cracks open to swallow up the few houses and the pins of light from their windows blink into nothingness. The music is a heartbeat that thrums inside me.

Then I see that the dancers have stopped and the accordion is no longer playing and the General is signalling for whisky, while I can still hear nothing but the music and I know I shall have no peace at all until I’ve written it down. I excuse myself and race upstairs to sprawl on the bed with a pad of manuscript paper as the music spews forth and my hand cramps around my pen and then I’m finished and at last the room is quiet. In relief, I close my eyes. There is only the faintest of aches behind them.

I return downstairs. The dancers mill in the great hall, swigging whisky and making conversation, and they no longer seem otherworldly. The smell of sweat mingles with woodsmoke and ever-present mildew. They laugh uproariously at some joke of Jack’s but Edie isn’t listening, she’s watching me. I walk over to her side.

‘Where did you vanish to?’ she asks.

‘It’s an odd tune. Not one I know, so I had to write it down.’

She studies me for a moment. ‘Is that something you do often? Collect songs?’

‘From time to time.’

She makes it sound as if I’m a butterfly hunter and I suppose I am in a way, a hoarder of melodies. When I find one I don’t know, I have to catch it, pin it into my book and fix it there. I don’t need to look at it again once I have it. Writing a melody down, I transcribe it twice – once into my manuscript book and once into my memory. The horn-dancers’ song will always be with me now.

‘Will you show me later?’

‘If you like.’

I shrug, feigning indifference, but I’m perfectly thrilled. No one’s been remotely interested in my song-scribbling habit before.

—

After dinner I prowl beside the fire, eager to go to her, but no one may ever leave the dining room and return to the ladies before the General declares we may. Jack attempted it once but even he was rebuked. I have stashed the manuscript book in the cubbyhole in the ladies’ sitting room that we still call the Chinese room even though the stencilled chinoiserie wallpaper was spoiled a decade ago and the sole Oriental item remaining is a japanned cabinet that is missing a door. We no longer use the drawing room after dinner when we are so few. It is too large and on bitter evenings frost gathers on the inside of the windowpanes, stalking along damp patches on the wall.

Jack is yawning and only George pretends attention as the General recounts a gory battle during the second Boer War that we’ve all heard before. I wonder how they can bear his nostalgia for Boy’s Own adventures after all they’ve seen. Again I wish they’d furnish me with the details. I feel peevish and the distance of the years between us grates. I feel much as I did when I was a boy of eight, and they at the grand ages of sixteen and thirteen sloped off to the barn to get blind drunk on filched cider, leaving me as their resentful lookout.

At last, piqued by our indifference, the General slams down his brandy glass and, muttering oaths of disappointment under his breath, stalks to the door. Chivers opens it for him, and I feel the echo of his disapproval as we file out. Edie waits alone in the Chinese room; she’s reading but puts her book aside as we enter. It does not occur to the General that keeping her in purdah for nearly an hour, while he regales us with stories of his youth, was rude. I spy my manuscript book in the cubbyhole beside the fireplace and I’m all eagerness to show her but it’s Jack at whom Edie’s smiling with simple pleasure. She lets him kiss her cheek but when the General gives a cough of displeasure Jack kisses her again, this time on the mouth. Edie squirms and gently pushes him away.

‘Yes, yes, righto,’ declares the General. He squats on the edge of a low chair, his back ramrod straight. I’ve never known anyone who makes after-dinner relaxation look quite so uncomfortable. ‘I suppose you travelled about a bit during the war, Miss Rose.’

She pulls Jack down to sit beside her and neatly crosses her ankles. ‘Yes, a fair bit.’

‘Did you get east? Cairo? Luxor?’

‘I went to Cairo twice.’

‘Palestine?’

Edie nods.

‘God, it’s a bloody mess over there. Skulduggery, murder. Civil war.’

‘I thought you enjoyed a decent war. It’s your favourite spectator sport after the Badbury point-to-point. You could put a fiver on each way,’ says Jack.

I glance at him in alarm, presuming he drank too much at dinner, but to my surprise he seems quite sober.

George looks worried. ‘Steady on, old chap,’ he mutters.

The General chooses to ignore Jack and simply carries on. He regards a second voice in a conversation as unnecessary. Company is present merely to provide him with an audience.

‘It’s the ingratitude of the bloody Jews that galls me. Bloody ingratitude.’

‘What would you have them be grateful to us for?’ asks Jack sweetly, and with that I know the conversation is becoming dangerous but I’m not quite sure why.

Edie places her hand firmly on Jack’s knee. ‘Would you mind ringing for a glass of water, darling? I’m terribly dry.’

While Jack reaches for the bell to ring for Chivers, Edie turns to me. ‘May I take a look at the song?’

To my chagrin, I grasp that she’s asking only in order to alter the course of the conversation. They all watch as I pull out the manuscript book from the cubbyhole. Edie shuffles along the sofa to make room, patting the spot between her and Jack. I squeeze in, jammed between them both, and Edie opens the book. It’s a battered, leather-bound volume that was once blue but has faded to grey.

‘There are heaps of songs in here,’ she says.

‘Nearly a hundred.’

‘How long have you been collecting songs, Fox?’ she asks.

‘Ages. I have to write down a song if I haven’t heard it before, otherwise it buzzes around like a mosquito in my brain. My problem isn’t remembering tunes, it’s trying to forget them.’ I shift on the sofa, suddenly self-conscious, and wish the others weren’t here. ‘I always keep an eye out. Or rather an ear, I suppose. Gather up what I find.’

Edie laughs. ‘You make it sound as if songs simply sprouted like berries on a hedgerow and sat there until you plucked them and popped them into your book.’

I laugh. I never really envisioned anyone else being interested in my song habit, far less a woman. Yet her enthusiasm appears sincere, and little spots of colour are daubed on each cheek. Jack fidgets and yawns, and George fiddles with the fire. I wish they’d jolly well leave us to it. Edie leafs through the pages, turning them carefully as though each one is a precious, fragile thing. She pauses, running her finger along the last.

‘I’ve never heard this one before. It’s the one from this morning?’

I nod.

‘Well, I’ve sung hundreds of folk songs. I even recorded a few—’

‘I know. I have some of your recordings.’

She smiles. ‘Of course you do. Anyway, I’ve not come across this one until today. I don’t know, but I think it’s possible that no one’s collected it before.’

I have a tingle in my belly; the satisfaction of discovery. Like an anthropologist rummaging through the jungle for lost tribes, I’ve found something ancient, as yet unrecorded and unfixed.

Edie smiles at me and returns the book. ‘It’s an odd tune. Tugs at one. It’s always nice to have made a find, don’t you think?’

‘He’s a clever old thing,’ says Jack. ‘Much brighter than the rest of us. None of us is musical in the least.’

‘Mother sang,’ says George.

No one speaks. I’m suddenly aware of the crackle and spit of logs on the fire. The General stiffens and blinks. Once. Twice. Jack grips Edie’s hand more tightly.

The silence jangles.

‘She sang to me,’ says George, insistent now. ‘And to Jack. And Little Fox.’

‘What did she sing?’ I ask and it’s suddenly desperately important that I know.

George shakes his head. ‘Can’t remember. I don’t have a head for tunes.’

It’s splendid to be at home from Cambridge for the long summer vac. Three blissful months at Hartgrove Hall. Most of my pals are staying on in digs for an extra few days to drink and punt but I couldn’t. Today is Mother’s birthday picnic. We hold it every year. Apparently this is what she always chose for her birthday treat – a picnic under the willows by the River Stour. The General would strip off and go for a bracing swim amidst the ducks and the waterweeds, while the rest of us cheered him on from the bank.

I wonder whether Mother sang to us then and, if so, which songs. I don’t remember any of it, but Jack and George are quite sentimental about the whole thing – as much for the man our father used to be as anything else. Chivers has winkled out an elderly cook from somewhere, and we ask her to make us up a hamper with cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, seedcake – Mother’s favourite, apparently – and a bottle of hock, to which she was also partial. It’s always a jolly afternoon. The General never comes. We invite him with careful politeness and there’s inevitably a dreadful moment when we worry that this will be the one time he accepts but of course he doesn’t.

George and I check the hamper in the kitchen. It’s stuffed with all the usual goodies and a pound of early cherries, glossy and black. Jack isn’t here. We’re to collect him and Edie from the station at a quarter to one. It’s the first time there’s been anyone other than the three of us. Jack sent us a cable last night: ‘WILL BE ON THE TWELVE FORTY-FIVE STOP BE A SPORT AND PICK ME UP STOP BRINGING EDIE STOP’. He never telephones or writes, he inevitably selects the most expensive form of communication much as he chooses the best wine or cut of beef on the menu. I’m pleased Edie’s coming and don’t mind that he didn’t consult us first. A little too pleased if I’m honest. I can’t tell whether George minds or not.

George pokes at a pork pie wrapped in wax paper. ‘I’m hungry already.’

I nudge him away and rewrap the pie.

I study him surreptitiously. He’s chosen not to find a job and instead has been attempting to fix the most desperate of the damage to the house – it’s a forlorn task, akin to sticking his finger in a dyke, but I’m taken aback by his skill. There’s now a hefty slab of silver oak as a mantelpiece in the great hall, and he’s carved three running foxes into the wood. They’re both crude and beautiful. I found him in the attic, gathering up all the old photographs of the house and estate, scrutinising them for God knows what. He has piles of ancient almanacs and farming magazines in his room – some of them dating from before the First World War. I can’t think what use he can put them to. This morning I watched from my window as he hurried across the lawn, I presumed returning from an early walk, but now I wonder whether instead he’d been out all night. He never talks about pals or girls and I hope he’s happy. I can’t ask. It’s not the sort of thing we do.

In the distance the church clock chimes the half-hour.

‘Shall we?’

I nod and together we shoulder the hamper into the boot of the car. It’s already hot and my shirt sticks to my back. The ancient and magnificent magnolia tree on the front driveway is still in bloom, the flowers huge and blowzy, with fleshy pink petals – like fat, tarty girls in ball gowns. I’ve always liked it. The General would prefer it chopped into firewood. I pick fallen and browning petals from the car’s paintwork and, somehow unable to discard them, shove them into my pocket.

‘Bags I drive,’ I say, leaping into the driver’s seat before George can object.

I drive too fast because it’s a gorgeous day and I’m filled with happiness at the thought of the picnic and seeing Jack whom I haven’t seen for simply ages. And Edie. I bat her name away and swerve around a pothole. George grips the door but doesn’t tell me to slow down. It’s a ten-minute drive to the station but we make it in eight and I feel a surge of triumph.

‘Do you want to go and meet them? I’ll wait with the car,’ says George.

‘Righto.’

I leap out of the car and am jogging onto the platform as their train pulls in, and I wish for a moment that I’d picked some of the cowslips sprouting on the lawn to present to Edie. It dawns on me how daft that is – as if she’s a visiting dignitary or my girl or something – and then they’re here and Jack’s thumping my back and Edie’s standing behind him, leaving space for the effusion of our reunion, and she’s even prettier than I remember in her yellow summer dress and her crooked half-smile and I almost can’t breathe.

‘Hello, Fox,’ she says. ‘You can kiss me if you like.’

I don’t. I glance at my feet and mumble, ‘Hello, Edie. Jolly nice to see you.’

We return to the car and to my exasperation I see that George has nipped into the driver’s seat. Sneaky so and so. Jack and Edie climb into the back and, as we hurtle along the narrow lanes and I glance back, I notice how Edie slithers into Jack as we take each bend. George catches me looking and quickly I turn away.

We park near a tumbledown mill. George and I heave the basket between us, leaving Jack and Edie to go ahead with the piles of blankets and scout a spot to sit. It’s the first hot day of the year and the ground still has the soft bounce of early summer. The grass is long and thick. A cricket ticks in steady crotchets. The river sloshes in easy curves, gnats misting the surface. Several cows watch us, bored, flicking flies with mucky tails. We halt in a field of dandelions. There are thousands upon thousands of them, constellations of vivid, sickly-yellow flowers. Jack flops down and instantly his shirt is tarnished with pollen.

Methodically, George unpacks the picnic onto a blanket. Edie tries to help but he waves her away. We eat in lazy silence until there is nothing left, passing the bottle of hock between us. As a concession to Edie we brought glasses but we entirely forget to use them and she doesn’t complain. The hock thrums in my head and I’m still thirsty. We should have brought water to drink in this heat. Jack lies back amongst the dandelions, his hair so gold in the sunlight that the flowers look gaudy beside him.

‘Lie here with me,’ he says to Edie but she shakes her head, lolling in the shade of a willow. She’s removed her stockings and I can’t help noticing that her white skin is almost translucent. There is a fine fuzz of pale hair on her legs. Jack reaches over and tickles her foot. He gazes at her with something uncomfortably like adoration. I look away.

‘How old would your mother have been today?’ she asks and I’m taken aback. We come here every year on Mother’s birthday but we never speak about her. We eat. We lark about and perhaps take a dip in the river and then we return home. I glance at George and register his surprise but he doesn’t seem to mind.

‘Fifty-two,’ he says. ‘She would have been fifty-two.’

I don’t wish to talk about Mother as that would mean I’d need to pretend to be sad. The sun is too hot and the sky is glazed in a too-flawless blue for sadness. Jack clearly feels the same.

‘And how old is your mother?’ he asks Edie, propping himself up on his elbow. ‘And when does she get the pleasure of meeting me?’ he adds, turning it, as he does everything, into a joke.

Edie smiles and digs in her bag for cigarettes but Jack continues to stare at her. It occurs to me that, beneath the teasing, he’s quite serious. He wants to meet her family, I think. He hasn’t yet and he wants to.

‘I’m not telling you how old my mother is, because it shows you how old I am,’ she says archly, plucking a dandelion and flinging it at him.

He loves her, I decide, but he doesn’t really know her at all. I thought loving someone entailed knowing every little detail about them – but then perhaps that’s not love, merely familiarity. I’d like to be more familiar with Edie, I think, and then, embarrassed, I feel heat rise into my cheeks. That bloody hock. I check my watch – it’s nearly five, we’ve been here for ages.

‘I have to go soon,’ I tell the others.

‘Whatever for?’ asks Jack.

‘There’s an old bloke nearby who knows a good many songs, apparently. I’ve been invited to tea.’

Edie leans forward, hugging her knees. ‘Found anything good lately?’

‘A few. Mostly around Cambridge but I want to hear the old Dorset songs again. Those are my favourites. Nothing sounds half so pleasant as the songs of home.’

She studies me for a moment and then asks, ‘Can I come with you?’

‘I don’t see why not. Can’t think why the old chap would mind. We should get going, though.’

As Edie starts to put her stockings back on, Jack sits up and grabs her ankle. ‘Don’t leave me. I shall be bereft without you.’

She shakes him off. ‘Stop it, Jack, you’re being a pest.’

He flops back in the grass, unconcerned. ‘Come for a swim first.’

‘Absolutely not,’ I say. ‘We simply don’t have time.’

—

Dripping wet from our swim, we hurry across the fields in bare feet. I wonder how it is that Jack invariably gets his own way. It’s a rare and unacknowledged gift. In the pub after several pints we sometimes debate what special power we’d like best and I always thought it would be super to fly, but really I think it would be better to always get my own way.

‘Slow down, Fox,’ says Edie. ‘You’re going awfully fast.’

‘Sorry.’

I wait for her to catch up. Her wet hair hangs loose in a plait. I’ve never seen her with her hair down and she appears younger, girlish. Her movements are precise and balletic and she possesses a careful self-constraint as if everything she utters is weighed and measured first. As I’ve got to know her better, I’ve found to my surprise that she’s not quite the absolute stunner I’d imagined. Of course she’s attractive, and in photographs she’s made up to be beautiful. I’ve noticed too that on meeting strangers she always behaves as though she is a lovely woman to whom they ought to be paying court and, somehow, without fail they do.

This afternoon any make-up has been washed clean away by the swim and she seems less contained and for once unselfconscious as she strides through the grass. She plucks the petals from a daisy, scattering them on the verge. There is a tiny streak of mud on her cheek and I don’t tell her, knowing that, as soon as I do, she’ll seize her pocket handkerchief and scrub it off, self-conscious again. I prefer her like this.

We’re to walk to Christopher Lodder’s cottage and afterwards back to the Hall. It’s a longish walk – nearly seven miles all told – but Edie assures me she can manage it. Also I don’t want Jack appearing at the cottage after an hour or whenever he’s bored, to collect us in the car. He never can keep time. Things happen precisely when he wishes them to. I make an effort to slow my pace again – I have the itch of excitement I always get when I’m off song collecting.

‘When we were boys George pressed leaves, orchids and butterflies between the pages of his schoolbooks so he could take little bits of Hartgrove with him. With me it was songs so I could listen to home. There’s nothing better for remembering. The songs from a place, the ones that grow there and have been sung down the generations, those are the ones that capture the essence of it. They’re like the specific smell of river mud, except that when you’re away from the river you can’t quite recall it precisely.’

‘And Jack? What did Jack take?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing, Jack never gets homesick, as far as I can tell. Wherever he goes, he’s the centre of it all, magnificently present, never pining for anywhere else.’

She makes no reply, knowing it to be true.

‘The tunes are often the same but, if you listen carefully enough, you spot a variation in the last verse and the words inevitably change from singer to singer. The best folk songs are living things, shifting with each performance. You can never really catch them.’

‘But you still try?’

I laugh. ‘Of course.’

Old Lodder doesn’t mind that I’ve brought Edie. In fact, it rather perks him up. He looks right past me but ushers her inside to the coolness of the cottage, seating her in the best chair by the window with a view of the vegetable patch and its row of exquisite green lettuces squatting in the earth. In the distance the river glints and I can hear goldcrests squabbling in the bulrushes.

Lodder is so tall and angular, it’s a wonder he fits into the low cottage – he’s hunching as he disappears into the kitchen concealed behind a fading curtain. It’s cramped and dark in the parlour, the walls painted brown in the Victorian fashion of seventy years earlier and the low beams stained darker still. There’s a milking stool, two good chairs, a solid and handsome dresser on which is displayed a hotchpotch of mismatching china. The only picture on the wall is a photograph of a stern, austere woman buttoned into a high-necked gown. I can’t tell whether it was his grandmother, mother or wife. The room smells very strongly of cabbage. An overflowing bucket of vegetable peelings and slops perspires nicely beside the range. To my excitement, there is no wireless and I’m hopeful of finding a good song hoard, full of old tunes, not just popular hits. I arrange my manuscript pad on my knee and sharpen my pencil.

‘What happens next?’ whispers Edie, conscious of Lodder busily brewing tea like a magician behind the partition curtain.

‘I’ll ask him to sing us some songs. Hopefully there’ll be something we haven’t heard before and, if there is, I’ll write it down.’

‘Do you write down the melody or the words?’

‘I try to do both. I sometimes get in a bit of a muddle.’

‘Let me help. Give me a page and I’ll try to scribble down the words. I don’t think I could manage the tune accurately enough. I don’t have perfect pitch like you.’

Before I can ask how she can tell that I have perfect pitch – which I do; it’s a source of both satisfaction and irritation – Lodder reappears with a tea tray laden with chipped teacups and a saucer of stale biscuits. Dutifully we sip. He sits on the milking stool apparently perfectly comfortable, his spindly legs folded up beside his ears like a daddy-longlegs.

‘This one’s fer you, missy,’ he says, grinning at Edie, and he launches into a rendition of Edie’s most celebrated hit, ‘A Shropshire Thrush’. I sag and rub my eyes. It was a mistake to have brought her with me. We listen politely. It never does to interrupt.

‘That was very pleasant, Mr Lodder,’ I say.

‘An honour to sing it fer the lady,’ he declares, clearly pleased as Punch with himself. ‘I never thought I’d see the day. Never thought it.’

‘But we’d love – Miss Rose would love to hear one of your own songs. Your nephew told me that you know some Dorset folk songs.’

He frowned. ‘What you want to hear that stuff fer?’

Edie leans forward. ‘I’d like to hear something. I’d like it very much.’

He pauses, scratches his nose. ‘All righty. Fer the lady then.’ He refolds his legs and then sings in a clear baritone.

The notes flutter out of the open window and I hear the goldcrests fall silent for a moment as though they’re listening too. There’s a dignity to him as he sings. He nods once to Edie and then seemingly forgets her, forgets there is any audience at all; he’s alone with his song. It’s unmistakably English, like the scurry of oak leaves shaking in the rain. As the sound floods the gloomy little parlour I’m filled with a sense of rightness as though he is singing my own thoughts back to me. I’ve heard variations on this song before. However, it’s not its familiarity that is raising the hairs along the back of my neck, but the shiver of loss and longing, and the knowledge that I’m listening to a melody sung down the generations. In his voice I hear a score of other voices converge and there is a shining moment when I can see both forwards and backwards, when time rocks to and fro upon the empty hearth.

—

Afterwards we stroll outside. I’m as tickled as anything. I have two new songs for my collection. I expect they’re probably variants of other more common songs but it doesn’t matter. I like the tune of one in particular and I know it will rattle around inside me for the rest of the day. I experience a supine contentment as if I’d eaten a meaty dinner. I want to sit down and have a cold glass of something and smoke a fag. I also want to look over Edie’s notes – she’s been dashing off pages like a schoolgirl in an exam – but it seems impolite in front of the old chap.

We dawdle through the garden. Lodder lives alone and it’s a man’s patch – thoroughly practical, stocked solely with things to eat, the only flowers permitted to bloom here being repellents to discourage pests from devouring the vegetables. There’s a village of sheds, ugly but useful. Lodder picks slugs off his lettuces between a stout forefinger and thumb, and flings them at the hawthorn hedge with some precision, where they hang on the prickles like wet grey baubles. A skinny and lonesome goat watches us from its tether in a circle of dirt. Edie makes towards it with a coo, but Lodder grunts a warning.

‘I wouldn’t, if I were yoos. She’ll git you something nasty.’

Edie stops short and the goat strains at its tether, horns down.

‘Lil bitch,’ says Lodder with a fond chuckle. ‘If only I could ’ave kept the wife out here. ’Ere, ’ave a tomato. Lovely ’n’ sweet.’

Edie eats her tomato in silence, her eyes wide, and I want to laugh. Lodder’s hamming it up for her benefit and I wonder whether she can tell.

‘Miserable buggers, them songs. They’re all ’bout lost things – sweethearts, youth, maidenhead—’

I shrug, conscious of the late hour and recognising that, although I’m pleased with the songs I’ve heard, the pleasure is starting to wear off and I’m already wanting something else but I can’t properly explain to Lodder what it is since I don’t know myself what I’m hunting for. Perhaps it’s simply the desire for another song; there’s always one more to be found.

Lodder grinds a snail under his boot and then with a grin points to the compost heap. ‘Slowworm,’ he says with some satisfaction.

The tiny snake snoozes in the last of the afternoon sunshine, a perfect silver coil.

—

Edie strides along, her cardigan draped around her shoulders. I fall into step beside her, relieved she doesn’t seem tired – I feel guilty about making her walk so far. The sun slinks behind the hill and it becomes abruptly cool, as if all the doors and windows of a fire-warmed room had suddenly been thrown open to the outside. The sky is clear and the earth holds no heat. We pass our former picnic spot. There is nothing to see but flattened grass. The cattle snort in the gloom. The hills are daubed with red for a few minutes and then smothered by darkness. As our eyes adjust we walk in silence, listening to a hurry of blackbirds calling evensong. A mistle thrush sings a counterpoint to their tune. At the bridge Edie pauses. I move and stand beside her. The black water gurgles in the dark.

‘Let me catch myself, just for a minute,’ she says.

‘Here.’

I pass her some cherries smuggled into my pocket from lunch, wrapped up in the magnolia petals. She eats them, spitting the stones into the river below. She spits them quite a distance and I’m impressed. Singer’s lungs, I suppose, lots of puff.

‘So you can remember every song you’ve ever heard?’ she asks, not looking at me but out into the gathering dusk.

‘I’ve a good ear for melodies.’

It’s true. I remember every song. Well, almost every song. I stare across the flat water meadows towards the shoulder of Hartgrove Hill.

‘I discovered a whole crew of musicians this term. It was perfectly wonderful. I was a starving man. I didn’t know I’d spent my whole life hungry until gorging at my first proper feast.’

‘It is a relief to be amongst other musicians. But then it can also be a relief to be away from them,’ Edie says with a smile, and I wonder whether this is one of Jack’s attractions.

‘I think I’m probably going to fail my exams. I’m afraid that I’ve ignored my studies and signed up to every music society instead. Orchestras. Quartets. I even play piano for the jazz band. I didn’t much like the choirs. Too clean. Too quiet. Too lovely.’

Edie laughs. ‘Yes, I’ve never been fond of choirs. Unless I’m the soloist, of course. I don’t mind them harmonising patiently in the background.’

I grin at this sudden and rare flash of the diva. ‘My mother used to sing to me. So I’m told.’

‘You don’t remember?’

I shake my head. ‘I was so young when she died. But sometimes I catch a tune and it feels so familiar that I wonder whether she sang it to me. I know she liked folk songs.’

She stares at me with a look of such wistfulness that I suppose I ought to feel sorry for myself but I don’t. Instead, I turn away, embarrassed, conscious of talking too much, and I’m relieved she can’t see me properly in the darkness.

‘I say, can I take a peep at your notes?’ I ask, eager to turn the conversation.

She hands them over, nibbling at her nail as I study them. I produce a torch from my pocket. The battery’s nearly spent but it’s sufficient to more or less make out the scribbled lyrics. Instantly I know it’s quite hopeless and if I want an accurate transcription I’ll have to go back and listen to Mr Lodder again, but she’s studying me with such eagerness.

‘Is it any good?’

‘It’s entertaining.’

She frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you see here that you’ve got “the girl with the cabbage”? It’s actually “the girl Will ravished”.’

‘Oh. I see. Ravished, not cabbage.’

‘’Fraid so.’

‘It’s the Dorset accent.’

‘Quite. Very hard to understand.’

I’m helpless with laughter and Edie’s laughing too, grabbing her notes back and swatting me with them. Before I can stop her she’s chucked them into the river. They swirl for a second and then, sodden, are pulled away downstream.

‘Oh, what a shame! I was looking forward to those.’

‘Beast.’

She pulls on her cardigan, races along the path leading away from the river and scrambles up the bank of the hill towards the Hall and Jack.

We arrive at the boundary of the Hartgrove estate tipsy with laughter. It’s been a glorious day and I’m calculating how many more she’s likely to stay. I dawdle as we reach the long drive, reluctant to reach the others, but to my surprise Jack and George are walking out to meet us.

‘Hello, darling,’ says Edie, reaching up to kiss Jack’s cheek, but he hardly seems to notice. He stares only at me. I see that George is equally grim-faced.

‘Canning has given notice,’ says George.

‘That is a pity,’ I say, not understanding why this news has caused Jack to look quite so bereft. I turn to Edie. ‘Canning has managed the estate for thirty years. No, more. He’ll be tricky to replace.’

‘He’s not going to be replaced,’ says George.

‘No, of course, he’s irreplaceable,’ I say, irritated now by my brothers’ sentimentality. Canning is a decent fellow, a thoroughly good sort who managed both the estate and the General with some determination, but if he wants to retire, it’s not for us to make a fuss.

‘The General is not going to replace him at all,’ says George.

‘We’re completely out of money,’ says Jack. ‘The Fox-Talbots are utterly broke.’

‘The General is going to dynamite the Hall and auction off the land,’ adds George, quietly.

My breath catches. The evening is hushed as if the wind had suddenly died. We’ve reached the steps of the house. We all sit and look out into the night. I’m shaking, whether with anger or grief I can’t tell.

‘It would have been better if the whole bloody place had just burned down in the war. To have her back only to lose her again like this. It’s beastly,’ says Jack.

Edie’s sobbing noiselessly into her handkerchief and I’m glad in a way that one of us is able to cry.

‘I don’t want to see her go up,’ I say. ‘I couldn’t bear that.’

I know that afterwards I’ll never come here again. The break must be clean. I can’t walk these woods and sneak through these valleys as a stranger trespassing on another man’s land. I don’t want to stand on the ridge and look down on a handsome new house where ours once stood. No, when she’s gone, I shan’t come back.

‘How long do we have left?’ I ask.

‘It’s all arranged for next week,’ says George.