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  The lane was narrow, winding between broad-trunked trees, splashed and speckled with sunlight filtering through shifting leaves. He had a swift glimpse of the river, a clear sandy bed with sweet water dancing over yellow stones, and then they were driving up the other side of the hill.

  ‘Right here,’ she said. ‘At the little signpost.’

  He could hardly see it. It was a fingerpost grey with lichen, leaning drunkenly backwards. It said ‘Woodman Row’ in letters which were half-eroded by time and weather.

  ‘That’s us,’ she said as if she were coming home. She put a hand on his arm to tell him to slow down and he realised that she was half-expecting a curly-headed reckless youth to sprint from the trees and fling himself at the car.

  ‘He’s a grown man now,’ he said gently. ‘Pushing forty.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Silly of me. I keep forgetting. Everything else is the same, you see.’

  He drove slowly down the little track and stopped at the first cottage. She opened the car door and stepped out. There were four cottages. The end two had been knocked into one, which was marred by the bulbous lump of a white aluminium and glass conservatory stuck on the side. He saw her wince and then look down the road to the last cottage.

  ‘Why didn’t she leave it to you?’ he asked. All the rest of the wealthy estate, the London flat, the paintings, the car, the exotic and expensive jewellery, had been left to her daughter.

  ‘She left it to Jacky Daws,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s how I know he’s still here. The lawyers gave him the deeds. I just assumed he’d be here, living here. That’s why I thought everything would be the same.’

  He slammed the driver’s door, and locked it. ‘I thought we were driving out into the country for a picnic. I thought we were just having a look at the outside of your old home. You never said anything about meeting him.’

  For once, she was not listening to him. She had opened the sagging garden gate and was walking up the path to the cottage. The front door stood open with sprays of honeysuckle peering curiously inside.

  ‘Now just wait a minute …’ he said.

  She tapped on the open door and then stepped over the threshold into the cool dim interior.

  The door opened directly into the kitchen. A man was seated at the kitchen table: a stocky small man, with iron-grey curly hair. He had a sheet of newspaper spread on the kitchen table and parts of some machine spread out in their own little pools of dark oil. He looked up as she came in and then slowly rose to his feet, wiping his hands on a piece of rag.

  ‘Why, Imogen,’ he said gently.

  ‘Jackdaw.’

  They stood in silence, scanning each other’s face and then he smiled a broad easy smile and waved her into a chair. ‘If I’d known you were coming I’d have had something ready,’ he said. He moved to the sink and filled a kettle and switched it on.

  ‘This is my fiancé, Philip,’ she said.

  He nodded with a smile. ‘I can’t shake hands. I’m dirty.’

  ‘I knew you’d be here,’ Midge said. In the dimness of the cottage her face was luminous. She was smiling, her eyes were bright. ‘I knew you would be here.’

  He nodded. ‘I guessed you’d come sooner or later. But I’d have had tea ready if I’d known it was today.’

  ‘You always had tea ready for Mother and me,’ Midge said.

  He nodded. ‘She liked it so.’

  Philip cleared his throat, interrupted the slow rhythm of their speech. ‘Why did she leave you the cottage? It’s a very valuable asset, isn’t it?’

  The man shot a swift warning look at him. ‘She had no use for it herself,’ he said gently.

  ‘She could have left it to Midge. Or given it to a charity.’

  ‘She liked Jackdaw,’ the girl interrupted. ‘I expect she wanted him to have it.’

  The man nodded. ‘She was generous.’

  ‘Very generous,’ Philip said rudely. ‘The place must be worth something like £80,000. Rather a big tip for a gardener, isn’t it?’

  The man flushed, his pride stung. ‘I wasn’t just the gardener,’ he said. ‘I kept everything nice for her, I kept things safe for her. It was always ready for her to come back. I waited for her.’

  ‘You waited?’ Imogen asked.

  ‘She never said she was not coming.’ They could hear the hurt of the seventeen-year-old youth in his low voice. ‘Every spring it was ready for her, in case she came. Every spring it was ready for her to come home. The garden, the house, and me – waiting for her to come back.’ He paused. ‘She asked me to wait for her.’

  The kettle boiled and the automatic switch clicked abruptly off.

  ‘You loved her!’ Philip accused. He could not tolerate the thought of their intimacy, of their cooing like wood pigeons at night, of her asking him to wait for her. She had never asked anything of Philip, except to take Imogen to dinner. By the time he had met her she had gone far beyond him, far beyond all possibility of desire. He knew she had never looked twice at him. He faced the man as if they were rivals, knowing, in his sudden enmity, that they had both loved her. He found himself shifting his feet, squaring up to the older man as if the woman they had both loved was still alive. As if she might ever have been won by either of them. John Daws looked quickly from Philip to Imogen as if he wanted to understand where this sudden rush of aggression had come from, then he looked away, his face guarded.

  There was a long silence. Outside a jay scolded abruptly and then went quiet. John Daws said nothing. He turned back to Philip as if he understood, as if he recognised a mutual pain.

  ‘She was a good employer,’ he said.

  Imogen rose slowly from her seat, her eyes fixed on John Daws. ‘Did you love her?’ she asked. ‘Did you? Was it her, all the time?’ She scanned his face as if she could see the bright seventeen-year-old who waited at the corner for the sound of his mistress’s car, who waited, and waited, although she had forgotten him altogether. Imogen was staring as if she could see the only happy days of her childhood breaking and reshaping into a new pattern, a pattern of betrayal. Days in which she had not been the centre of love but had been a diversion, or even worse than that … an alibi. An innocent chaperone whose presence made an adultery possible.

  Imogen gave a quick painful gasp. ‘Why,’ she cried in the thin voice of a shocked child. ‘Jacky Daws – you were not my friend, you were never my friend! You were her lover! You were her lover and never my friend at all.’

  He said nothing. He bowed his head to her as if to confess to the betrayal. Then he raised his eyes and scanned her hurt face.

  And both men waited with fear for her to look towards Philip when she finally understood.

  Going Downriver

  August 10

  I started this diary with a view to publishing it alongside my thesis. I thought I would call it something like ‘Living with the People – a year with the Nloko’ and that there would be a picture of me on the front with Shasta and one on the back of me on my own outside the hut they gave me. My diary was, in those early days, rather self-conscious, perhaps a little self-satisfied – I’d accept that as a criticism.

  I had in mind a woman reader: a rather bright anthropology student in her first year, say. I addressed her frankly – as an expert – and I charmed her. I showed her my commitment to understanding a native people, and the stripping away of my western values. I showed myself in bad lights too: the meal of the maggots eggs, and the time they took me swimming; but there is a sort of golden glow over it all. It reads, I suppose, as the account of an adventure by an adventurer who knows he will make it safely home. Behind it all was the awareness of my apartment in New York, and my hopes of publication, my ambitions in the university, and my certainty that among all those young women readers would be one – or indeed more than one – who would be so impressed by my diary (and the pictures on the back and the front) that I would be ‘set up’ when I got back to NY after my year in the back of beyond. This may sound crude; but i