Of course it was Jess I called. Like Lily, I’d come to rely on her. She was a trusted man Friday who didn’t expect, or want, to be wined, dined and rewarded with trivial conversation. It was curiously restful once I accepted her way of doing things. If she was in a talkative mood, we talked. If she wasn’t, we didn’t. I hadn’t appreciated how conventional I was until I learnt to sit through Jess’s silences. I was the type who rushed to speak for fear of seeming boorish, and changing that habit did not come easily.

I gave up trying to work out what made Jess tick after she resumed her visits. She turned up at inconvenient times of the day, as she’d done before, but I found it less irritating the second time around because she didn’t take offence if I said I was busy. As often as not, she’d go outside to mow the semi-circle of formal lawn at the back of the house then leave without saying goodbye, but when I pointed out that I didn’t expect her to shoulder my responsibilities, she merely shrugged and said she liked doing it. “Years ago, when Lily had a gardener, he cut the grass all the way to the boundaries and the wildlife vanished. Now they live in the long grass, and you can see their tracks where they come in and out of hiding. You’ve got a weasel here, if you’re interested. He goes to the fishpond to drink.”

“What else lives here?”

“Mice, voles, squirrels. A badger’s been through recently.”

I pulled a face. “Rats?”

“Hardly any, I should think…not unless you’re leaving rubbish out. Your weasel will have their babies if it can, and there’s a colony of tawny owls in the valley who prey on them.”

“Do you have rats at the farm?”

She nodded. “All farms do. They go for the grain stores and the livestock food.”

“What do you do about them?”

“Make life as difficult as possible, keep animal feed in bins and grain stores in good structural order. They only set up home and breed if they have access to food and water, and find cavities and holes to hide in. They’re like any other animal. They thrive in conditions they can exploit.”

Like MacKenzie, I thought. “You make it sound so simple.”

Jess shrugged. “It is in a way. You only get infestations if you’re lazy or careless. It’s an open invitation to a rat to leave food and rubbish lying around. They like easy pickings, the same way people do.” She paused. “Which isn’t to say I don’t use poison from time to time, or reach for my airgun when a fat one comes nosing around. They can pass Weil’s disease and leptospirosis to humans and animals, and prevention’s a damn sight better than cure.”

This matter-of-fact approach to pest management was appealing, but I couldn’t see her being so sanguine if a plague of locusts descended on her fields. It’s one thing to monitor your own premises for vermin, quite another to look death in the face as your crop is taken by a swarm that has bred and gathered a hundred miles away. In those circumstances, you weep and pray to God for deliverance because there’s nothing on earth that can help you except the charity of foreign governments and NGOs.

When I said this, she replied rather scathingly that BSE and foot-and-mouth were no different. “I lost Dad’s whole herd to BSE when cattle over thirty months had to be incinerated-whether they had the disease or not-and it’s taken me eight years to build another herd half the size. It’s wrecked the beef and dairy industry in this country but you don’t hear much sympathy for farmers.”

“Weren’t you compensated?”

“Nowhere near what each animal was actually worth. It took Dad years to build his herd-he was always winning prizes at the shows-and none of them had BSE. I got an extra sixty quid for every animal that was killed unnecessarily when the tests post-slaughter proved negative. It was a joke…and bloody upsetting. I was pretty fond of those cows.”

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “You get on with it. Did your dad lose crops to locusts?”

“Only the human variety. Mugabe took his farm.”

“How long had your family been there?”

“Not long enough,” I said ironically. “Three generations-four if you count me-about the same length of time as Madeleine’s has been in Barton House.”

“How does that make it not long enough?”

“Wrong colour,” I said harshly. “If you’re black, you’ve been there for centuries…never mind you were born in Mozambique or Tanzania. If you’re white your ancestors stole the land from the indigenous people.”

“Is that what your family did?”

“No. My great-grandparents bought ours fair and square, but deeds of title don’t count for much when Zanu-PF thugs turn up on your doorstep.” I shrugged. “There are rights and wrongs on both sides, but stealing the land back again hasn’t solved anything. It’s just made it worse…turned Africa’s breadbasket into a dust-bowl. Ten years ago, the white farmers were producing enough food”-I broke off.

“Go on.”

“No,” I said with an abrupt laugh. “It makes me too angry. Like you and your dad’s herd. I wouldn’t mind so much if the farm had gone to our workers, but it’s been appropriated by one of Mugabe’s cronies and hasn’t produced anything for three years. It’s a crazy situation.”

“Will you ever go back?”

“I can’t,” I said unwarily. “I’m excluded indefinitely because of what I’ve written about Mugabe.”

There was a beat of silence before Jess changed the subject. She’d done it before when I made rash comments about myself, and I did wonder if Peter had told her I wasn’t who I said I was. It was noticeable that she never called me Marianne, preferring to wait until she caught my attention before saying anything. I had every intention of coming clean-certainly before my parents arrived, as two Mariannes in the same family would need explaining-but I kept postponing it. I wasn’t ready to talk about Baghdad-not then, not ever, perhaps-so I carried on with the pretence because it was easier.

There was no question Peter had told Jess that I knew about her relationship with Nathaniel because she made a reference to it the morning after I’d spoken to him. This left me deeply curious about Peter’s relationship with Jess. Had he been to her house the previous evening? Had he phoned to say I’d visited him? I wasn’t worried by the breach of confidence, because I hadn’t asked him to keep it to himself, but I was intrigued to know why he’d felt it necessary to inform Jess. At the very least, it implied a closer friendship than either of them was admitting to.

“It takes a crisis to show you what a person’s really like,” she said, jerking her chin at one of Nathaniel’s paintings. “He behaved like a complete tosser after my parents died.”

“What did he do?”

“Holed up in London rather than face the emotion down here. It worked out for the best in the end. I might have sold the farm if I’d listened to him. He wanted me to buy a house in Clapham with a studio upstairs.”

“For him?”

“Of course. He had visions of living in Bohemian bliss in some claustrophobic tenement.” She smiled slightly. “On my parents’ money…with him as the charismatic artist and me doing the washing-up.”

“Were you tempted?”

“Sometimes…at night. Come the mornings, I always had the sense to see it wouldn’t work. I need to be on my own with lots of space around me, and he needs an audience.” She paused. “I gave him the boot when I realized I wasn’t cut out to be a servant.”

Interesting choice of words, I thought. “Is that when he took up with Madeleine?”

“Nn-nn. He’d been sleeping with her for ages. She sprogged two months after I said I never wanted to see him again.” Jess gave one of her rare laughs at my expression. “That’s how Lily reacted. It was about the worst thing that could have happened…her only child getting pregnant by a Derbyshire cast-off. The way she carried on, you’d think Nathaniel and I were related. I thought it was pretty funny, myself.”