Freddie was not reassured by the amorphous shape of a doctor in a white coat sitting uncomfortably close to him, and the starched apron of a nurse bending over him. Freddie had never been in a hospital and he was terrified. He struggled to see the nurse’s face, and she was frowning like a bulldog. She had his arm in a vicelike grip.

‘Keep still or this will hurt,’ she said sharply and a stinging pain drove into his bicep. He heard a man’s voice saying ‘This will make you sleepy, Mr Barcussy.’

Blissfully it faded and he returned to the floating place, so warm and soft now that he no longer wanted to look down at his body lying there. He wanted to go with the man in a cream robe who smelled of meadow hay and boot polish, a shining man who was leading him down an avenue of lime trees. At the end of the avenue was an archway in a high wall with golden flowers hanging over the top of it. Freddie could see a familiar figure standing here, waiting for him. Levi!

He paused, then walked up to his father and looked deeply into the translucence of his eyes, old familiar eyes but different now. The weariness and the gloom, the frustration and the rage had gone, leaving a mysterious contentment. Freddie felt they were both weightless, suspended like feathers on the wind, and he sensed himself absorbing the essence of that sparkle in Levi’s eyes.

‘Now I’ll tell you something,’ Levi said in his normal voice. He put his hand on Freddie’s left shoulder, its comforting warmth radiant like the heat from a flame. ‘That Ian Tillerman. Don’t you let ’im take your life. He’s lying. He’s lying, Freddie.’

Freddie stared into his luminous eyes and felt a change moving over him. Coral-coloured, it wound itself around his shoulders like the hug Levi was giving him now.

‘I’m sorry, son. Don’t you ever be like me.’

‘I’ve forgiven you, Dad,’ said Freddie, and Levi beamed, the smile magically bringing them closer than they had ever been.

Levi stood back and Freddie gazed beyond him into the archway, curiously observing a garden where trees glittered like jewellery and everything danced with colours. Across it was a lattice of brilliant gold.

‘No,’ said Levi firmly. ‘You gotta go back, Freddie. Go on. Go back.’

Freddie nodded. He turned and floated back, still light as air, the man in the cream robe drifting beside him. He looked back once and saw Levi watching him, waving, then melting into the webs of light. The tingle of his feet reconnecting with the earth made him stronger, but still he couldn’t hear his footsteps. What he could hear, louder and louder, was a rushing sound in his ears, a voice speaking his name.

‘Mr Barcussy. Come on. Open your eyes.’

He came back with a jolt into the body lying on the bed. The pain had eased and his skin felt cool and soft, his body relaxed on comfortable pillows. Gradually the nurse’s face came into focus. She was smiling now, a slim glass thermometer in her hand.

‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘We nearly lost you.’

Freddie was ill for many weeks. After George had driven his lorry all the way to Gloucester and fetched him home, he lay in bed watching and listening.

His hearing was super sensitive and so attuned to the land beyond the town that he could hear the quack of herons passing overhead at dawn, and the unearthly sharp yelping of foxes, and in the mornings the squeak of ice being broken and crisp leaves being crunched underfoot. At nine forty-five he listened for the cattle train passing through, and the distressed cries of sheep and cows crowded together, terrified, their faces pressed to the slatted openings, their noses sniffing the fresh turfy fields where they had grazed. He felt their desperation.

Annie lumbered up and down stairs with trays of home-baked meals. She brought him a new drawing book and a pencil, but he didn’t want to draw. He just wanted to stare out at the winter sky. The clouds created curling images of faces and ferry boats, lions and angels. Strangely, the illness was a gift of time to Freddie’s artistic soul, each change of the light adding to his storehouse of ideas waiting to be carved in stone. He dreamed of carving in marble or alabaster, his fingers coaxing a smooth translucence from the rough blocks.

At night he kept the curtains open to the starlight, watching and learning to read the night sky. His room faced west and he lay on his side and watched for the planet Venus, as Granny Barcussy had taught him in his childhood. ‘Venus follows the sun,’ she’d said, and her eyes had sparkled. ‘And – it’s the planet of love.’

So Freddie stared at it, and wondered if Kate was seeing it too. He’d shown it to her once, at Hilbegut Farm in the twilight when the western sky flushed pink, then duck-egg green smoothly blending into indigo, and they’d gazed at the big bright star together.

Thinking of Kate was too painful most of the time, but he had to do it. He had to plod his way through the pain until he had overcome it with his own strength. There was a molecule of hope in Levi’s words, ‘He’s lying,’ but Freddie didn’t cling to it. Kate had stopped writing to him, she was far away making a new life, and, worse, she had cut her hair. That news in her last letter, had upset Freddie. He couldn’t imagine Kate with short hair, yet she’d said it made her feel liberated. Liberated from what? Was being beautiful such a burden? Supposing he had carved a stone angel with short hair? It bothered Freddie in an inexplicably sensitive part of his soul, and when he dreamed of Kate it was always with the sensual memory of her hair twined in his fingers. At least, he thought, Ian Tillerman wasn’t going to have that particular delight.

One morning just before Christmas, on the day of the winter solstice, Freddie sensed a change. At first light he got out of bed and stood at the window, watching the sunrise reflected in the windows across the street. The weather was mild and spring-like. He opened the window and breathed deeply, smelling the steam trains and the flooded Levels beyond. A song thrush was singing with its whole being, like an opera singer filling the awakening town with exuberant music. ‘The first bird to sing at the turn of the year,’ thought Freddie, his eyes searching until he saw the slim shape of the thrush high on the apex of a roof, the sun gilding its speckled breast, its beak lifted to the sky. It filled him with longing to carve a singing bird. But how would he put the song inside the stone?

Though his legs were weak, Freddie climbed into his clothes and dragged himself downstairs and out into the yard. There was his stone angel, illuminated by the sunrise, and it startled him to see it. Had he done that? He stood in front of it, filled with an overpowering sadness as he looked at Kate’s beautiful face, captured in the stone, forever frozen, no longer laughing, no longer turning her big eyes to gaze into his face.

A maelstrom of negative feelings gusted through him. Bitterness, vengeful thoughts towards Ian Tillerman, a slow burning fury that made him want to raise an axe high in the air and smash the stone angel into hundreds of pieces. He let the thoughts pass through like a crowd of people stampeding to some event that didn’t interest Freddie. He could turn his back and walk away. Those thoughts did not belong to him.

Blessed with the gift of peace, he stood thinking, his eyes exploring the blocks of stone waiting to be carved, and the red roof of his lorry still parked outside the garden wall, waiting for him. ‘I gotta get on with it,’ he thought. ‘With or without Kate.’

And as he thought those words he was suddenly remembering another pair of eyes. Ethie’s eyes. They were pale, pale blue with a cluster of yellow in the centre of the iris, yellow like the eyes of a sparrow hawk. Her eyes were focused on him, compelling him to interpret some silent message coded within that ring of yellowness.