I said yes, of course I would.

She said: ‘Do you think you could feel my throat?’

I said: ‘Your throat?’

She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling and said: ‘Just touch it. Touch it and tell me what you think.’

If this was the beginning, I thought, if this was how the whole business was going to start up again, then it wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Not at all. Any sense of control over the situation had drained out of me: I felt as though I was plunging to earth, and I walked towards her with the tread of a sleepwalker, my fingertips outstretched until they came into contact with the pale skin at the base of her neck. From there I traced a slow line, sensing a film of fine, downy hair as I touched the soft ridges of her throat. Fiona remained perfectly still, and perfectly quiet.

‘Like that?’ I said.

‘Again. To the left.’

And this time I came upon it almost at once: a small obstruction, a ball of hardness about the size of an olive lodged well beneath her skin. I stroked it, then pinched it gently between forefinger and thumb.

‘Does that hurt?’

‘No.’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did the doctor say?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t seem very interested.’

I took my hand away and stepped back, searching her blue-green eyes for clues. They stared back neutrally.

‘Have you always had it?’

‘No. I noticed it a few weeks ago.’

‘Is it growing?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘You should go back to the doctor.’

‘He didn’t think it was important.’

I had nothing else to say: just stood there, as if rooted to the spot. Fiona watched me for a moment and then folded her arms and hunched her shoulders, withdrawing into herself.

‘I really am tired,’ she said. ‘I must go.’

‘OK.’

But before she went I put my hand against her neck again and we slid into an embrace which was clumsy at first, but it didn’t matter, we persisted, and by the end we were clasping each other tightly: I clung to her silence and, closing my eyes to our reflection in the kitchen window, pictured a knot, made from the threads of her wordless fears and my famished longing, which would hold fast against the very worst that the future might throw at us.

Dorothy

To hug someone, and to be hugged, now and again, in return: this is important. George Brunwin had never been hugged by his wife, and it was many years since he had taken a mistress. None the less, he regularly enjoyed long, rapt, tender embraces, stolen, more often than not, in darkened corners of the farm which he had once been pleased to call his own. The latest willing object of his advances was a veal calf called Herbert.

Contrary to local rumour, however, George had never had sex with an animal.

Although he probably never rationalized it to himself, it was one of his more deeply rooted beliefs that the life unvisited by physical affection was scarcely worth living. His mother had been a great one for touching, cuddling, swaddling and coddling; for ruffling of hair, patting of bottoms and dandling on the knee. Even his father had not been averse to the occasional firm handshake or manly embrace. George had grown up in the assumption that these delightful collisions, these outbursts of spontaneous, loose-limbed intimacy were the very stuff of loving relationships. Furthermore, the rhythm of life on his father’s farm was dictated, to a large extent, by the reproductive cycles of the animals, and George had proved perhaps more than usually sensitive to these, for he developed a healthy sexual appetite at an early age. In the light of which, he could hardly have found a less suitable partner (not that he was ever given much choice in the matter) than Dorothy Winshaw, to whom he was married in the spring of 1962.

They had spent their honeymoon at a hotel in the Lake District, with a view over Derwent Water: and it was in this same hotel, twenty years later, that George found himself drinking, alone, one clammy evening in June. Clouded as it was by alcohol, his mind still carried an unpleasantly vivid memory of their wedding night. While she had not exactly fought him off, Dorothy’s stolid passivity had itself been resistance enough, and there was also – to add to the humiliation – a discernibly bored and mocking aspect to it. Despite all that George could provide in the way of foreplay, his questioning fingertips had met with nothing but tight dryness. To have proceeded further in these circumstances would have been to commit rape (for which he hadn’t the physical strength, apart from anything else). Three or four more attempts had followed, over the ensuing weeks, and after that the subject – like George’s hopes – was never raised again. Looking back on those days now, through his alcoholic fog, he found it absurd, laughable, that he should ever have expected the marriage to be consummated. There had been, between Dorothy and himself, an absolute physical incompatibility. Sexual union between them would have been as impossible as it had recently become for the misshapen turkeys which his wife was now obliged to propagate through artificial insemination: their meat-yielding breasts so horribly enlarged through years of chemical injections and selective breeding that their sex organs could not even make contact.

Why did George not hate his wife? Was it because she had enriched him (financially) beyond his wildest expectations? Did he even take a certain reluctant pride in the fact that she had built up what used to be a quiet, old-fashioned, modestly run family farm into one of the biggest agrichemical empires in the country? Or had the hate merely been washed away, over the years, by the tides of whisky to which he surrendered daily and with fewer and fewer pretensions to secrecy? He and Dorothy now lived very separate lives, at any rate. Every working day she would drive into town, where a bleak scrub of land in one of the outermost suburbs was dominated by a huge four-storey complex of offices and laboratories: the world headquarters of Brunwin Holdings PLC. George himself had not set foot there for more than fifteen years. With no head for business, no understanding of science and nothing but disdain for the boys’ game of stockmarket snakes and ladders which seemed to preoccupy most of the directors, he chose to retreat, instead, into a fantasy version of happier times. There was a small redbricked cowshed which had somehow managed to survive Dorothy’s expansion programme (she had demolished most of the original buildings and replaced them with row upon row of massive broiler-sheds and controlled environment houses in dull grey steel), and it was here that he spent most of every day, his only companions being his whisky bottle and whichever of the sicker, more enfeebled farm animals he had managed to rescue from their confinement in the hope of restoring them to health: chickens, for instance, whose legs could no longer support their over-developed bodies, or cattle with dipped backs and distorted hips from carelessly prescribed growth hormones. For a long time, the existence of this gloomy haven was unknown to Dorothy, who could rarely be bothered to inspect her own premises: but when, by chance, it was finally discovered, she could not conceal her furious contempt for her husband’s sentimentality.

‘His leg was broken,’ said George, blocking the doorway of the cowshed while Herbert shrank in a corner. ‘I couldn’t bear to see him loaded on to a lorry with the others.’

‘I’ll break your bloody legs if you don’t leave my stock alone,’ shouted Dorothy. ‘I could report you to the bloody police for what I caught you doing.’

‘I was petting him, that’s all.’

‘God Almighty! And have you done what I asked you to do: have you spoken to the cook about dinner on Friday night?’