'Just when I was going to get wondering whether the Good Lord had done something violent with your tongue, knotted it – yes, I like to have the heater on.'

It was the last day of March. They'd left the three-lane highway lar behind. They'd turned off the two-lane highway long ago, and a hit after they'd cut through the town of Kingsbridge. When the y, uy driving had dumped the road map on his lap and told him to tai l the navigation bit, they'd left the last bit of decent track. The guy driving used the word 'lane' for what they were on now, and the map called it 'minor road'. The lane, the minor road, seemed in him to coil round the fields that were behind the high hedges that had been brutalized the past autumn by cutting equipment and had not yet taken on the spring's foliage. The high hedges and the fields beyond seemed dead to him. They bent round the angles of the fields, they dropped with the flow of the lane into dips and . limbed small summits, and when they reached the small summits he could see in the distance the grey-blue of the sea and the white caps where the wind caught it. It was not raining now. It had rained most of the drive out of London, then started to ease when they were just short of Bristol, then stopped when they were east of Exeter. It was four hours since they had left London, and he was quiet because he was already fretting that the guy driving had made a mess of the equation of distance and speed and time. There was a certain time when he wanted to get there, to the end of this goddam track, and he didn't care to be early and he didn't care to be late.

He asked, sour, 'What sort of place is this going to be?'

The man driving looked ahead. 'How the hell should I know?'

'I was just asking.'

'Listen, man, because I work out of London doesn't mean that I know every corner of the country – and the heater stays on.'

There was no rain, and the narrow tarmacadam surface of the lane was dry, but there was wind.