“So you said no?” said Irene, frowning. He said that he had told Derek he would think about it, but he had made up his mind on the way home. He would refuse. “Too old and too busy,” he said, and turned off the boiling kettle to fill their hot-water bottles.

“Tony Dibson!” his wife said. “You’ll do no such thing. People rely on you to represent the real village people, like you and me. Families who’ve been here for years. Not the newcomers who buy up houses for weekending, nor them that say they love the village and then try to change it.”

“So you think I should do it?” She nodded, and after a couple of seconds added that if she could she would love to do more to help. Smitten by the suggestion he had been criticising her, he kissed her fondly on the top of her head. Flattening out the hot water bottles to release hot air, he screwed them up and trudged upstairs to warm up their bed. Then he returned to his wife and began the long and arduous business of getting her undressed, and carrying her upstairs.

“Good thing I’ve always been a little ’un,” she said.

“Light as a feather,” he said, as he always said every night, and picked her up in his arms, trying not to notice the stab of pain in his back.

JOHN THORNBULL GOT OUT OF HIS CAR IN THE YARD AT THE BACK of the farmhouse, and thought he should check that his wife Hazel’s bantams were shut up. If she had forgotten, as she often did, the stupid things flew up into a tall silver birch tree and roosted in the high branches. Sometimes he took the clothes line prop from the garden and tried bashing them down to go into their perfectly comfortable house. But they squawked like banshees and flew up even higher.

Tonight she had remembered, and he went into the farmhouse calling for her as he went.

“Here!” she said, and when he went into the sitting room where she was watching television with the sound turned down low, she put her finger to her lips. “Sssh! Lizzie is restless tonight,” she whispered. “Hope she’s not sickening for something.”