It’s true we were a little unsure about the route at this point and the old man’s directions were welcome, but it was he who approached us, rather than the other way round. We stood at the edge of the road next to the kissing gate, with the wind making waves in the silver coloured fields which spread out behind us like the cratered ranks of some ancient stadium. He crossed from the other side without looking left or right, and came up to us with the look of someone who is pleasingly early for an appointment.

We told him where we were going.

“You see that little grey horse? Well, you turn right just past that bend and follow the edge of the copse. Then you’ll come to two towers, and from there you can pick up the path again. I think they’re on your map.”

He leant over.

“These two. That’s them, yes. They used to be a gatehouse for the estate. Someone used to live in them until 1970, if I remember. Used to sleep in one and cook in the other.”

“What was the estate?”

“The Weld estate. Weld as in weld.”

He made a gesture with the index and middle finger of his right hand, as if sliding a chess piece to an adjacent square.

“Have you lived here a long time?”

“About thirty years now. Not too long. Not too short either.”

“And what did you do?”

“I worked on the estate.”

“The whole time?”

“I had a girlfriend who lived in the village, so I would come down to see her, and they would get me to do odd jobs. I stopped seeing her for a while. I was living in Southampton at the time, and she called me up one day, she says, ‘Jo-h-n…’” – he dragged out the pronunciation of his own name out like a child whining for something from its parents – “‘have you got that chainsaw of yours still?’ You see there was a terrible storm and all the roads were blocked. It didn’t break the branches, least the main ones, but it took them right up at the root. So all those trees were what we call ‘loaded’.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Yes,” he said, and he smiled again, as he had been for the last ten minutes whenever he wasn’t speaking.

He took off his cap, which was faded, but not dirty looking, to the point of dissolving into a field of marbled grey blotches, and looked at the logo of a jaguar that camouflaged itself nearly perfectly into the background. Then he put it back on again.

“Just past that grey horse up there,” he beamed.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”