That, he said, was the whole point of moving here, to go out for walks.‘Nature,’ he said. ‘You don’t just look at it, do you?’For the time being she would have been happy to do that. She was bone-tired. Even her brain was tired. Filling the packing cases, cleaning the old flat for the people who were coming in, because that, apparently, was something else you did; travelling down, cleaning the cottage, because the people leaving had not done it for them; unpacking the boxes, putting things away. A hot poker bored into her lower back every time she moved. She had period pain. Her arms ached.What she wanted to do was indeed to ‘just look at it’. To lie down and look at the dense, green leaves that blotted out the mould-coloured sky. The faint line of blue hills in the far distance. The jungle of garden.‘We can get our bearings later,’ Adrian said.Bearings.She went in search of some painkillers. The bathroom had a sloping roof with a small square of window that let in more greenish, undersea light.
