For his birthday, Reggie had given the baby a teddy-bear and a bib embroidered in blue with ducks and the words 'Baby's First Birthday'. First things were nice, last things not so much so.

Often, after one of her moments ofsadness, Dr Hunter would give her head a little shake as if she was trying to get rid of something from it and smile and say, 'And yet we are not downhearted, are we, Reggie?' and Reggie would say, 'No, indeed we are not, Dr H.'

'Call me Jo,' Dr Hunter said to Reggie. 'Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dee, the fly has married the bumblebee,' she said to the baby.

Reggie had never told Dr Hunter about her mother, about her being dead, the weight of the sadness ofit might have been too much for Dr Hunter to bear, even without the unnecessary and tragic manner of Mum's going. And every time she looked at Reggie, Dr Hunter would have had the sad expression on her face and that too would have been unbearable. Instead, Reggie made up her mother. She was called Jackie and worked on the checkout at a supermarket in a shopping centre that Dr Hunter never went to. When she was young she had been a champion highland dancer (although you would never have guessed that). Her best friends were called Mary, Trish and Jean. She was always planning the next diet, she had long hair (lovely hair, sadly Reggie had not inherited it) that she said she was going to have to start wearing up because she was getting too old to wear it down. She was thirty-six this year, the same age as Dr Hunter. She was sixteen when she got engaged to Reggie's father, seventeen when she had Billy and a widow at twenty. Reggie supposed it was just as well she had packed everything in early on.

She took a terrible photograph, made worse by the goofy faces she always pulled the moment a camera was pointed in her direction. One of her favourite sayings was, 'It's a funny old world,' said affectionately, as ifthe world was a mischievous child. She liked reading Danielle Steel and her favourite flower was a daffodil and she made a really good shepherd's pie. Actually all of these things were true. It was just the being alive bit that was made up.

While Reggie was wiping down the draining board her eye was caught by something moving at the far end of the field. The sun had hardly popped its head up today and it was hard to distinguish anything more than smudged shapes at that distance. Not a horse, this was not a day for horses, they were living their mysterious lives somewhere else. Whoever or whatever it was seemed to scuttle along the hedge, a blur of something black. Reggie glanced at the dog to see if her canine senses were alerting her to anything but Sadie was sitting stoically on the floor next to the baby while he tried to stuff her tail in his mouth.

'I don't think so, mister,' Reggie said to the baby, gently releasing a fistful offur and lifting him in her arms. She carried the baby over to the window but there was nothing to be seen out there now. The baby clutched a hank of her hair, he was a terrible hair grabber. 'Atavistic instinct, I expect,' Dr Hunter said. 'From the days when I would have been swinging through trees and he would have been clutching on to my fur for dear life.' The idea of Dr Hunter, always so neatly groomed in the little black suit she wore for work, as a primitive tree-dweller was comical. Reggie had to look up 'atavistic'. She still hadn't found an opportunity to use it. She was working her way through the 'a's so it fitted in well with the drive to improve her vocabulary.

Lately, Reggie had got into the habit ofstaying longer and longer at the Hunters' house while Mr Hunter seemed to be out of the house more and more. 'He's setting something up, a new venture,' Dr Hunter said brightly. Dr Hunter seemed glad that Reggie was there so much. She would suddenly look out of the window and say, 'Heavens, Reggie, it's dark, you must be getting home,' but then she would say, 'I hate this horrid weather so. Shall we have another cup oftea?' Or 'Stay and have some supper, Reggie, and then I'll give you a lift home.' Reggie hoped that one day soon Dr Hunter might say, 'Why go home, Reggie? Why not move in here?' and then they would be a proper family -Dr Hunter, Reggie and the baby and the dog. ('Neil' didn't really figure in Reggie's daydream of family life.)

On one of these evenings, apropos of nothing ('apropos' was another new word), when Dr Hunter and Reggie were giving the baby a bath, Dr Hunter turned to Reggie and said, 'You know there are no rules,' and Reggie said, 'Really?' because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike Ms MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr Hunter was very keen on. She said, 'No, not those kinds ofthings, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn't a template, a pattern that we're supposed to follow. There's no one watching us to see ifwe're doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.'

Reggie wasn't entirely sure that she knew what Dr Hunter was talking about. The baby was distracting her, squawking and splashing like a mad sea-creature.

'What you have to remember, Reggie, is that the only important thing is love. Do you undt:rstand?'

That sounded OK to Reggie, a bit Richard Curtis, but OK.

'Loud and clear, Dr H.,' she said, taking a towel from the radiator where it had been warming. Dr Hunter lifted the baby out of the water, he was slipperier than a fish, and Reggie wrapped him in the towel.

'Knowing that when light is gone, Love remains for shining,' Dr Hunter said. 'Isn't that lovely? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her dog.'

'Flush,' Reggie said. 'Virginia Woolf wrote a book about him. I've read around the subj ect.'

'When everything else has gone, love still remains,' Dr Hunter said.

'Totally,' Reggie said. But what good did it do you? None at all.

Ad Augusta per Angusta THIS WOULD BE THE SCENIC ROUTE THEN. HE WAS TAKING THE LONG way round. Jackson tipped a metaphorical hat in the direction of the Dixie Chicks.

For reasons best known to itself the GPS stopped working five miles after leaving the village. At some point they had obviously taken a wrong turning because Jackson found himself on a one-track road that wound its leisurely way up through a deserted dale. There was no signal on his phone and the radio had given out nothing but crackle and hiss for some time now. The CD player contained one disc accidentally left over from the previous rental and Jackson wondered in what circumstances he would feel so desperate for the sound of another voice that he would listen to Enya's.

He should have brought his iPod, he could have been listening to songs of heartache and redemption and redneck righteousness. And it had obviously been a really bad idea to leave that OS map behind, although he wasn't convinced that the roads around here actually conformed to any map. If it hadn't been for a signpost a mile back reassuring him that they were heading for the right destination he would have turned round by now. (Although should he put so much faith in signs?)

Bleak in its beauty, the landscape was beginning to bring out the mournful streak in Jackson that he was usually better off keeping at bay. Hello, darkness, myoId friend. Life was easier if you were an unimaginative pragmatist, a happy idiot. 'Well, you've got the idiot part right,' he heard his ex-wife Josie's voice say in his head.

The road stretched tightly over the contours of the land and, apart from the occasional dip, they were climbing the whole time. Although Jackson would have referred to himself in the singular ifhe had been (God forbid) on foot, when he was in a car he became a plural pronoun. They, we, us. The car and me, a bio-mechanical fusion of man and vehicle. Pilgrims on God's highway.