When I got through to John, the first thing he said was: “Look, there’s been an accident – “

Ha! I told Charlie. Maybe now he’d be sorry.

“What happened? Are you alright? I told you you should have let me drive you.”

“For God’s sake, stop fussing, woman. It’s nothing. The worst thing is I’ve pranged the Merc. It actually happened in the carpark – some tart in a Primera comes out without looking. Unfortunately I got a bit of a knock on the head and the doctors want to keep me in overnight for observation.”

“That sounds really bad.”

“They’re just trying not to get sued, that’s all. And rightfully, because I would sue the pants off them if they called it wrong. Anyway, will you be a love and put some things in a bag for me and pop them round here? And fetch my laptop too, okay?”

“Is it far? Should I get a cab?”

“Charlie’ll drive you. Just give him one of your sultry looks. Or let him get another flash of your tits in his dressing-gown. He’ll happily drive you to Timbuctoo. You know he’s got a crush on you, don’t you?”

This set me off blushing so hard I was surprised it didn’t melt the phone’s circuitry.

“What are you talking about?” I croaked. “He’s known me for about ten minutes.”

“What do you think all that chest-beating was about this morning? Picture it – my sex-starved brother stuck down here in the country 24/7, covered in dung, surrounded by women – and I use the term in the loosest possible sense – who make your average horse look attractive – and then you come down here looking like a sort of slutty Julie Christie in that movie they made me watch for O level English – “

“’Far from the Madding Crowd’” I said.

“Whatever – but seriously, Min, if my idiot brother really makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have to stay there. Go to the Crown. They’ve got three rooms, it’s really quite pleasant.”

I wondered how he knew what the rooms at the Crown were like, but I didn’t need to really. No doubt one of my snottier predecessors – and I could just imagine what she would have been like – had taken one look at the ancestral dungheap and decided she would sooner eat her Jimmy Choos than set them down anywhere in the vicinity of the Casa Godwin.

Having taken a few more instructions and promised to turn up at St Bede’s with the necessaries, I tramped back down to the house. By now, I was really starving. Charlie opened the door for me and put a true doorstep of a sandwich into my hand, brown bread, Cheddar, pickle, and a mug of tea into the other. Never had such humble fare seemed more attractive. John could wait a few more minutes while I had my lunch. Anyway, he didn’t sound concussed.

“Is he still alive then?” said Charlie as I sat at the kitchen table, devouring the bread and cheese. I updated him. John was right; I didn’t even have to ask.

“I’ll drive you,” said Charlie. “I have to go into town anyway.”

Charlie’s car was not a Mercedes roadster. It was a colour that could have been pale blue or green, accessorised with rust. It was an estate and the back was filled with an assortment of newspapers, farming impedimenta and old clothing.

He dressed for the trip into town by the simple expedient of swapping his wellies for a pair of shoes that looked the way shoes would look if it were possible to fashion shoes out of mud.

“Hold on.” He opened the front passenger door and hefted a carrierbag full of empty bottles into the back, followed by some baling twine and what looked like a small engine part covered in grease. “Go on.”

I sat myself down gingerly and was immediately spiked in the thigh by a broken spring under the seat’s upholstery. We jolted into town – the suspension was shot too – not really talking, me painfully aware of his strong capable-looking hand on the gearstick by my right knee and thinking embarrassing thoughts about what I would like that strong capable hand to be doing, and him in some reverie of his own, which he finally broke just as we reached the outskirts of town by saying, “You know, I bet I can rig up something to improve the phone reception down at the house.”

Passionate!

“I’ll meet you back here in an hour,” he said at the hospital.

“Aren’t you coming in?” I said surprised.

“Believe me, the Dog won’t be wanting to see me. I’ve got some things to do.”

After consulting with the bored receptionist, I managed to track John down. Of course he had somehow managed to get a room to himself. It should have been a four but the other 3 beds were unoccupied. He didn’t look any the worse for the wear apart from his bandaged finger.

“Was it broken?” I asked.

“No, just a bad sprain, the doctor says. What have you been getting up to?”

I told him about the morning’s tour. “He’s really got something going up there. I was quite impressed.”

John snorted. “It’s just wanking in the wind. There isn’t enough land to make a serious go of it. It’s subsistence farming. He’s the product of 6000 years of civilisation, the Industrial Revolution and Imperial College, all to live the lifestyle of a mediaeval peasant. It’s stupid. It’s worse than stupid; it‘s ungrateful. And as for you, you’d last for about 2 minutes up there without your trusty Tescos.”

“I didn’t say I was planning to move in,” I said grumpily. Why did he always have to trash everything that wasn’t exactly like him? “Why do you hate each other so much?” I said aloud.

He looked haughty and long-suffering. “I don’t hate him. He hates me.”

“Alright. Why does he hate you so much?”

“Isn’t it obvious? He’s jealous. He’s always been jealous of me. It’s a typical younger brother dynamic. Only in his case, it’s worse because – “

“What?”

But whatever had made him break off, it was obviously big enough to close the subject entirely.

“Nothing,” he said. “Why are we constantly talking about him anyway? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were interested.”

He shot me a look. I laughed pallidly and changed the subject myself. The hour dragged. I went and got myself some Tictacs and John a Marathon and the papers from the giftshop. When I got back, he had powered up his laptop and was deep in a document that looked so boring, I marvelled that his brain could focus on it without immediately going into a self-protective coma. I have no idea what John actually does in that big office of his, but whenever I see any of the work he brings home, I am deeply grateful that I don’t have to do it. No doubt it is very important – nay, essential – to the successful running of a post-industrial growth economy, but how can anything so important and worth paying him such scads of money for, be so mind-crunchingly dull? No doubt my thinking this is just another sign of my terminal intellectual and emotional immaturity.

John worked on his laptop, I read his Telegraph and ate my Tictacs, occasionally reading out interesting snippets to him and being rewarded by distracted grunts. Was this a vision of my future with John? How had I even begun thinking of a future with John when everything he said or did gave me the impression that he thought of me as a kind of diverting canape before he moved on to the main course of the kind of woman that he would take seriously, a sort of female clone of him, Oxford, LBS, high-flying City job, her own platinum card that wasn’t just courtesy of her daddy.

This was depressing. Why did being with John for any length of time always make me feel like such a bit of fluff? As if I weren’t clever enough, or serious enough, or tough enough, as if my massage therapist job were some trivial female thing, nice, but not what the business of the real world was about. No doubt if I pressed him he would say that my clients were all losers who were not equipped to face the real world and give me a lecture about how the weakest should go to the wall.

Charlie was right. What am I doing with him? He is a tosser. I looked at my watch. Thank Christ! He was engrossed in his document and barely acknowledged my departure.

Downstairs, reception was fairly empty. I looked around for Charlie but there was no-one around apart from a handsome yokel engaging the bored receptionist – bored no longer! – in what, from her giggles and hair-twirling, I took to be flirtatious banter.

Something about him looked familiar. I looked a bit closer and realised it was Charlie, but not as I knew him. I approached cautiously. “Charlie?”

He broke off from the receptionist and turned around. It was Charlie, but Charlie shorn. The wild hair, the unkempt beard, had been ruthlessly excised, and underneath, amazingly, Charlie was good-looking, I mean, seriously goodlooking. I mean, I always thought John was goodlooking in that big, bluff, blond English sort of way, but Charlie, although built much less in the Viking mould, was the kind of goodlooking that make women whisper in corners together. Without the camouflage, there was something almost Italian about his clearcut features, which in combination with his English colouring and those heartstopping eyes, well, it just made you want to jump him.

“What did you do?” I said, marvelling.