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Teddy also knew things he’d read in books and online – stories of heroes and inventors and soldiers and spacemen – and when he read those things he was there and he was free and whole, and he felt as if he were flying. In reality, he couldn’t even walk. At least Charlie had that. At least Charlie could propel himself about the planet on his own two feet. Go where he pleased – even upstairs – run across a field in his bare feet if he felt like it, however damaged he was in the head.

Teddy’s mother always told him how lucky he was. Lucky to be living in England instead of India, where he’d be begging in a gutter; lucky to have the internet when children in Africa didn’t even have books or electric lights to read them by. Lucky to be alive.

Teddy’s head jerked angrily. Sometimes it was hard to feel lucky.

Charlie sang quietly beside him. As usual. He only knew three songs. ‘One Man Went to Mow’, ‘Ten Green Bottles’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’. He didn’t know all the right words and couldn’t count up past ten or back down at all, which made his song choices unfortunate. Sometimes Teddy imagined that baby cord squeezing Charlie’s tiny neck like a cruel python. What could Charlie have been without that cord? What songs might he have sung then? But it wasn’t all bad. That fouled cord may have squeezed most of the IQ clean out of Charlie’s head, but it had also squeezed out all the bad things – leaving only sunshine and smiles and a breathy, tuneful little-boy voice.

Teddy suddenly felt guilty for not singing along with Charlie.

‘They’re coming,’ said Beth, and Teddy saw Mr King and Mrs Johnson walking back to them across the lush meadow, both wearing dark glasses that made them look like spies. He thought how amazing it would be to be a spy, and then realized that he almost was one – the way he picked up information while nobody thought he knew what they were saying. In his head he was a spy.

In his head he could be anything.

It made him happy, and when Charlie counted down from four men to one man – via nine men – he suddenly joined him:

… and his dog, Spot! Bottle of pop!

Charlie giggled. Only Teddy knew that bit, although when he sang it, it sounded like ‘da, Spa! Oddey o pa!’

Went to mow a ME–DAL!

‘Warm enough for you, Charlie?’ Mr King took off his sunglasses and winked at Charlie, and Charlie laughed and nodded. Mr King smiled and ruffled the boy’s wispy yellow hair. ‘Be back for you in a mo, OK, big man?’

‘OK, Mr King.’ He loved it when Mr King called him big man.

Beth and Teddy got out – Teddy in his wheelchair on the lift that Charlie liked to ride on when everyone was in a good mood – and he said goodbye and watched them cross the grass towards the tents and the horses and the flags and the fun.

Jonas eyed the horses from the safety of the refreshment tent. Now and then a child would amble over with a pony in tow like a saddled dog, and fumble change out of her jodhpurs for an ice cream, but mostly the horses stayed on the other side of the blue nylon rope that divided the middle of the field into three square rings – two for showing and one for jumping.

It was years since he’d been to a horse show. Not since he was a boy. He couldn’t remember the name of the pony he’d borrowed from Springer Farm, but he remembered the sun beating down on his back, and the same smells of leather, hot grass and manure.

For some reason, they made him feel uneasy.

In a minute he’d have to make another circuit through the car park. The first two had been fraught with contact. Everyone wanted to say hello and shake his hand and ask how he was. Now Jonas was lingering over the dregs of his tea before venturing out into the open again.

The Exmoor foxhounds were in the showing ring. All tongues and tails, crowded around the huntsman with his red coat, white whip and gleaming britches. Children had been invited in to pet the big brown and white dogs, in a get-’em-early PR exercise for the hunt. There was even a boy in an electric wheelchair, flapping his crooked arms and looking at the sky, while a hound pissed on his wheel.

Now and then a hound would detach itself from the pack and lope across the ring after a scent. A sharp call of its name would bring it back in an instant. It had always amazed Jonas that the huntsman knew each of his forty or so dogs by name, when they all looked so similar.

‘Daisy!’

‘Dandy!’

‘Milo!’

And the errant dog would lope back to the pack and join the patchwork mayhem.