"Not really," Mog said. "Telly and music use bugger-all batteries really. They can last about a fortnight." Swearing sounded a conscious thing for her. "Come and have a look at the kitchen."

A floor-to-roof ply screen cut the galley kitchen off from the sitting area. He recognized the Lilliputian appliances from his caravanning holidays as a child and a forgotten, soulless wet week in Dorset came back to him.

A small cooker was being used as a food cupboard. He could see half a loaf of sliced bread and what he guessed was a block of village shop cheese in a white paper bag. There was a box of tea bags, a bag of sugar, a jar of rice and a few others of dried beans and lentils. A spotless grill pan was hanging from a wall. Neatly placed in the work surface was a caravan sink, complete with blue plastic pump and one of those curved caravan taps.

"You just work it, like this." Mog showed him, putting a cup under the tap to catch the short gush.

"Is it fresh?"

"Of course. Is yours?"

"Good point."

"It's sophisticated stuff nowadays. Some buses have Agas on them, you know. I'd love an Aga." She sighed wistfully, disappearing behind another partition.

"Grief, this is like the Tardis."

"It's actually a Bedford Twin Steer, I think from about 1967."

"Older than you, then? Good God!" he said. "A shower?"

"Well, this is a bit of a cheat. It was like this when we got it. The people who owned it first about, I don't know, twenty years ago-"

"Before you were born."

"Yeah, yeah, before I was born," she said good-naturedly. "They did it up as a camper van for their family, and they used to take it to Europe and live in it for a few weeks, but because they weren't proper travelers they had to have all the trappings, like the cooker and that, and they put this in. It's cool, isn't it?"

He looked at the Heath Robinson workings. A bin of water sat on a substantial shelf at head level. "How does it fill?" he asked.

"Well, that's the downside. You have to fill it yourself, with warm water, so it takes a bit of planning, but it's bliss once you're under it. When we bought it, all the other travelers on the camp used to queue up to use it. That was another reason we left."

"Couldn't you just say no?"

"That wouldn't be in the spirit of things."

"You've got to be quick, though, I expect."

"Very." Mog laughed. "But it's such a luxury!"

"How come you ended up with such a smart pad?"

"I had some money," she said, reddening. "And Dean traded in his ambulance."

"Ambulance?"

"Don't ask. It was a complete hovel."

He caught a glimpse of the bedroom, a lower chamber at the very back of the bus.

"That's where we sleep. It's really cozy."

"What more could you want?"

"A loo?"

"Well, I didn't like to mention it."

"You dig a pit," she said quickly. "Or you use public ones. I could write a book about where to find the best ones."

"You should."

Mog put up her hands as if to say not me.

"Where do you get your water from?" he asked.

She picked up the kettle. "It depends. Mostly, we figure out where the natural springs are. You can find out by looking at an Ordnance Survey map, and we take it from there. You can be almost sure it's going to be a hundred times cleaner than anything from a tap, but here"-she waved the kettle toward the car park-"we get it from the bogs and boil it."

Jonathan nodded. As they walked back through the bus he thought of her parents, wondered whether they woke every morning feeling sick with worry at the thought of her empty bed, or whether it was possible that they no longer noticed.

Outside, Dean was still thinking about sumps.

"How much, then?" he asked.

"That's academic," Mog said, emerging and taking her very pregnant body carefully down the steps. "It doesn't matter if it's fifty or five hundred, we still can't afford it." She put her arms round his wiry frame. "Shall we have another cup of tea?"

"Let me go and get it," Jonathan said, putting his hand out for the kettle. She looked closer to the full term than he had realized.

"No, I need the exercise. Anyway, you're not allowed in the ladies."

"Let him get it from the blokes, then."

"Dean, there's roughing it and then there's roughing it."

"It's all the bloody same. Still gone through at least seven different livers by the time you drink it. And you're too bloody posh, you are." He smiled at her and she put her face up for his kiss.

Over a second cup of tea, since Jonathan was in no hurry, they talked about the baby.

"We think it's due in a fortnight. I was a bit slow on the uptake," Mog said. "I didn't realize I was pregnant for quite a long time."

"Which is the understatement of the fuckin' year," Dean said, picking tobacco from the end of a new roll-up.

"We'll have to get some petrol for the motorbike. We've timed it. It takes eight minutes to get to the bus stop, one comes on the hour every hour and it takes forty minutes to get to the hospital, so if we leave the minute I get my first contraction, we should be okay."

"We don't want to leave too early," Dean said. "If we get there too early, they'll be swarming round us like flies, telling us what to do, how to do it, probably even what to call the poor little sod. We don't want all that crap."

"The way we see it, childbirth has been going on for all time, so, you know, we want our baby to come into the world without all those bright lights and people in green masks staring at her and pumping her full of drugs or whatever."

"Him," Dean corrected.

"Her," Mog replied.

It was an innocent argument, delivered in a way that made Jonathan realize they thought they were the first to have it.

"What are your plans if something goes wrong?" he asked, feeling obliged to put it up for discussion.

"Like what?"

"Like a bus not coming?"

"We'll go on the motorbike."

"Or the motorbike not starting." He looked at it and tried to imagine it carrying a woman in labor.

"It will," Dean said. "It always does."

"Or Mog going into labor in the middle of the night?"

"I've got the number of a twenty-four-hour taxi firm."

"Have you got a phone?"

"There's one in the village."

"There's not much to go wrong, is there?" Mog added. "We'll be fine."

They looked so full of confidence that Jonathan didn't want to frighten them with the list of possibilities.

Niall was also trying to draw up a list of possibilities-any possibilities, all possibilities-since the most likely possibility was too impossible to even contemplate. There was almost half a pint of Guinness still in his glass on the bar which he'd gingerly been taking sips from since he'd heard what Roy Mundy had to say.

It was the first round at the Cott he'd been included in that hadn't been in return for one he'd bought earlier-a milestone in local acceptance-but the stout wasn't going down like it should. Something else was going down instead.

"Don't miss a trick, I don't," the spherical Roy Mundy kept chuckling.

Niall wanted the plumber to shut up, but Roy was in full flight. The more he teased, the higher he tugged up his trouser leg. Perched on a high bar stool like a portly gnome, he was now exposing a good six inches of mottled shin. Under normal circumstances, Niall would have had a laugh about it.

"But you don't have to tell us, does 'e, Dave?"

"No," said the landlord, "'cos if 'e don't, someone else always will."

"That's right, my boy," Roy cackled. "So, save for the odd bleddy cloak-and-dagger meeting in a rest area, how's it going up the road?"

"It's what you could call work in progress," Niall said, trying to ignore the cracks about the rest area. Roy and Dave were adamant they had seen him and Emmy in a clandestine rendezvous somewhere called Boxtree. "We've not quite found our feet yet."

"They'll be on the end of your legs," Roy said. His V-neck navy sweater, which reminded Niall of his old school uniform, was at least a size too small for his magnificent beer belly. "That's where I generally find mine."

Niall wondered if he ever got to see them. Perhaps if he did, he wouldn't wear those dodgy black lace-up shoes and nylon gray socks. He had another go at steering the conversation back to something less unsettling. Aga parts would do.

"I drove halfway round the bloody world looking for this place, and it turned out to be a lock-up in some dying factory with vegetation growing out of the middle of the road, with a note on the door saying 'Gone Surfing.' Is that normal?"

"Depends how many feet you've got," Roy said.

"Feet of surf," Dave explained with a pained expression.

As Roy hooted at his own joke, Niall heard Cathal's voice in his head again, muffled words coming from inside the sewing room that he couldn't piece together. "This isn't about Niall, Emmy. This is the one thing in your life that isn't about Niall."

By the time he came to again, Roy Mundy had changed the subject. "Well, then, I knew old Mr. Hart quite well. He was a case, w'un 'e? He was an old bugger, 'e was. I 'spect you've heard that, 'ave you?"

"Funnily enough..."

"I don't care, I don't. People can do what they like, can't they?" Roy sipped his beer. "What is it, some sort of hippy commune you've got up there?"

"Nudist hippy commune," Niall said. "I'm only wearing clothes now because I'm here. Usually we all walk around naked. Especially the women." His banter sounded hopelessly flimsy. He could hear Emmy in her sewing room with Cathal. "Right for who?" she was shouting.

"Nudist, is it? 'Ell! What's it you say is wrong with your Aga? Maybe I could fit it in this afternoon, hey, Dave?" He took a long sip, draining the last three inches of ale. "That's what they all think in the village, mind."

"Better not spoil their fun by telling them the truth then."

"Old bleddy Mrs. Partridge up there thinks you'm all on the wacky baccy."

"Jaysus, what a joke."

"We all think it is. We're all having a great laugh."

"Good. It's nice to know you're giving something back to the community."

Roy cackled some more and the two of them realized they liked each other. Niall wished he was in the mood to show it.

"Emmy is Mr. Hart's niece," he said, the Guinness still sitting unhappily in his stomach on top of the rest area conversation. "He left her the house in his will, and-"

"We know that," Roy interrupted impatiently. "And we know you've had Culworthy's up to have a look, and the colored maid who's taken over from Dr. Rawe at the surgery went home apparently sick the other day and then recovered enough to buy a pasty from Cott Stores and start eating it before she even got in the bleddy car. I tell you, we don't miss a trick, we don't."

"So you keep telling me. Anyway, Sita needs to eat, she's still breastfeeding."

"Spare me the details, boy. No, as I said, I don't mind. I like everyone, me." He tapped the bar with his empty glass.

"I'll get that," Niall said, nodding at the landlord.

"You're a funny lot, though, in' you? You've got all this space up there, and you have to drive a couple of miles up the road in separate cars just so you can talk in a bit of privacy."

"It wasn't me."

"Yes, 'twas."

Roy put a five-pound note on a pump, and Niall took it off again, pointing to himself as Dave Kemp filled the empty glass with a pint of Wreckers.

"You're a worse gossip than Eileen Partridge, you are," the landlord said.