From nineteenth century mud and fog, we move to vistas on chalk grasslands, where orchids are growing wild in June 2018. Alice Fowler writes outwardly tidy stories, in which tangled darkness hides beneath apparently comfortable domesticity. ‘Dancing in the Grass’ begins with the narrator and her cleaner, Agata, meeting by chance. “Then, together, we stepped on to the down: the great expanse of waving grassland, sweet-scented, opening before us; so we became explorers, poised upon its edge.”

The first sentence of ‘Dancing In The Grass’ is about climate change and the narrator is concerned with nature conservation, but also with not appearing racist. Dead flowers are weighed against living humans.

“‘This is England. Wildflowers are protected here.’

My voice flared louder than I wished. The outcome of the vote was known by then. England – Britain – weren’t words that I said easily. Agata was applying for residency, she’d said”.

The sympathies of the reader keep shifting, as do the relative statuses of the two women, certainties about morality, and the narrator’s sense of who she is. Both women behave badly and claim victimhood, both develop and change over the course of the story. The ending is great.

Collected in The Truth Has Arms and Legs, Fly on the Wall Press, 2023