She asked what it was.

She hadn’t planned to say anything. She had planned — if she had planned anything — to look for a few minutes and leave, and write up the site review in the careful language of someone who found nothing of note, and go home, and not come back. She had planned this so well that when she opened her mouth the question surprised her as much as it probably surprised him.

What is that? She pointed at the far bed. The one with the tall stalks and the rust-coloured foliage, climbing.

He looked at where she was pointing for a moment. Then he looked at her.

He crossed the yard.

Not quickly. He moved the way he moved when he was working — with the unhurried economy of someone who does not waste steps, who has worked out long ago the most efficient path between two points and sees no reason to deviate from it. When he reached the fence he stopped, two metres back, which put him close enough to hear and far enough to leave both of them a way out.

He did not say anything for a moment. She understood this was not rudeness. It was something else — the pause of someone who has not spoken to another person in a while and is remembering how.

“Bronze fennel,” he said.

His voice was lower than she expected. Careful. Like the man himself.

“The one on the gantry,” he added. “The rose is separate.”

She looked at the rose. It had reached the upper strut of the old signal gantry — maybe four metres high — and was moving along it in the patient way of things that have decided on a direction and are not in a hurry to justify it.

“Is it meant to go there?” she asked.

He considered this. “It was meant to go somewhere. That was where it went.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She looked back at him instead. Up close he was older than she had thought from a distance — seventy, maybe more — and had the kind of face that had been angular once and had not softened so much as settled. His hands, where they rested at his sides, were dark with soil in the creases.

“You’re not from the Accord,” he said. It was not a question.

She said nothing.

He looked at her with the patience of someone who has a garden to get back to and can afford to wait.

“I work for them,” she said, finally.

He nodded, as if this was the answer he expected and he had already decided what to do with it.

“The fennel dies back in November,” he said. “If you wanted to come again. In November it looks like nothing.”

He held her gaze for a moment. Then he turned and walked back across the yard, moving in the same unhurried way he had come, and bent back down to the third row, and began again.

She stood at the fence until it felt like the right time to leave.

She was not sure when that was.