Friday night

"The odd thing about a banana," Oliver Swithin mused as he chased the naked policewoman across the moonlit field, "is not that it's an excellent source of potassium, but that everybody seems to know it is."

A week earlier, he'd been borrowing a book about swans from the library. A passing reader had tapped him on the shoulder and whispered: "A full-grown swan can break a man's arm, you know."

Oliver might have forgotten the incident, but on his way home, a bus passenger had spotted the book poking out of his leather satchel and said the same thing. Later, his housemate Geoffrey Angelwine couldn't resist making a similar comment.

That's when it struck Oliver that he'd never had a conversation about George Washington without somebody piping up: "Did you know he had wooden teeth?" Every time the subject of hedgehogs arose, someone felt compelled to say: "They're covered in fleas, you know." Munch on a celery stalk and you'd inevitably be told that you burn more calories digesting it than you take in from eating it. And how many discussions of sexual orientation had led to the dubious anecdote that Britain had no laws against lesbians because Queen Victoria didn't (or couldn't or wouldn't) believe they existed?

An owl hooted, interrupting his thoughts. At least Oliver guessed it was an owl. It could have been a hedgehog howling at the moon for all he knew about country matters. It was hard to hear anything over his labored breathing. Was that a nettle patch he'd just run through?

Oliver had assumed that he and Effie were only going for a nighttime stroll. But when they'd reached the edge of Synne Common, the tract of scrubland near the Cotswolds village where they were staying, she had swiftly disrobed, bundled her clothes under a holly bush, and, ordering him to "get your kit off," hared off into the darkness. Mesmerized, Oliver undressed and followed, struggling to catch up with his girlfriend's slim outline, silvery-blue in the moonlight, the mass of curly hair fanning out around her head and bouncing wildly as she ran. Pure Botticelli. But he knew that he'd need some serious mental distraction to blot out his awareness that he was stark naked in a public place and it wasn't a dream.

Back to bananas.

Oliver believed that this irresistible urge to educate strangers about swans and bananas and lesbians was a new strain of trivia that he'd identified. No, not trivia. Anti-trivia. It was the opposite of conventional trivia, the stuff of board games and pub quizzes.

That kind of trivia, you either knew or you didn't. More likely, you didn't. For example, Effie Strong it harm, like many women, had a pair of faint indentations, set symmetrically on her lower back. (The clear moon might have been bright enough to reveal them now, but Oliver had left his glasses with the rest of his clothes.) And he would have bet that not one person in a hundred knew they had a name—the "dimples of Venus."

But in contrast, Oliver thought, his attention drifting downwards, everyone can (and, crucially, does) tell you that the gluteus maximus, the humble buttock, is the largest muscle in the human body. (Well, strictly speaking, it's in joint first place with its counterpart.) "Muscle" couldn't do justice to Effie's fleet derriere, flickering about five yards ahead of him. No need for his glasses to make that out. Perhaps there is a divinity that shapes our ends, he reflected. Or maybe it's the squats.

Did Botticelli do bottoms? Or would it take a sculptor to do full justice to his girlfriend, capturing the way each side approached the Euclidian perfection of the sphere, those gluteal creases each an almost perfect arc? Dear God, they seemed to be smiling at him!

Effie slowed and turned round. Oliver stumbled to a halt, remembering Sir Robert Helpmann's caveat about nude ballet: that not everything stops when the music does.

"What's on your mind?" she asked.

"Solid geometry," he confessed.

Effie nodded. "Serves a girl right for asking."

Oliver sneezed. Fair-haired and English-skinned under the full moon, he felt as conspicuous as a polar bear in a nunnery. In his late twenties, he had so far avoided gathering any spare flesh on his wiry frame, but his physique was still an embarrassing contrast to Effie's lean, athletic build. Her attractive face under the teeming curls, vaguely reminiscent of the young Ginger Rogers, would always score higher out of ten than his own benign features—his chin not quite firm enough, his teeth a touch too prominent, his pale blue eyes always looking as if he had just removed his glasses, even while he was wearing them. Gazing at her blurry form and trying to recover his breath, he was struck again by how grown-up it felt that a whole adult person, with a smirking bottom and everything else that goes with it—most of which was currently on display, since she'd elected to unmask her beauty to the moon—should love him as much as he loved her.

"I still wonder what you see in me," he confessed.

"You know, the number of times my colleagues at the Yard say the same thing, you'd think I could come up with a reason by now."

Oliver's riposte was thwarted by another sneeze.

"So have you guessed where you are?" Effie asked.

"In the middle of bloody Warwickshire, far from my clothes, even farther from my nice warm bed, too far by half from London, and in constant fear of being dive-bombed by bats," he thought, but kept it to himself. The irony had not escaped him that, since his adolescence, he'd lavished many hours of his imagination on female nudity, preferably accompanied by his own. Now that it was an al fresco reality, all he wanted to do was cover up his full Monty and go in search of a nice hot cup of tea. A cloud, which had momentarily slid across the moon, moved on, and the expanse known as Synne Common ensilvered itself moment by moment.

He saw that they had reached the highest point of the Common. In front of them, surrounded by a chain-link fence, was a huge, circular pattern, about 150 feet in diameter, where the top surface of the chalky soil had been scraped away to leave a dozen concentric rings of dark grass, each a yard wide. This landmark was the nearby village of Synne's greatest claim to fame. It was one of England's seven authentic turf mazes, possibly the finest, well documented since the seventeenth century, but called the Shakespeare Race only since the early twentieth, on the grounds that any community within twenty miles of Stratford-upon-Avon needed to claim some Shakespearean connection, no matter how spurious.

Because Synne had been his parents' home for the last ten years, Oliver had seen the Race many times, but its serpentine beauty, monochrome and almost luminous in the glimpses of the moon, was still an impressive sight, despite his fuzzy vision. On the far side of the Race, an ancient tree known as The Synne Oak was reputed to have been the village gibbet.

"Splendid," he said, wiping his nose on his handkerchief. "Although I don't see why we had to take our clothes off first. Can we go back now?"

Effie punched him mischievously in the upper arm. It hurt.

"Back? We haven't even started. We have to do the maze."

"Do the maze?"

"I was talking to your brother Toby."

"Oh dear."

"Toby, as you know, is stuffed full of Shakespearean lore and local traditions. He was telling your Aunt...