@gattocattivo, Moth’s illness becomes even more of a thing, if anything, in The Wild Silence and Landlines. He’s depicted as increasingly weak and forgetful in TWS, needing to write a daily ‘to do’ list that reminds him to call Raynor to assure her he’s actually arrived at university every day, because on one occasion he drove for an hour in the wrong direction. He’s unable to look at a screen for long, making his academic work hard, he sleeps 12 hours a night etc.
Raynor longs for him to come and be with her as her mother is dying, but won’t let him because she thinks it would be unbearable for him to look at his own death. (Her mother struggles to breathe at the of her life, and that supposed to be the likely end stage for CBD.)
Being offered the cider farm is the answer to this — he needs ‘a wild, green life’ without problems.
Landlines starts with thst turning out not to be the case — he’s much sicker, he can’t even manage a 2-mile loop around the farm, and has a bad fall and n the orchard. She thinks he’s in the final decline. Yet Raynor decides they will walk the remote, difficult Cape Wrath trail despite this, and he recovers rapidly en route and is in fact the one pushing for them to walk all the way home to Cornwall from the north of Scotland.
Also, I think that the fudging and omissions about the reasons for the repossession of their farm at the start of TSP is absolutely covering up RW’s theft. They were evicted as a direct result of that theft, when they borrowed money at high interest and with a charge on their home to repay the stolen money and avoid RW being charged — when that debt was called in by whichever creditor took over the debt when the lender’s business failed, that was the court case that led to their home being repossessed.
Hence the cover story about ‘Cooper’.
Which may not be an outright lie, of course. It may be that they did invest in a friend’s business and lose money at some other point. But that’s not what lost them the house.