Selected Stories

The Children

‘We must go now,’ Connie’s father said and Connie didn’t say anything.

The two men stood with their shovels, hesitating. Everyone else, including Mr Crozier, who had conducted the funeral service, had gone from the graveside. Cars were being started or were already being eased out of where they were parked, close to the church wall on the narrow road.

‘We have to go, Connie,’ her father said.

Connie felt in the pocket of her coat for the scarf-ring and thought for a moment she had lost it, but then she felt the narrow silver band. She knew it wasn’t silver but they had always pretended. She leaned forward to drop it on to the coffin and took the hand her father held out to her. By the churchyard gate they caught up with the last of the mourners, Mrs Archdale and the elderly brothers, Arthur and James Dobbs.

‘You’ll come to the house,’ her father invited them in case an invitation hadn’t already been passed on to them. But people knew: the cars that were slipping away were all going in the same direction, to the house three and a quarter miles away, still just within the townland of Fara.

Connie would have preferred this to be different. She would have liked the house to be quiet now and had imagined, this afternoon, her father and herself gathering up her mother’s belongings, arranging them in whatever way the belongings of the dead usually were arranged, her father explaining how they should be as they went along. She had thought of them alone after the funeral, doing all this because it was the time for it, because that was something you felt.

Her mother’s dying, and the death itself, had been orderly and anticipated. Connie had known for months that it would come, for weeks that she would throw her scarf-ring on to the coffin at the very last minute. ‘Brown Thomas’s,’ her mother had said when she was asked where it had been bought, and had given it to Connie because she didn’t want it herself any more. This afternoon, in the quiet bedroom, there would be other things: familiar brooches, familiar earrings, and clothes and shoes, of course; odds and ends in drawers. But she and her father were up to that.

‘All right, Connie?’ he asked, turning left instead of taking the Knock-lofty road, which was the long way round.

There’d been no pain; that had been managed well. While she was at the hospice, and when she came home at the end because suddenly she wanted to, you could tell that there had been no pain. ‘Because we prayed for that, I suppose,’ Connie had said when everything was over, and her father said he supposed so too. More important than anything it was that there had been no pain.

‘Oh, I’m OK,’ she said.

‘They have to come to the house. They won’t stay long.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve been a strength, Connie.’

He meant it. He himself had been the source of strength at first and had seen her through that time, before she began to give back what he had given her. She had adored her mother.

‘She would want us to be hospitable,’ he said, unnecessarily, saying too much.

‘I know we have to be.’

Connie was eleven and had her mother’s faded blue eyes, and hair the colour of corn-stalks, as her mother’s had been too. The freckles on her forehead and on the bridge of her nose were a feature of her own.

‘We can get down to it when they’ve gone,’ she said as they drove on, past the two cottages where nobody lived, down the hill that suddenly became almost dark, beech foliage meeting overhead. Mrs Archdale had been given a lift by the Dobbs brothers, their red Ford Escort already turning in at the gates. On the uneven surface of the avenue other cars were progressing cautiously, watched by the fenced sheep on either side.

‘Come in, come in,’ Connie’s father invited the mourners who had already left their cars and were conversing in quiet tones on the gravel in front of the house. He was a tall, thin man, dark hair beginning to go grey, a boniness distinguishing his features. Sombrely dressed today, he was quite notably handsome. He had known much longer than his child had that his wife was going to die, but always at first there had been hope of a kind. Connie had been told when there was none.

The hall door wasn’t locked. He’d left it so, wanting people to go in as soon as they arrived, but no one had. He pushed it open and stood aside. All of them would know the way and Mrs O’Daly would be there, tea made.

When Teresa was left by her husband she’d felt humiliated by the desertion. ‘You’ll have them to yourself,’ he’d said; with ersatz gentleness, she considered. ‘I promise you I won’t be a nuisance about that.’ He spoke of their two children, whom she had always believed were fonder of him than they were of her. And it seemed wrong that they should be deprived of him: in her lowness at the time she had even said so, had felt she should be punished further for her failure to keep a marriage together, should lose them too. ‘Oh no,’ he had protested. ‘No, I would never do that.’

Among the mourners in the drawing-room, she remembered that with poignancy, wondering if the pain of death so early in a marriage left behind the same cruel rawness that did not change and lingered for so long. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said when Connie’s father put a hand on her arm and murmured that she was good to have come. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Robert,’ she said again, murmuring also.

She knew him as Connie’s father, her own daughter, Melissa, being Connie’s particular friend. She didn’t know him well; more often than not he wasn’t there when she brought Melissa to spend the day at the farm. She had liked Connie’s mother but had never had much of a conversation with her, they being different kinds of people, and the house was a busy place. During all the years Teresa had known the house no one was employed to help in it, as no one was – except for odd days during the summer – on the farm itself. Teresa had guessed that the present bleak occasion would be in the hands of Mrs O’Daly, who in her capable countrywoman’s way would have offered to see to things. She poured the tea now, cups and saucers laid out on a table that didn’t belong in the drawing-room. O’Daly, a small, scuttling man who worked on the roads and took on anything else he could get, was handing round plates of biscuits and egg sandwiches.

‘He did it very well,’ someone remarked to Teresa. ‘Your rector did.’

‘Yes, he did.’

A couple she couldn’t place, whose way of referring to Mr Crozier suggested they weren’t of the locality, nodded a nervous confirmation of her agreement. Teresa thought she probably would even have known them if they’d come out from Clonmel. Yes, Mr Crozier did funerals well, she said.

‘We’re distant cousins,’ the woman said. ‘A generation back.’

‘I live quite near.’

‘It’s lovely here.’

‘Quiet,’ the man said. ‘You’d notice the quiet.’

‘We didn’t know until we picked up the Irish Times,’ the woman said. ‘Well, we’d lost touch.’

‘Saddens us now, of course.’ The man nodded that into place. ‘To have lost touch.’

‘Yes.’

Teresa was forty-one, still pretty, her round face brightened by a smile that came easily and lingered, as if it belonged to these features in a way as permanent as they were themselves. Her reddish hair was cut quite short; she had to watch her weight and adamantly did so. She shook her head when O’Daly pressed his plate of Bourbon creams on her.

‘We drove over,’ the woman she was in conversation with imparted. ‘From Mitchelstown.’

‘Good of you to come.’

They deprecated that, and Teresa looked around. When she woke that morning she’d found herself wondering if her husband would be here, if he’d drive down from Dublin, since the death would have shocked him. But among the mourners in the drawing-room she didn’t see him. It seemed quite a sparse attendance in the large, ordinarily furnished room, for not everyone who’d been at the church had come. But Teresa knew her husband hadn’t been in the church either. It was years now since they’d met; he’d ceased to bother with his children as soon as other children were born to him. As good as his word about not being a nuisance, Teresa supposed.

Afterwards, when everyone had gone, Connie helped the O’Dalys to clear up and when that was done the O’Dalys went too. She and her father did what her mother had requested then, taking her things from the wardrobe and the dressing-table drawers, disposing of them as she had wished, her charities remembered. It was late before all that was completed, before Connie and her father sat together in the kitchen. He poached their eggs when they’d decided to have eggs. He asked her to watch the toast. ‘We’ll manage,’ he said.

The farm had come to Robert when he married, introducing him to a way of life he had not sought and which he did not imagine he would take to. In fact, he did, and over the years transformed the farm his wife had not long ago inherited as a sluggish, neglected enterprise into a fairly thriving one. It was a means of livelihood too; and, more than that, a source of personal satisfaction for Robert that he succeeded with crops and stock, about which he had once known nothing.

All this continued when he was widowed, when the house and land became entirely his. There were no changes on the farm, but in the house - to which Mrs O’Daly now came for three hours every weekday morning - Connie and her father, while slowly coming to terms with the loss they had suffered, shared the awareness of a ghost that fleetingly demanded no more than to be remembered. Life continuing could not fold away what had happened but it offered something, blurring the drama of death’s immediacy. And then, when almost two years had passed since the funeral, Robert asked Teresa to marry him.

It was a natural thing. Having known one another through the friendship of their daughters, they had come to know one another better in the new circumstances, Teresa continuing to drive Melissa to the farm, with her much younger brother when he was made welcome there by Connie but was still too young to cycle. And Robert, doing his bit as often as he could, drove the two back to the bungalow at Fara Bridge, where their father in his day had attempted to get a pottery going.

The day he asked Teresa to marry him, Robert had looked up from the mangels he was weeding and seen her coming towards him, along the verge of the field. She brought him tea in a can, which she often did when she stayed all afternoon in order to save him the journey later to Fara Bridge. A year after the death she had begun to fall in love with him.

‘I never knew,’ he said in the mangel field when Teresa’s response to his proposal was to tell him that. ‘I thought you’d turn me down.’

She took the can of tea from his hand and lifted it to her lips, the first intimacy between them, before their first embrace, before they spoke of love. ‘Oh, Robert, not in a million years would I turn you down,’ she whispered.

There were difficulties, but they didn’t matter as they would have once. In an Ireland they could both remember it would have been commented upon that she, born into a religious faith that was not Robert’s, had attended a funeral service in his alien church. It would have been declared that marriage would not do; that the divorce which had brought Teresa’s to an end could not be recognized. Questions would have been asked about children who might be born to them: to which belief were they promised, in which safe haven might they know only their own kind? Such difficulties still trailed, like husks caught in old cobwebs, but there were fewer interfering strictures now in how children were brought up, and havens were less often sought. Melissa, a year older than Connie, had received her early schooling from the nuns in Clonmel and had gone on to an undenominational boarding-school in Dublin. Her brother still attended the national school at Fara Bridge. Connie went to Miss Mortimer, whose tiny academy for Protestant children – her mother’s choice because it was convenient – was conducted in an upstairs room at the rectory, ten minutes’ away along the river path. But, in the end, all three would be together at Melissa’s boarding-school, co-educational and of the present.

‘How lovely all that is!’ Teresa murmured.

There was a party at which the engagement was announced – wine in the afternoon, and Mrs O’Daly’s egg sandwiches again, and Teresa’s sponge cakes and her brandy-snaps and meringues. The sun came out after what had been a showery morning, allowing the celebration to take place in the garden. Overgrown and wild in places, the garden’s neglect went back to the time of the death, although sometimes when she’d come to keep an eye on the children Teresa had done her best with the geranium beds, which had particularly been the task of Connie’s mother.

She would do better now, Teresa promised herself, looking about among the guests as she had among the mourners, again half expecting to see the man who had left her, wanting him to be there, wanting him to know that she was loved again, that she had survived the indignity he had so casually subjected her to, that she was happy. But he wasn’t there, as naturally he wouldn’t be. All that was over, and the cousins from Mitchelstown with whom she had conversed on the afternoon of the funeral naturally weren’t there either.

Robert was happy too – because Teresa was and because, all around him at the party, there were no signs of disapproval, only smiles of approbation.

Because the wedding was not to take place until later in the summer, after Melissa’s return for the holidays, Connie and her father continued for a while to be alone together, managing, as he had said they would. Robert bought half a dozen Charollais calves, a breed he had never had on the farm before. He liked, every year, doing something new; and he liked the calves. Otherwise, his buying and selling were a pattern, his tasks a repetition. He repaired the fences, tightening the barbed wire where that was possible, renewing it when it wasn’t. He looked out for the many ailments that beset sheep. He lifted the first potatoes and noted every day the ripening of his barley.

Teresa dragged clumps of scotch grass and treacherous little nettles out of the sanguineum and the sylvaticum, taking a trowel to the docks. She cut down the Johnson’s Blue, wary of letting it spread too wildly, but wouldn’t have known to leave the Kashmir Purple a little longer, or that pratense’s sturdy roots were a job to divide. A notebook left behind instructed her in all that.

Miss Mortimer closed her small school for the summer and Connie was at home all day then. Sometimes Melissa’s brother was there, a small thin child called Nat, a name that according to Melissa couldn’t be more suitable, since he so closely resembled an insect.

‘You want to come with us?’ Teresa invited Connie when Melissa’s term had ended and Teresa was setting off to meet her at the railway station in Clonmel. Connie hesitated, then said she didn’t.

That surprised Teresa. She had driven over specially from Fara Bridge, as she always did when Melissa came back for the holidays. It surprised her, but afterwards she realized she’d somehow sensed before she spoke that Connie was going to say no. She was puzzled, but didn’t let it show.

‘Come back here, shall we?’ she suggested, since this, too, was what always happened on Melissa’s first evening home.

‘If that’s what you’d like,’ Connie said.

The train was twenty minutes late and when Teresa returned to the farm with Melissa and Nat, Connie wasn’t in the house, and when her father came in later she wasn’t with him either, as she sometimes was. ‘Connie!’ they all called in the yard, her father going into some of the sheds. Melissa and her brother went to the end of the avenue and a little way along the road in both directions. ‘Connie!’ they called out in the garden, although they could see she wasn’t there. ‘Connie!’ they called, going from room to room in the house. Her father was worried. He didn’t say he was but Melissa and her brother could tell. So could Teresa.

‘She can’t be far,’ she said. ‘Her bicycle’s here.’

She drove Melissa to Fara Bridge to unpack her things, and Nat went with them. She telephoned the farm then. There wasn’t any answer and she guessed that Robert was still looking for his child.

The telephone was ringing again when Connie came back. She came downstairs: she’d been on the roof, she said. You went up through the trapdoor at the top of the attic stairs. You could lie down on the warm lead and read a book. Her father shook his head, saying it wasn’t safe to climb about on the roof. He made her promise not to again.

‘What’s the matter, Connie?’ he asked her when he went to say good-night. Connie said nothing was. Propped up in front of her was the book she’d been reading on the roof, The Citadel by A. J. Cronin.

‘Surely you don’t understand that, Connie?’ her father said, and she said she wouldn’t want to read a book she didn’t understand.

Connie watched the furniture being unloaded. The men lifted it from the yellow removal van, each piece familiar to her from days spent in the bungalow at Fara Bridge. Space had been made, some of the existing furniture moved out, to be stored in one of the outhouses.

Melissa wasn’t there. She was helping her mother to rearrange in the half-empty rooms at Fara Bridge the furniture that remained, which would have to be sold when the bungalow was because there wasn’t room for it at the farm. There had been a notice up all summer announcing the sale of the bungalow, but no one had made an offer yet. ‘Every penny’ll go into the farm,’ Connie had heard Teresa saying.

Nat, whom Teresa had driven over earlier, watched with Connie in the hall. He was silent this morning, as he often was, his thin arms wrapped tightly around his body in a way that suggested he suffered from the cold, although the day was warm. Now and again he glanced at Connie, as if expecting her to say something about what was happening, but Connie didn’t.

All morning it took. Mrs O’Daly brought the men tea and later, when they finished, Connie’s father gave them a drink in the kitchen: small glasses of whiskey, except for the man who was the driver, who was given what remained in the bottle to take away with him.

‘That’s a lovely piece of delft,’ Mrs O’Daly commented in the hall, referring to a blue-and-white soup tureen that the men had placed on the shelf of the hallstand. Having finished her morning’s work, she had gone from room to room, inspecting the furniture that had come, and the glass and china in the hall. ‘Isn’t that really lovely!’ she exclaimed again about the soup tureen.

It was cracked, Connie saw, a long crack in the lid. It used to be on the sideboard of the dining-room in the bungalow. She’d never much noticed it then, but in the hall it seemed obtrusive.

Melissa was pretty, tall and slender, with long fair hair and greenish eyes. She liked jokes, and was clever although she didn’t want to be and often pretended she wasn’t.

‘Time to measure the maggot,’ she said later that same day. Her contention was that her brother had ceased to grow and would grow no more. She and Connie regularly made him stand against the door jamb of Connie’s bedroom in the hope of finding an increase in his modest stature.

But Connie shook her head when this was again suggested. She was reading London Belongs to Me and went on doing so. Nat, on his way upstairs already, for he enjoyed this ceremonial attention, looked disappointed.

‘Poor little maggot,’ Melissa said. ‘Poor little maggot, Connie. You’ve gone and upset it.’

‘You shouldn’t call your brother a maggot.’

‘Hey!’ Outraged, Melissa stared disbelievingly at Connie’s calm features. ‘Hey, come on!’

Connie turned down the corner of a page and began to walk away.

‘It’s only a blooming word,’ Melissa ran after her to protest. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘This isn’t your house,’ Connie said.

The day Connie’s mother came back from the hospice Miss Mortimer had pinned up pictures of flowers. Miss Mortimer painted her pictures herself; before the flowers there’d been clowns. ‘Foxglove,’ Connie had said when Miss Mortimer asked.

Going home on the river path, she’d been thinking of that, of the four new pictures on the schoolroom wall, of Miss Mortimer saying that soon there wouldn’t be a cowslip left anywhere. The schoolroom stayed on in her mind nearly always when she was going home, the writing on the blackboard, the tattered carpet, the boards showing all around it, the table they sat at, Miss Mortimer too. The rectory itself stayed in her mind, the two flights of stairs, the white hall door, three steps, the gravel.

Her father didn’t wave when she saw him coming towards her. It was drizzling and she thought that was maybe why he was coming to meet her. But often in winter it rained and he didn’t; it was her mother who used to. ‘Hullo, Connie,’ he said, and she knew then that her mother had come back from the hospice, as she had said she would.

He took her hand, not telling her because she knew. She didn’t cry. She wanted to ask in case it was different from what she guessed, but she didn’t because she didn’t want to hear if it was. ‘It’s all right,’ her father said. He went with her to the room that had become her mother’s, overlooking the garden. She touched her mother’s hand and he lifted her up so that she could kiss her cheek, as often he’d done before. Mr Crozier was standing by the windows in the drawing-room when they went downstairs again. She hadn’t known he was there. Then the O’Dalys came.

‘You stay here with me,’ Mrs O’Daly said in the kitchen. ‘I’ll hear you your reading.’ But it wasn’t reading on a Tuesday, another verse to learn instead, and six sentences to write. ‘You going to write them then?’ Mrs O’Daly asked. ‘You going to think them up?’

She didn’t want to. She learned the verse and said it to her father when he came to sit beside her, but the next day she didn’t have to go to Miss Mortimer’s. People came in the morning. She could hear their footsteps in the hall and on the stairs; she couldn’t hear voices. It was in the afternoon that her mother died.

‘That’s not like Connie,’ Robert said.

‘No, it isn’t.’

When Teresa had been told by her children what Connie had said to them she had guessed, with sudden, bitter intuition, that everything going well was over. And she had wondered where she and Robert had gone wrong. Robert was simply bewildered.

The wedding – to be conducted by Mr Crozier as a purely family occasion - was less than three weeks off. No going away afterwards, no honeymoon because the time of year on the farm wasn’t right for that.

‘What else does Connie say?’

Teresa shook her head. She didn’t know but suspected nothing else, and was right.

‘We want to be married,’ Robert said. ‘Nothing’s going to stop that now.’

Teresa hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Nothing is,’ she said.

‘Children manage to get on. Even when they’re strangers to one another.’

Teresa didn’t say that being strangers might make things easier. She didn’t say it because she didn’t know why that should be. But Melissa, who never wept, wept often now, affected as a stranger would not have been.

The books Connie pretended to read were in the dining-room bookcases, on either side of the fireplace. They’d been her mother’s books, picked up at country-house auctions, some thrown away when the shelves became full, all of them old, belonging to another time. ‘The Man with Red Hair,’ her mother said, ‘you’ll love that.’ And Dr Bradley Remembers, and Random Harvest. Only Jamaica Inn retained its paper jacket, yellow, without a picture. ‘And The Stars Look Down,’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll love The Stars Look Down.’

Connie took it to the roof, to the lead-covered gully she had found, wide enough to lie on between two slopes of slates. Every time she went there she wished she didn’t have to disobey her father and always took care not to spend too long there in case she was discovered. Sometimes she stood up, protected from sight by the bulk of a chimney and, far away, saw her father in the fields or Teresa among the geraniums. Sometimes Melissa and Nat were on the avenue, Nat on the carrier of Melissa’s bicycle, his small legs spread wide so that they wouldn’t catch in the spokes.

Teresa felt she had never loved Robert more; and felt that she was loved, herself, more steadfastly even than before – as if, she thought, the trouble brought such closeness. Or was there panic? she wondered in other moments; was it in panic that the depths of trust were tapped? Was it in panic that the widowed and the rejected protected what they’d been unable to protect before? She did not know the answers to her questions. It only seemed all wrong that a child’s obduracy should mock what was so fairly due.

‘Connie.’

Robert found her in the outhouse where the furniture was. She had folded aside a dust-sheet and was sitting in an armchair of which the springs had gone, which should have been thrown out years ago.

‘Connie,’ he interrupted her, for she had not heard him. Her book was Folly Bridge.

She marked her place with a finger. She smiled at him. No one considered that recently she’d turned sulky; there was no sign of that. Even when she’d told Melissa and Nat that the house was not theirs, she had apparently simply said it.

‘You’re troubled because Teresa and I are to be married, Connie.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You didn’t seem to mind before.’

The armchair had a high back with wings, its faded red velvet badly worn in places, an embroidery of flowers stitched into where an antimacassar might be.

‘It’s very good,’ Connie said, speaking about the book she held.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you read it?’

‘If you would like me to.’

Connie nodded. And they could talk about it, she said. If he read it they could talk about it.

‘Yes, we could. You’ve always liked Teresa, Connie. You’ve always liked Melissa and Nat. It isn’t easy for us to understand.’

‘Couldn’t it stay here, the furniture you don’t want? Couldn’t we keep it here?’

‘Out here it’s a bit damp for furniture.’

‘Couldn’t we put it back then?’

‘Is that what’s worrying you, Connie? The furniture?’

‘When the books are thrown away I’ll know what every single one of them was about.’

‘But, for heaven’s sake, the books won’t be thrown away!’

‘I think they will be, really.’

Robert went away. He didn’t look for Teresa to tell her about the conversation. Every year at this time he erected a corral where his ewes paddled through a trough of disinfectant. They crowded it now, while he remembered his half-hearted protestations and Connie’s unsatisfactory responses. ‘Oh, come on, come on! Get on with it!’ Impatient with his sheep, as he had not been with his daughter, he wondered if Connie hated him. He had felt she did, although nothing like it had showed, or had echoed in her voice.

From the roof she saw a car she’d never seen before, and guessed why it had come. In one of the drawers of the rickety Welsh dresser she’d found a shopping list and thought she remembered its being lost. Ironing starch. Baking powder, she’d read.

The car that had come was parked in the yard when she came down from the roof. A man was standing beside it. He referred to the furniture that was to be sold, as Connie had thought he might.

‘Anyone around?’ he asked her.

He was a big red-faced man in shirtsleeves. He’d thought he’d never find the house, he said. He asked her if he was expected, if this was the right place, and she wanted to say it wasn’t, but Teresa came out of the house then.

‘Go and get your father,’ she said, and Connie nodded and went to where she’d seen him from the roof.

‘Don’t sell the furniture,’ she begged instead of saying the man had come.

One night, when the wedding was five days away, Teresa drove over to the farm. About to go to bed, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep and wrote a note for Melissa, saying where she was going. It was after half past one and if there hadn’t been a sign of life at the farm she would have driven away again. But the lights were on in the big drawing-room and Robert heard the car. He’d been drinking, he confessed as he let Teresa in.

‘I don’t know how to make sense to her,’ he said when they’d embraced. Without asking, he poured her some whiskey. ‘I don’t know what to do, Teresa.’

‘I know you don’t.’

‘When she came to stand beside me while I was milking this afternoon, when she didn’t say anything but I could hear her pleading, I thought she was possessed. But later on we talked as if none of all this was happening. She laid the table. We ate the trout I’d fried. We washed the plates up. Dear Teresa, I can’t destroy the childhood that is left to her.’

‘I think you’re perhaps a little drunk.’

‘Yes.’

He did not insist that there must be a way; and knowing what frightened him, Teresa knew there wasn’t. She was frightened herself while she was with him now, while wordlessly they shared the horrors of his alarm. Was some act, too terrible for a child, waiting in the desolation of despair to become a child’s? They did not speak of what imagination made of it, how it might be, nurtured in anger’s pain, in desperation and betrayal, the ways it might become unbearable.

They walked on the avenue, close to one another in the refreshing air. The sky was lightening, dawn an hour away. The shadows of danger went with them, too treacherous to make chances with.

‘Our love still matters,’ Teresa whispered. ‘It always will.’

A calf had been born and safely delivered. It had exhausted him: Connie could tell her father was tired. And rain that had begun a week ago had hardly ceased, washing his winter seeding into a mire.

‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ he said.

He knew what she was thinking, and he watched her being careful with the plates that were warming in the oven, careful with the coffee she made, letting it sit a moment. Coffee at suppertime was what he’d always liked. She heated milk and poured it from the saucepan.

The bread was sawn, slices waiting on the board, butter beside them. There were tomatoes, the first of the Blenheims, the last of the tayberries. Pork steak browned on the pan.

It was not all bleakness: Robert was aware of that. In moments like the moments that were passing now, and often too at other times, he discerned in what had been his daughter’s obduracy a spirit, still there, that was not malicious. In the kitchen that was so familiar to both of them, and outside in the raw cold of autumn when she came to him in the fields, she was as events had made her, the recipient of a duty she could not repudiate. It had seemed to her that an artificial household would demand that she should, and perhaps it might have.

Robert had come to understand that; Teresa confessed that nothing was as tidy as she’d imagined. There were no rights that cancelled other rights, less comfort than she’d thought for the rejected and the widowed, no fairness either. They had been hasty, she dared to say, although two years might seem a long enough delay. They had been clumsy and had not known it. They had been careless, yet were not careless people. They were a little to blame, but only that.

And Robert knew that time in passing would settle how the summer had been left. Time would gather up the ends, and see to it that his daughter’s honouring of a memory was love that mattered also, and even mattered more.