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after Wednesday when we will be on our own, will rattle around in it.
    I turn my key in the lock and walk in. ‘Hello!’ I cry. My mother pops out of the kitchen at the far end of the hall.
    â€˜Hello!’ she cries. ‘Dinner won’t be long. Are you going to have a sherry?’
    My mother is from Yorkshire. When my father retired they moved south so as to be closer to me. A meal in the middle of the day is dinner, and in the evening supper. The word lunch is not in my mother’s vocabulary. Sherry is my mother’s tipple.
    â€˜No thank you,’ I answer. ‘I’ve started two half glasses of wine. I don’t know what happened to either of them in the end. Do you want any help? Where is everybody? Where’s Becky?’
    â€˜She’s in her room, with the door shut. Ann is packing, Dad’s gone down to the newsagent’s.’ He will be buying the
Sunday Express
.
    â€˜Shall I lay the table?’ I ask.
    â€˜It’s done,’ she says.
    â€˜Then I’ll go up and see Becky,’ I tell her.
    â€˜I wouldn’t if I were you,’ my mother counsels. ‘I’d leave her be for the moment.’
    I flop down on a kitchen chair and take off my dog collar.
    â€˜How long is this going to last?’ I ask.
    My mother opens the oven door, takes out the meat dish and proceeds to turn over the potatoes. A comforting smell of roasting beef fills the kitchen.
    â€˜I don’t know, love,’ she replies as she puts the dish back in the oven, closes the door and turns the heat up high to bake the Yorkshire puddings which she will do, not under the meat, but in loaf tins. They will rise up and call her blessed, they will be golden and crispy on the outside and soft within. They will be served before the main course, smothered in onion gravy. If I were to say grace it would be before eating my mother’s Yorkshire puddings.
    â€˜Life’s hard for the lass at the moment,’ my mother says. She is quite right, but her words catch me on the raw.
    â€˜It’s not all that easy for me!’ I say briskly.
    â€˜I know that, love,’ she says. ‘Don’t imagine I didn’t think what was in your mind this morning. But it’s certainly worse for Becky.’
    â€˜And how do you work that out?’ I demand.
    â€˜Easily,’ she says. ‘And so can you. It was your choice to come here – oh, I know you didn’t choose what went before, but you did choose to come to Thurston. You’ve got all the excitement of a new job, new challenges – and we all know how you like new challenges. You always have, ever since you were a little girl. Always ready to throw yourself into something new. It used to worry both me and your Dad, though it usually worked out all right in the end. But Becky’s not like that. She doesn’t have your push and go. She likes things settled. And right now she’s the one who’s had to give up everything. You’ve got to bear that in mind.’
    â€˜I know, Ma! I will, and don’t think I’m not sorry for her. I want to help – but how?’ How terrible that sounds! Me, a priest of God and I don’t know how to help my own daughter!
    â€˜You’d do best right now to leave her be,’ my mother repeats. ‘When I’m ready to dish up you can go and fetch her. In the meantime, why don’t you take a turn round the garden?’
    The garden at the back of the house is large, mostly lawn and shrubs, a lot of them evergreens. Not much colour. I shall change that. I enjoy gardening. The lawn is quite well kept and I hope I’m right in seeming to remember that a man, I think the man who looks after the churchyard, cuts the grass at the Vicarage.
    At the bottom of the garden, beyond the mown lawn, there is a fence, and beyond that what I suppose it would be polite to call a wild garden, which sounds better than abandoned and neglected, which it