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herself in such a position, taking his arm and exchanging banter. But thanks to what Barnaby had awoken in her, Henry suddenly seemed the manliest man she knew, of course, and the sisterly happiness she felt for him was borne up on little upswells of erotic regret. She sensed that Jane read the situation correctly as she said her goodbyes, fancied she could smell the disappointment off her, a passing sourness, as of stale sweat trapped in a dress sleeve. Washing up and putting away the china after they were gone, she felt a kind of desolation steal over her.
    Her mother’s response was brief but heartfelt. ‘I should have pushed you together more,’ was all she said after they had done the evening chores and eaten a bowl of soup in silence. ‘A chance like that won’t come your way again. Not here.’
    As ever, her mother’s emotion was expressed in her attitude to inanimate objects. All that evening and all the day that followed, things made her cross and she spoke to wobbling tables, sticking doorkeys, even a chicken she was stuffing, as though they were deliberately setting out to make her teasy.
    Dorothy knew she ought to reach out to her, if only to say something not quite true, like, ‘Mum, honestly, it doesn’t matter.’ She knew her mother was suffering in her way quite as if it were she and not Dorothy who had been passed over. She loved her and hated to see her in pain, but there was a forbidding reserve to the older woman, especially when she was upset, expressed in a tension across her shoulders and a tightness to the set of her jaw that had always made it hard to express whatever warmth Dorothy felt for her. Funnily enough her father had the same trouble with her, never trying to reason or cajole her out of a black mood.
    ‘Your mother’s stiff-shouldered,’ he used to tell Dorothy with a certain pride. ‘All the Treeves were that way. We just have to wait for her to smile again of her own accord.’
    In this instance, her mother’s spell of growling at sticking drawers or dripping taps or cats in her path at least had the effect of drawing Dorothy’s attention away from any pain of her own. She knew, without it being discussed, that when they went to church together now, or into Penzance, her mother was looking around her, assessing any single men on her behalf and finding them all wanting.
    They were invited to the wedding, naturally, which was held, rather magnificently, in the cathedral, and gave the happy pair a Morphy Richards toaster. In the months that followed, especially as her pregnancy began to show, Jane took to coming up to the farm with Henry when he had things to see to there, and she would visit Dorothy while he went about his business. She became a friend, a cherished friend even, the nearest Dorothy had enjoyed to a confidante since primary school. When Piran was born and Jane asked her to be a godmother, though, she couldn’t help wondering if it was a gesture of recompense or compassion, and she felt a fleeting resentment of her. Her mother mortified her by twice asking Jane if she had brothers and twice being told that she did and that each was already married.
    Father Philip died in the autumn of that year, suddenly, if not quite peacefully. He was found slumped across the wheelbarrow in his garden when he failed to appear for an eight o’clock service. He was buried above his wife, in the tiny Morvah graveyard and, after the prescribed period, the vacancy was advertised in the Church Times . During the interregnum priests from neighbouring parishes, some of them retired, took services in the old man’s stead but Dorothy heard no rumours of who might apply. All she had heard, as she was clearing up the Sunday School books one week, was that applicants were so few the decision was postponed by a further month.
    Her mother took against one after another of the temporary vicars and kept threatening to transfer her allegiance back down to the church in St Just, only there was a