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new vicar there, a permanent one, and she had taken against him too because he had introduced the Peace, which she thought false and embarrassing.
    Around this time she became unusually tense and quick-tempered again, lashing out in particular at footstools, buckets, the fiddly plastic compartments in the new fridge – and turning her impotent fury on Dorothy if Dorothy dared to reason with her. ‘Don’t use that reasonable tone with me,’ she snapped on more than one occasion. Dorothy began to worry she was ill – not in her mind but her body – and that fear or pain was finding voice in anger. But they did not have the kind of relationship in which she could set her mind at rest by asking.
     
     
    And then Barnaby Johnson appeared in the yard without warning. It was late afternoon. It had been unseasonably warm – oppressive, milk-turning weather that had brought clouds of thunder flies into the sheds. Dorothy was in the act of bringing in laundry from the line in the mowhay and saw him from behind a sheet without his seeing her. He walked up to the front door, shadowed by the dog, and then hesitated, visibly nervous, and went to check the milking parlour instead before heading back to the front door. She watched from her hiding place. He wore extraordinarily shiny black shoes and seemed taller and more grown up, somehow. He seemed to have invested in a new, darker suit, a very well-cut one. It looked expensive.
    She slipped off to one side and in through the scullery. Her mother was in the kitchen, furiously rolling out pastry, and she reached her just before the door knocker sounded through the house. Dorothy had never been so decisive.
    ‘It’s him,’ she told her. ‘He’s come back. I’m not here.’
    Flustered, her mother was taking off her apron and brushing flour from her hands. ‘But what should I—?’ she began.
    ‘I don’t know. I’m not here, that’s all. I’m in Truro for the day.’
    She had expected a protest on moral grounds – her mother was rigorously truthful – so was surprised that she hurried out directly as he knocked again, and half-closed the kitchen door behind her. Dorothy positioned herself to one side of it so she could hear but could also escape silently through the scullery if need arose. She heard every word of the conversation that followed. Amplified by the hall, perhaps, which was all hard surfaces, she heard it as clearly as a radio play and, just as when she listened to the radio, she found she could picture the facial expressions from tones of voice.
    ‘Mrs Sampson?’
    ‘Hello. Dorothy’s not here.’ Her mother’s voice was harsh with anxiety. Dorothy knew what the lie cost her, but perhaps she convinced herself not here could simply mean not in the hall right now.
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good because it’s not her I came to see. Not really.’
    ‘Oh? Will you come in. Can I fetch you a drink? Tea or something cold? It’s warm out there.’
    ‘Er. No. Thank you. I can’t stay.’
    ‘Well, let me just …’ And her mother must have stepped out to join him in the sunny yard because her words became maddeningly indistinct, then Dorothy heard the front door shut, and the sounds from outside – birdsong, cattle lowing – were abruptly muffled.
    She hurried out into the scullery and watched through the window, amid the sharp scents of cheese rind, quinces and cold lamb from the day before yesterday, as her mother walked with him to the top of the yard and back onto the lane. The two of them were talking with some animation.
    Then something she said made him stop, shake her mother’s hand and, unhesitatingly, plant a kiss on her mother’s cheek before he walked away. Her mother stood there a moment, gazing after him, and one hand rose to touch her face. Then she turned and looked, with unerring instinct, towards the scullery window and her expression was as stricken as Dorothy could remember seeing it, worse than when Dad died, and there were