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tears on her wrinkled cheeks. She had not cried when Dad died, or not in the open, and not like this.
    Dorothy ran out and took her in her arms. They were not people who touched; she had not realized her mother had become so very thin and she worried, once again, she might be ill with stomach ulcers, or worse, and not telling her. Her mother did not embrace her back but said only, ‘I’m sorry,’ pulling back and controlling herself with a kind of shudder. ‘I meant it for the best. I was thinking of you. I didn’t want you hurt.’
    ‘I don’t understand,’ Dorothy told her. Some people were approaching on the footpath. She set a hand in the small of her mother’s back and gently steered her towards the open front door and privacy.
    ‘As a priest’s wife, you’d always be poor.’
    Dorothy smiled. ‘I never thought to marry money, Mum. Anyway, who says he’s interested?’
    ‘And it’s a hard life,’ her mother went on quietly, ignoring her.
    ‘Harder than marrying a farmer?’
    ‘Oh on a farm there’s always work, the work never ends and there’s often uncertainty, but you stand together and … He may be exhausted half the time and out of the house the rest but you have him to yourself, girl. The husband who’s a priest will never be yours entirely. You have to share him. Your house, your family too. He’ll always have a higher duty than to you.’
    She could tell this was a speech her mother had rehearsed in her head, maybe even muttered aloud as she milked the cows. ‘I know all this,’ she told her. ‘Do you think I haven’t worked this out for myself weeks ago? But it’s all by the by now. What did he want, anyway? You still haven’t said. Mother?’
    ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a vicar’s wife who was happy, not outside of a novel …’ Her mother broke off and looked into Dorothy’s face with something like wonder, as though seeing it somehow transformed. ‘I meant it for the best,’ she said again. ‘I was only thinking of your happiness.’
    ‘For pity’s sake stop talking in code!’ Dorothy told her. ‘What have you gone and done?’
    Her mother shrank in on herself again, accepting defeat. ‘They’re all here,’ she said and led the way back along the hall to the tall mahogany bookcase which stood at one end, beside the looking glass where she would always give a quick, corrective glare at herself before leaving the house, and the table where the only telephone was, chairless and far from the nearest heat source so that calls were kept short. She reached for the top shelf and took down a volume of the rarely consulted old encyclopaedia that was ranged there. ‘They weren’t so hard to find,’ she said wryly. ‘I put them under P for Priest.’ She took out a small bundle of envelopes and handed them over then returned to the kitchen and her pie-making.
    There were eight letters in all. Only the first had been opened. Presumably discretion had overruled curiosity once her mother had learnt to recognize his handwriting and the Portsmouth postmark. Dorothy sat on the stairs to read them. Blood sang in her ears and burned in her cheeks. She could hear the familiar rhythmic thump of her mother’s rolling pin.
    The first letter answered hers, of course, and the second, her second, but he had slowly sensed something was wrong as she failed to respond to his specific enquiries or to acknowledge that he had written at all. By the fourth letter he knew that his letters weren’t reaching her because her fourth letter must have said something like, I understand your not writing back because your new post must keep you so busy . But, like her, he had kept on writing and, unlike her, he had not lost faith. Whereas her letters had been quietly matter of fact, accounts of her days and snippets of news from the parish, his were lacking in specifics but simply about his feelings and thoughts and his hopes and plans for the future.
    It was only in the short last letter that a