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you?’
    ‘I fell asleep on the beach.’ Alex took the proffered hand, feeling foolish. ‘I’m Alex by the way. The tide came in while I was asleep and I was cut off. I scrambled up what looked like a path but it was very rocky. Stupid of me wasn’t it?’
    ‘Happens all the time,’ Liz said comfortably. ‘Coastguard’s always busy round here.’ She turned as she spoke and began to walk back up the long brick path to the house. ‘Come in, come in. I was just about to make some tea,’ she called over her shoulder and after a moment’s hesitation, Alex felt obliged to follow.
    Twenty minutes later, her wounds washed and dressed, Alex was shown into the sitting room where she perched awkwardly on the edge of a sofa. After so many weeks of self-imposed seclusion she felt obscurely ill at ease at having this company thrust upon her. Liz had talked at her almost incessantly from the moment she’d arrived. She was a widow too apparently, having lost her husband Bill eight years before, four years after moving into the village. And it seemed the whole village knew who Alex was and what had happened to Simon courtesy of the receptionist at the hotel who ‘likes a bit of classical music.’ Alex shuddered to think what else they’d been saying about her.
    Liz came through and Alex forced herself to chat over tea and home-made fruit cake. Determined to avoid any probing personal questions, she asked Liz about a dog she’d seen on the beach - a black and white border collie with mismatched eyes.
    ‘Sounds like Mick Fenby’s dog: Susie. She’s often on the beach. But you don’t see much of him . He keeps himself to himself. Lives in an old railway carriage down along the Grenloe.’
    ‘The Grenloe? The stream that runs over the bar?’
    ‘Yes. Where that little bridge is. It’s a river really but it’s been so silted up for years that now it pools behind the bar in a long, wide stretch of marshy ground. It’s been like that as long as anyone round here can remember. There’s a rough stone wall reinforcing the bar now.’
    ‘Yes, I saw…but I don’t remember seeing any sign of a railway.’
    ‘Oh not now. It used to come right down to the harbour where they loaded the tin into boats – oh centuries ago.’ Liz grinned. ‘Local history was a big hobby of Bill’s, you see, so I’m a second-hand expert. They used The Grenloe originally to move the tin but the mining up river caused it to silt up so they laid the railway instead. But I don’t think there’s much track left now. Tin mining stopped donkey’s years ago. Price fell out of the market. Have another piece of cake why don’t you? No? Are you sure?’ Liz put the plate of cake down again.
    ‘So why is this Mick Fenby living in a railway carriage there then?’ Alex felt her curiosity piqued for the first time in months.
    ‘God knows. Why do any of these people live like that? Asserting their independence? Cocking a snook at authority? I don’t know. New Age Travellers – what does that mean anyway? But there’s only him so far as I know. He arrived there about a year before Bill died. There was talk….you know, everyone expecting trouble. But then no-one ever saw him and he caused no bother so everyone stopped talking about him. You see him at the shop every now and then, briefly, in and out. People call him The Birdman. He carves birds in wood apparently and sells them round and about.’ Liz picked up the teapot and smiled expectantly. ‘More tea?’
    *
    Walking home, her torn and bruised legs increasingly stiff, Alex felt relieved to have got away and then guilty for thinking it. She meant well, Elizabeth Franklin, quite obviously. She was a nice woman. But her helpfulness and endless talk had begun to feel more and more oppressive. At the point at which she’d started to give Alex advice on how to cope with bereavement and the importance of getting out and meeting people, and was she thinking of getting back to her singing before long,