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around her fiercely, I won’t, I bloody won’t. But wherever she looked she met pity. She wanted sympathy and she wanted love, but pity was for freaks. Roll up, roll up, for the girl who can’t stop losing her loved ones. Her angry eyes met the calm blue gaze of Louisa Blackstaff, Noah’s grandmother. Until that moment, if you had asked Grace what Louisa Blackstaff looked like she would have said, ‘Pale, sort of old,’ and shrugged to indicate that that was about it. But now, as she looked into the slanted deep-blue eyes that looked back at her not with pity or curiosity, but with understanding, she would have said that Noah’s grandmother was beautiful.
    The organ started up and the congregation got to its feet. Grace stood mute as the singing started; it was pretty rude, she thought, expecting an orphan to sing.
    The sun was shining. The birds were on the wing and a faint breeze ruffled the feather in Mrs Shield’s black velvet beret. Grace was staring down at the deep-dug grave. Any moment now her father would be lowered into that dark hole. Grace would return to the house and who would chase away the pictures in her mind of what each new day would do to her father’s body?
    Mrs Shield reached for Grace’s hand. ‘My darling girl,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘Thank God for you.’

Nell Gordon:
First love ends in heartbreak.
    Grace stood outside the house where once she had lived with her mother and father and her brother Finn when she was one of the lucky people. She had returned to Kendall, the eternal small town where everyone was busy but life flowed by slowly, where people sat on their porches on warm summer evenings watching the world go by, where they were born and grew up and stayed to make new families and died to be taken across the river to be buried. Grace was there to try to learn enough to forget.
    She was staying with the Singletons, her Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Leslie. Theirs was a big house, a house that was waiting in vain for children to occupy its rooms. But none came and although by now Aunt Kathleen and her husband Leslie had all but given up hope, they could not bring themselves to leave the house for a smaller, more convenient place. That house was their home. There was a closed-in porch where Uncle Leslie went to smoke and a large yard at the back where roses thrived in the dry heat, flowering bright red and filling the air with scent, and in the summer of 1976, here was Grace, their orphaned niece, not exactly a child at eighteen, but messy and noisy enough to make the house seem just right.
    Grace had heard talk from friends, leaving school like her, of the need to get away, to break free of the maternal bond and to strike out and find yourself. But it was easy for them; they knew from whom it was they were trying to cut loose. Grace remembered a sea-green frock and eyes to match, coral lips, and a cool hand across her hot forehead. How little that was, she had realised only when her father died.
    She had tried to explain to Aunt Kathleen that it was as if she had lost her mother all over again when Gabriel died. While he was there she felt secure in the knowledge that she could visit her mother through him, so consequently she seldom did. Now it was too late.
    â€˜I know what you’re saying.’ Aunt Kathleen nodded. ‘Everyone goes on and on about the Monument across in Vermont, but have I been there? No, I have not, because I live just round the corner, that’s why.’
    â€˜Something like that,’ Grace said and all at once she remembered hearing, a long time ago, her mother being discussed and someone saying how she was a really sweet woman but not very clever.
    There weren’t many photographs; Grace’s father had not been one for taking pictures and the one Grace had taken herself with her first camera had disappeared. In the few she had seen, her mother looked different from how she did in