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she had brought.
    Eventually the clock struck five and Beatie reluctantly rose, saying they had better be starting back. Abbie and the others followed her and Tom outside. There Tom shook hands with Beatie’s parents and they kissed Beatie goodbye. A minute later, with Beatie calling back, ‘I’ll try to see you in a month or so,’ the young couple started away.
    At seven o’clock, soon after high tea, the Pattisons – Jack Pattison and his wife Agnes – came round for the evening.
    Frank Morris and Jack Pattison played chess every three weeks, turn and turn about visiting one another’s homes. They played from about seven until nine thirty. If a game was still in progress at the end of the evening they would write down the positions and resume it at their next meeting. These chess games had been going on for more than two years now, and were among the few things in Frank Morris’s life in the way of a pleasurable pastime. When he was not out at work helping in the construction of some building, he was normally working on the allotment or the small cottage garden. And, whereas many men from the village went regularly to the pub, he went very infrequently. When he did go it would usually follow some disagreement at home; then he would take off for the Harp and Horses and sit with a few of the other villagers, making a couple of pints of ale last for two or three hours. So his chess and his books were the real sources of his relaxation, and with regard to the former he looked forward to his meetings with Jack Pattison. They might have had little in common outside of the game, but within it they were a good match and that was what counted.
    Pattison and his wife, a childless couple, ran the post office on the far side of the village. Abbie found them an ill-matched pair – not only in physical attractiveness but also in their personalities. Mr Pattison was a tallish, handsome man of forty-five with thinning dark hair, a spare, wiry frame and a bright, ready laugh. His wife Agnes was a little wisp of a woman two years his senior, with spectacles and an out-of-date wardrobe, which Abbie’s mother often said she wouldn’t be seen dead in. To Abbie, Mrs Pattison always seemed to be weighed down by cares and tribulations which, with grave, ill-hidden relish, she described in low tones to Abbie’s mother as they sat facing one another across the range, Mrs Pattison knitting, Mrs Morris mending. The subject of Mrs Pattison’s weary tales was, as often as not, her aged mother who lived in Westbury and enjoyed very poor health, and had done so for many years.
    Sometimes, if Mrs Pattison was a little off colour, or visiting her ailing mother, Jack Pattison came alone. He seemed more relaxed at such times. Usually, however, his wife was with him.
    On the Pattisons’ arrival Lizzie and Iris would be sent up to bed while Abbie put the kettle on for tea and then ran down to the Harp and Horses to get a jug of ale. In the meantime the two men would take their seats facing one another across the kitchen table on which Abbie’s father had already set out the chess pieces, while the two women sat down to have a quiet chat – enjoyed by Mrs Pattison and suffered by Mrs Morris. When Abbie returned she would pour a mug of ale for each of the men and make tea for the women and herself. That done, she would sit at the other end of the table where she read or sewed and listened to the women’s conversation while occasionally looking up as the men murmured to each other in the progress of their game. Eddie would keep well out of the way at such times.
    ‘So I said to her,’ came Mrs Pattison’s hushed, lugubrious voice to Abbie’s half-attentive ears, ‘“Mother,” I said, “you got to remember that you ain’t a young woman no more, and you can’t do what a young woman does.”’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Abbie’s mother, barely looking up from her mending.
    ‘Right, indeed,’ said Mrs Pattison, knitting needles clicking