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call on Christmas Day,’ she said.
    Her mother made no reply. This was old history. Nothing new to be said.
    Jean was free on New Year’s Day to do whatever she wished. Without any particular reason, she decided that she wanted to feel the weight of the sky and to see no one.
    She’d have travelled to the sea, if it had been the right sea. But the beaches nearest to this town were all wrong, with their pavements of rock and their crumbling earth cliffs.
    Driving out of the town, Jean thought of her childhood coast with its deep hinterland of marsh and brackish lakes, and miles of dunes before you reached the sea. She longed to whittle time as she did then, spending the day hidden up, snug inside the sand, in sight of no one. Make a driftwood fire for warmth, this time of year.
    She headed out for the hills. A beat was playing in her head, something by Duke Ellington, left over from the night before. She was determined to walk hard today; shehad a route planned that meant she would have to, once she’d set out, if she were to get back to her motor car before dark. She’d walk herself out of the mood she was in, and into something different.
    Last night everyone had laughed and toasted in the New Year, and Jean had swung around a dozen faces and kissed them. But later, home in her bed and lying in the dawn, curled around her own belly, hands tucked warm between her legs, she had cried her loneliness into the pillow before she slept. That’s why today, the first day of the year, she was determined to walk herself straight again.
    Jean had a lot of sympathy for other people’s sadness. It accompanied illnesses and accidents into her surgery every day and she knew better than to set them up on a scale. The death of a father was a terrible sorrow for one person, but liberation for another. A son failing grammar school entrance, a daughter who played loose, a miscarriage, the failure of the potato crop – you couldn’t set a scale to the sadness by knowing what gave rise to it. She didn’t understand why some were struck harder than others, but she knew that it was so.
    Setting out, Jean had little patience with her own feelings. She had a map and compass and a good sense of direction to guide her through this walk.
    You’re a fortunate woman, she told herself. You deserve short shrift. And she checked her bootlaces, humped up her haversack and set out.
    All day the sky stayed low and every so often the thin mist that had followed her from the town would drift up from the valleys and hang in a desultory kind of way over the high moorland, laying a fine drift of wet over everything: plant, stone, solitary walker, the sheep that huddled in the lee of the rocks. Occasionally Jean heard the bristle of a small creature in the gorse and later, when she had dropped down lower into the valley, she heard deer.
    Unpacking her lunch, she found her haversack wet with dew. She stood by a stream to eat and watched the long-tailed tits, their feathers dirty in the mist, skitter about the tall, dead stems of willow-herb. The rushes were half-dead and half-green, bundled untidily at the edge of the water. She saw a single fern pushing through the fallen leaves, its green so green it was like an interloper in this landscape.
    The last miles were heavy weather. Her feet were wet; the haversack straps dug into her shoulders and her knees had started to ache with every downhill step.
    â€˜Bloody hell,’ she said. She looked around her, peering into the empty, sodden air. ‘Bloody hell,’ she yelled, and she laughed, cold and alone and on a walk that was too long of her own devising.
    When Jean bent over the bed and saw the little boy’s sore eyes and runny nose and heard his cough; and when she coaxed his mouth open and saw the tiny tell-tale spots clustered in his soft cheek; when she felt the heat of his brow, she knew they were in for a bad run.
    â€˜Keep him in bed, keep the room cool