disturbing you?’ she asks.
‘No, not at all,’ he says. ‘I can mark these later.’
Smiling, she walks across the room, puts her arms around him and kisses him.
The windows of the cottage are small, and the weak rays ofthe January sun barely penetrate the low-ceilinged room. The only other sources of light are a desk lamp and a small red lamp which burns perpetually before an oleograph of the Sacred Heart. Sarah can never become used to such pictures. Her mother strongly disapproved of them, and taught her children to pray before a candle or some flowers. Sarah cannot believe in a doe-eyed God whose hair curls prettily at the nape of his neck. At best, she finds such pictures foolish, meaningless or odd; at worst, she finds them shocking, and she wonders how people can live out their daily lives beneath them, seeing every day the wounds and the blood.
She remembers visiting the cottage as a child, and then too the picture had been a frightful mystery to her; then too the visits had been clandestine. Her parents had never forbidden her to call on Ellen and Peter, but they had not approved of such visits either. When Ellen gave her an apple or a bun she had always known to hide or eat the evidence before going home. The kindness of such gifts was never appreciated by her parents, and to this day she cannot understand why. Since her mother’s death her father has been too sad or distracted to notice or care what Sarah does, but Catherine, she realizes, seems to be trying to supplant their parents. Sarah knows that her sister has always been uncomfortable in Ellen’s company. She had once thought it no more than an unreasoned habit which she had picked up from her mother. But Sarah has felt this disapproval strengthen since the summer of their mother’s death, more than two years ago. It is as if Catherine wants to draw her back from any possible involvement outside the family, and just as she thinks this Peter says, ‘Your sister was over here this morning.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. She brought a letter. Sarah – is there anything wrong with Catherine?’
She immediately moves away from him and says, ‘Wrong? What do you mean, wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says, embarrassed now. ‘She just seemed a little … strange, and I wondered if something was wrong.’
‘Perhaps you read too much into what my sister says and does simply because you don’t like her.’
He opens his mouth to deny this, but she looks at him angrily and turns her back on him. They stand in silence.
After a few awkward moments she turns to him again and says politely, ‘How’s school?’
‘Fine,’ he replies, and then he begins to tell her in some detail of how his teaching is progressing. It is three days now since the beginning of the new term, and Sarah only half listens to his lies. No matter what he says she knows that he hates teaching as much as she hates working on the farm. Once he was more honest: while still at teacher-training college he often told her that he doubted his capacity to be a good teacher. But since mid-December, when their friendship changed, they are both less likely to tell the truth when they are talking to each other, and she feels a reserve, almost a politeness between them which is becoming worse each week. It increases in direct proportion to the degree of physical intimacy reached; and she thinks of the day when they will talk about the weather. But when Peter asks her what she is thinking of, and why she is smiling, she does not answer him. Instead, she once more crosses the room and kisses him. After some moments he says to her very hesitantly, ‘Sarah, do you …’
She anticipates the question, and with a deep sigh she interrupts him. ‘Do I what?’ she says wearily, and this time it is he who draws away from her.
‘Nothing,’ he says sulkily. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Make me some tea, then,’ she says.
She follows him into the kitchen and as they wait for the kettle to boil