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twisted hawthorn and the sky.
    It was the silence that hit me first. I had always thought of the pool as a peaceful place, but now I realized that it had never quite been quiet: there had always been the hum of falling water. Now, the unaccustomed hush brought my heart to my mouth. I stepped up towards the bank. The waterfall was just a damp stain on the rock. Beneath me, bare stone sloped down to a shallow pond of algaed water. Dimly visible in its base, the pestle-stone rested, motionless. The place was dead. And I would have sank down, I suspect, on the parched moss, and put my head in my hands, had I not heard footfalls on the stream bed behind me. Someone had followed me there. I turned round. It was Uncle George.
    I wasn’t thinking. I barely noticed the angry flush of his face, the sweat of rage and exertion dampening his shirt. All I knew was that I couldn’t let him be there, couldn’t let him see. It was the one thing left that was mine. I grabbed his arm, shoved him away.
    â€œGet out of here,” I said. “Get out.”
    Which was, I soon discovered, just about the worst thing I could have done.
    For a week afterwards it was agony. The following fortnight was painful, and I remained uncomfortable for the best part of the next month. I couldn’t really blame him for the thrashing that he gave me. He had warned me, after all. I didn’t even blame him for using, from time to time, the buckled end of his belt. My first night back in the bar, Mr. Robinson, who always smelt of goats, made it his business to point out to me that I had had that flogging coming, that it was the only way to deal with the likes of me. That George would put me finally in my place. Around the bar, the other men’s heads were nodding in agreement.
    The beating did let me know, quite clearly, where I stood, though at the time I wasn’t, strictly speaking, standing. And afterwards, the tack of the weals against my Da’s old shirt, the sting and lingering smart when a scab cracked open, kept me awake. Which was good: I couldn’t risk drifting again, couldn’t let myself sleepwalk through my life.
    Senses vividly alert, I began to experience my circumscribed existence with a clarity and intensity I hadn’t known since I was a tiny child. The patterns of wear in the stone flagged floor became beautiful to me. In the garden, the failed fallen apples, hard as shot, seemed perfect in their minuteness. The scent of mown grass on cooling evening air could make my throat swell with longing for I didn’t quite know what. In the evenings in the bar room, I observed the way the day’s dust lingered in the men’s hair, the slopes and shadows of their faces as they leaned lower and lower over their drinks, how their nails looked white against their sunscorched hands, the reek of their unwashed and hardworked bodies. No one spoke to me, but I overheard that the cows were now lickingdaylong at the damp places in the river bed, that someone’s hen had laid an empty egg, that my grandmother now sat, head in hands, on the ferrysteps, and desiccated in the sun. And that somewhere, not so very far off, a wagon was coming pulled by steaming glossy horses, brasses jingling, courtesy of Lord Carus, barrelled up to the gunnels with water from the demesne wells. It would be here any day now, but:
    â€œIt’ll be too little and it’ll be too late.”
    Each morning I joined the queue at the village pump, head pounding with the heat, and would become, in spite of the discomfort, utterly absorbed in the observation of the way the light caught the curls of hair escaping down the nape of the woman in front, or the workstained and cracking skin on her sunbrowned hands. Then the queue would step, as if ratcheted, one pace forward, as someone came staggering back along the line, laden with the regulation two buckets, sweat standing out on her skin from the exertion of cranking the pump. With the