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shoddily, leaving a gap between the two. As Denny peeled the wallpaper away, Ellis watched the beam emerge. It was colossal. Near the corner of the room, it disappeared behind plasterwork into the centre of the cottage.
    “How could anyone slap wallpaper over a beam like this?” Denny sighed. “We’ll sort this out next weekend. Can’t leave it like this.”
    “Then Mafi will have a lovely beam in her bedroom and we can paint it shiny black and hang stuff on it.”
    “That’s right,” Denny said. “These things matter.”
    But they didn’t matter to Mafi. She decided that the best place for her wardrobe was against that wall. It would cover the beam anyway and there was more pressing work for Denny to do on the cottage. When she made decisions they tended to be final, owing not so much to a profound strength of opinion on her part as to her preference for keeping debate on trivial issues brief. Chrissie pinned a paper horseshoe to the beam for good luck and then the beam disappeared behind the wardrobe, to remain out of sight for as long as Mafi lived.
     
     
    At six o’clock every morning, Mafi took a cup of tea back to bed and watched the cherry tree. She called it her special time, when she felt lucky to be alive, and she called the years since she left the pub her “borrowed life”, the life after hers was meant to have finished. Ellis encouraged her stories of being landlady at the Gate Inn. His favourites were of Mr Prag getting stuck inside the grandfather clock, the piglets falling into the beer cellar, and the war: of Nissen huts going up along the canal, doodlebugs and Mafi refusing evacuation to Hampshire. She taught him and Chrissie how to clean a glass properly and how to shuffle a pack.
    In spring, the garden looked dewy and luscious from Mafi’s bedroom window. Ellis studied her face. She was lost in thought and had barely noticed him come in. From beneath them, in the dining room, came the sound of Denny’s electric shaver. Ellis wondered what part of her life Mafi was revisiting. She had never married. Chrissie claimed she had been engaged to a man in the war and he died of TB. Ellis didn’t know if this was true. He liked Mafi as she was, old and unmarried and inclined towards throaty laughter.
    “Ellis, old thing,” she said, “I’m afraid to say that cherry tree is not well.”
    The woodsmen came on the same day Ellis found spotted jelly bubbles in the pond on Eggpie Lane. They said the tree had to come down. Before they returned, Ellis visited the pond four more times. The black spots grew into semicircles and by late March the jelly had fallen apart and a sprawl of wriggling tadpoles appeared. When he took his dad to see them they found a mass of froth on the water’s surface.
    “They’ve disappeared,” Ellis said.
    “They do,” his dad replied.
    In April, Mafi showed Ellis how to tap a bird’s nest and set off the calls of baby blackbirds inside. Sometimes, the young poked their heads out and Ellis caught a glimpse of their open beaks clamouring for food. By the time the woodsmen came, the nests in the garden were empty and the shrubs nearby filled with birdsong. Cats prowled beneath the bushes. Chrissie tried to adopt them and Mafi shooed them away.
    Denny O’Rourke took photos of the cherry tree and Mafi unravelled the roses from its trunk and laid them out across the lawn.
    “We’ll plant a new one,” Denny said.
    “How long will it take?” Ellis asked.
    “When you’re as old as Mafi, the new tree will be half the size of that one,” Chrissie said.
    Ellis sighed. That was far too slow.
    “You plant trees for the next generations,” Denny explained.
    Chrissie joined her hands together and chanted “ Aaaaa-men .” Ellis copied her. Their dad marched them away in a head lock, one under each arm.
    “I’ve a pair of idiots for children,” he told the woodsmen.
    Ellis watched from Mafi’s bedroom window. The woodsman with a thick orange beard dangled from a rope