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Leadbetter had been orphaned at an early age, and though he’d spent most of his time at boarding school, the house in Kelsey Road was home to him, the place he’d always come back to in the holidays, back to Dorrie. His beloved aunt, his mother’s sister, was his only living relative, the person he’d loved most in the world, despite realising, as he grew older, that she wasn’t quite like other people. The amused glances that followed them whenever they went out had first told him that, Dorrie looking like a bag lady in a haphazard collection of garments, with her hair escaping from its knot into straggling wisps round her face. Sometimes wellingtons on her feet with an old cotton dress, if she’d forgotten to change them after gardening, or dressed up in ancient finery, as if for a garden party, to go and buy vegetables. Her mother’s tatty old musquash fur coat and her strange hats. The indulgent way the shopkeepers treated her, the way the vicar humoured her because she was more than generous with her donations to church funds – but also, Sam had come to believe, because he was fond of her as well. Anyone who really knew Dorrie couldn’t help loving her. Old Dorrie Lockett, mad as a hatter.
    But no, even as a child he’d known that wasn’t right, and fiercely defended her against anyone who even hinted at it – just living on another plane, but even so quite often able to cut through the conventional ways of looking at things that hampered other people, and to give one a sharp glance and a surprisingly wise judgement. Not mad. Just someone happy not to live her life by other people’s prescribed rules.
    Was she still happy, though? Coming home again after a long absence, Sam had immediately sensed a jitteriness that was foreign to her, a worry at the back of her eyes, an uncertainty that surely hadn’t been there before he went away. She’d never mentioned in her letters that anything was troubling her, though, and he’d read nothing between the lines of her almost impossible to decipher backward script.
    ‘Though of course,’ said Mrs Totty, as if a party to his thoughts, ‘there isn’t as much for me to do as there used to be. Sensible, if you think about it, though, shutting most of the place up. Who needs all that space, living on their own, when all’s said
and done? Better live in two tidy rooms than in twelve like a pigsty I say, though I’d never let her come to that, not me, never, you can bank on that, Sam.’
    It didn’t need saying. The kitchen here, though so old-fashioned it might qualify for a Heritage award, was spotlessly clean, as was the bathroom, and the two bedrooms still in use. The bright and sunny former morning room Dorrie had chosen to live in was untidy, as anything around Dorrie was bound to be, but hoovered and polished within an inch of its life by Mrs Totty. But he had been shocked all the same, to see how bad a state of repair the rest of the house was in when he’d gone poking around, searching for his own left-behind belongings on the morning after his arrival. So familiar he hadn’t noticed anything untoward before he went away, but impossible to miss now, with the furniture sheeted up, the pictures removed. Broken cornices, peeling wallpaper, wet and dry rot, mice scuttling behind the wainscotting. It didn’t need Mrs Totty to tell him it had slid into neglect, and he was ashamed he’d never really looked at it seriously before; it couldn’t have reached that stage so quickly. But those few years had signalled for him the passing of the borderline into more responsible attitudes: before then, he’d never noticed such things, and in any case, leaving England so precipitously, so preoccupied with his own troubled mind, he’d been in no state to be thinking about the house, so far were his concerns fixed on other things, or at any rate, on one other person …
    ‘She’ll have to sell, you know, sooner or later, she’ll have to give in. The school keeps