COPYRIGHT

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1983 by Collins Crime

Copyright © Emma Page 1983

Emma Page asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008175887

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780008175894

Version [2016-02-18]

DEDICATION

For

Rosemary and Anthony

with love

(Not forgetting Daniel, Lucy and Oliver)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About the Author

By Emma Page

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

In the front bedroom of Ivydene, on the outskirts of Cannonbridge, Lisa Schofield lay fast asleep with her long blonde hair spread out over the pillows. In the muted light her peachdown skin had a faintly golden quality and her bare shoulders gleamed against the lacy top of her trousseau nightdress.

She dreamed she was learning to ride a bicycle, laughing and squealing, falling off every few yards. Someone held the saddle as she climbed on again, a man’s hand, firm and strong.

‘Don’t let me fall, Derek!’ she cried out to her husband in the dream, although she knew without turning that it wasn’t Derek but her father who held her safe.

Beside her in the big double bed Derek gathered himself up into a ball, tucking his head down towards his belly, trying to ward off his dream pursuers. They were gaining on him, crowding in on him, brandishing broken boughs—

Lisa turned over suddenly, flinging an arm across his face. He woke with a start of terror and leapt up with his heart pounding. ‘A-ah!’ he cried aloud.

He came wide awake and saw the shadowy outlines of the furniture, the mahogany tallboy, the bow-fronted chest of drawers. He drew a long shuddering breath – it was all right, he was safe in bed at Ivydene. He’d moved into the house on his marriage a few months ago; it had been Lisa’s home for seven years before that, she had lived there with her older sister Janet and their mother.

Ivydene didn’t yet feel like home to Derek but at least the sprigged wallpaper and chenille curtains of the bedroom greeted him as familiar acquaintances, if not old friends. His heart began to slacken its rapid beat.

The yellow sunlight of late July stole in through a gap in the curtains. He glanced at the bedside clock. Five minutes to six. If he lay down again he’d probably oversleep – and he daren’t risk being late for work, particularly not on a Monday morning. Things were already dicey enough at the Cannonbridge Mail Order Company without his making the boss an outright present of an excuse for cutting down on staff.

He eased his way out from under the bedclothes, found his dressing-gown and slippers and went from the room with accustomed noiselessness; he was always up long before Lisa.

At the head of the stairs sunlight streamed in through an uncurtained stained-glass window, throwing shifting patterns of colour on to the landing, luminous pools of amber and green, rose and blue, as a wandering breeze rippled the tall trees in the garden.

He went softly down to the kitchen, comfortable and old-fashioned, he crossed to the window and drew back the flowered curtains.

‘A nice cup of tea,’ he said aloud; the words had a cosy, reassuring sound. He filled the kettle and put it on to boil. As he turned from the stove he met his own gaze in the mirror that hung to one side of the fireplace.

An unremarkable face, not bad-looking in a nineteen-thirties bandleader way. His brown eyes stared back at him, large, habitually anxious.

He was thirty-seven years old but had the air of being older. His light brown hair had a strong natural crimp that he’d fought for years to subdue, only to discover now on the verge of middle age that it had suddenly become fashionable. The growth was beginning to recede from his temples and nowadays his exploring fingers could locate a treacherous spot of thinning on the crown.

While he waited for the kettle to boil he unlocked the back door and went out into the garden. Ivydene was a solidly-built Edwardian villa standing on the edge of Hadleigh, a semi-rural suburb of Cannonbridge; until fifty years ago Hadleigh had been an independent village.

The garden was large enough to stroll about in and gave a pleasant sense of space and seclusion. He plucked a weed here and there, lifted a wayward strand of a rambler rose and draped it over a neighbouring stem – he must remember to get a ball of garden twine in the lunch-hour. A fine climbing rose, trained along a trellis and over an arch, was just coming into flower, the blooms a deep soft peach tipped with cream. He selected a bud with care, the petals just about to unfurl, free from the smallest blemish. He carried it back to the kitchen and put it in a glass of water.

He made the tea, poured himself a cup and stood at the window drinking it, looking out at the tranquil garden, thinking about Lisa and his marriage, his new life at Ivydene.

There were moments when he felt as if it was all a dream; this struck him most often at work. He sat at the same desk, followed the same routine, nothing there was changed. But it seemed to him sometimes in odd disturbing flashes that he must shortly wake to find that home was still a cramped bedsitter in a down-at-heel quarter of Cannonbridge and Lisa no more than a beguiling face glimpsed in a bus queue.

She had married him two days after her eighteenth birthday, very much against the wishes of her sister. Janet was eleven years older than Lisa and was now her only close relative; their mother, Mrs Marshall, had died some months before the marriage, leaving Janet as legal guardian to Lisa till she came of age.

‘You’re surely not going to rush into marriage with the first man who’s paid you any serious attention,’ Janet had warned Lisa. ‘It’s madness at your age.’ Particularly when the intended bridegroom was nearly twenty years older than Lisa and was possessed of assets and prospects so meagre as to be practically invisible.

Derek poured himself another cup and returned to the window. He had been overwhelmed by the dead set Lisa had made at him when they first met. She was then only a little over sixteen and had just left school. Mrs Marshall had wanted her to stay on to take a secretarial course but Lisa would have none of it – and when it came to a battle between Lisa and her mother Lisa usually won. She had been born eight months after her father’s death and Mrs Marshall had always cosseted and cherished her second daughter, regarding her as a poor fatherless child to whom the world owed a great deal.

So Lisa threw her school hat in the dustbin, gave her blazer to a jumble sale and then went out and took the first job she could find. This turned out to be at the Cannonbridge Mail Order Company where Derek Schofield daily bent his head over columns of figures. In a matter of days the supper-time conversation at Ivydene became peppered with Derek’s name and within another two or three weeks Lisa was declaring herself madly in love with him.

Both Mrs Marshall and Janet fervently hoped the attachment would wither and die as Lisa grew up and got some sense, but in spite of their opposition – or more probably because of it – she became unshakably determined to marry him. Her mother’s death did nothing to weaken this determination and six months after her mother’s funeral, on a fine spring morning, marry him she did – in the Cannonbridge register office with no friends or relatives present, and two cleaners called in to act as witnesses. Derek was swept up out of his poky bedsitter into the spacious comfort of Ivydene.

Janet Marshall was a schoolteacher, at that time teaching in the neighbouring village of Stanbourne, catching the bus every morning from a stop fifty yards up the road from Ivydene.

When Lisa and Derek returned from their Easter honeymoon in Tangier, Lisa was astounded to discover that Janet had moved out of Ivydene two days earlier. Not only that, but she’d given up her teaching post at Stanbourne and found herself another at Longmead, a village a few miles away. She was renting a small farm cottage close to the Longmead school, had removed a quantity of furniture, china and linen from Ivydene and was already comfortably installed in her new home.

Lisa didn’t stop to unpack her bags but at once commanded Derek to drive her over to Rose Cottage.

‘You never said a word about all this!’ she stormed at her sister. ‘You planned it all behind my back!’

‘You chose to get married against my wishes,’ Janet said calmly. ‘I saw no reason to consult you about my own intentions.’ Derek had stood by, mute and forgotten.

He stared out now at the dewy garden, brilliant in the glittering sunlight. Until Lisa came along he’d managed well enough on what he earned, he had even been able to save. There had been difficulties of course, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

And then Lisa took control of his existence. ‘You’re being exploited,’ she told him. ‘You don’t value yourself properly. You should be getting much more than they’re paying you.’ Easy enough to rectify. All he had to do was approach the boss with righteous confidence and point these matters out to him.

And, fired by Lisa’s total certainty, Derek, shortly after returning from his honeymoon, still a little drunk from the North African sunshine and the astonishing pleasures of marriage, did actually walk in through the manager’s door and put these points to him.

Unfortunately the manager didn’t share Lisa’s opinion. He informed Derek in loud clear tones that it was only by a miracle the firm was surviving at all, he was currently giving serious thought to the question of redundancies. ‘If you’re not satisfied,’ he added, ‘you’ve been here long enough to know where the door is.’

And that was that. Unemployment was high in Cannonbridge and still rising; there was certainly no massive demand for clerks approaching middle age.

Derek daren’t tell Lisa he’d failed but allowed her to believe his efforts had been successful. ‘My salary’s being raised from the beginning of next month,’ he told her, in the mad hope that something would happen to rescue him before his savings finally ran out. The greater part of these had already been swallowed up by his courtship and honeymoon, above all, by that wildly extravagant North African honeymoon; he had had no idea until then that it was possible for two people to spend so much money in fourteen days. And week by week the relentless expenses of his new life bit savagely into what was left of his nest-egg. He felt himself beset these days by problems, every one of them relating at some point to money. And in his dreams now the feet were getting closer.

Lisa had given up her job before the wedding and appeared to have no intention of ever again darkening the door of any place of employment. She was in any case now three months pregnant and as a consequence exempt in her own eyes from all but the very lightest endeavours.

He turned from the window, suddenly hungry, and made himself some toast. He sat down at the table, buttered the toast and smeared it with marmalade. He took a thoughtful bite.

Until his marriage he’d had scarcely any idea how expensive it was to run a house. Before he took to bedsits he had lived with his father in an old rented terrace house in a seedy area of Westfleet, a small town twenty-five miles from Cannonbridge; he had been born and brought up in the house.

Derek was an only child. His mother had run off with a neighbour when he was six years old and there had never been any other woman in the life of the deserted father and son.

His father – now dead – had been a labourer in the yard of a builder’s merchant in Westfleet. He was out of doors in all seasons and as time went by he became afflicted with chronic bronchitis. ‘Don’t do what I’ve done,’ he warned Derek when the time came for him to leave school. ‘Get yourself a job that’ll shelter you from the weather, one that’ll keep your hands clean.’ And that much at least Derek had managed to do. Lowly as his status was at Cannonbridge Mail Order, it had always seemed an achievement to him – until his marriage.

The bronchitis finally carried his father off when Derek was nineteen. ‘I haven’t amounted to much,’ he said to Derek on the day before he died. ‘You’ve got your whole life before you. Watch out you don’t end up like me.’ His gaze wandered round the dismal bedroom. ‘I’ve left you everything.’ Everything amounted to forty-odd pounds in the post office, some tools, a cupboardful of cheap clothes and a few sticks of worthless furniture.

The landlady didn’t wait for the earth to settle over his grave before she marched round to the terrace house.

‘I want you out of here inside a fortnight,’ she informed Derek. ‘I’m going to do this place up and sell it.’

She knew her man; Derek moved out at once without protest, almost with apology, into the first of his bedsits.

Now he blinked away the memories with a jerk of his head. He finished his toast and went over to the dresser, pulled open a drawer and took out a handful of bills. He sat down at the table to study the figures although the amounts were accurately burned into his brain. He clenched a fist and dug it into his chin, frowning down at the papers, trying to think of some way out of his difficulties. At last he blew out a long breath and stood up. ‘Something’s got to be done,’ he said aloud.

In the meantime, in the big double bed upstairs, Lisa would be beginning to stir. He made a fresh pot of tea, found a clean linen cloth and smoothed it on to a tray. He poured a cup of tea and set it on the tray beside a small plate of biscuits and the peach-coloured rosebud in its glass of water. He carried the tray carefully upstairs to Lisa.

She woke and stretched like a cat and her long blonde hair fell back against the pillows. She smiled at him and held out her cheek for a kiss.

She drank some tea and nibbled at a biscuit, then she reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table.

‘I really think you ought to try to give them up,’ Derek said apologetically. ‘You know what the doctor said.’

She pulled a face. ‘The doctor’s an old woman.’ She took out a cigarette and he lit it for her; she inhaled deeply. ‘The doctor we had in Ellenborough smoked all the time.’ The Marshalls had lived in Ellenborough, a large town forty-five miles away, before they moved to the Hadleigh suburb of Cannonbridge.

Outside there was the sound of feet on gravel, the click of the letterbox. ‘That might be a letter from Janet,’ Lisa said. ‘Do go down and see.’ There was only one post a day now in Hadleigh. Lisa had written to Janet again last week, asking her to come over as soon as the school term ended on Friday, stay as long as she liked.

Derek went downstairs to the hall. Three envelopes lay in the wire cage at the back of the door. The first was postmarked Cannonbridge, addressed to Lisa in the bold handwriting of her friend Carole Gardiner. The second was an advertising circular, and the third – he drew a long breath and ripped it open, running his eye rapidly over the sheet, biting deep into his lip as he read, unaware of any sensation of pain. He stood frowning down at the letter and then went swiftly into the sitting room and knelt by the grate.

He pushed aside the tapestry firescreen that had been worked by Mrs Marshall, struck a match and set fire to the letter and its envelope. When they were both thoroughly consumed he ground the ashes into dust with the poker and replaced the screen. He got to his feet and went back upstairs.

‘Nothing from Janet,’ he said as he entered the bedroom. On his tongue he could taste the blood from his bitten lip. ‘But Carole Gardiner’s written to you.’

‘When are we going to have the phone put in?’ Lisa said impatiently as she took the letter he held out. ‘It’s such a nuisance, all this letter-writing.’

‘There’s a waiting-list for phones,’ he said. He had no idea if this was so; he had made no application for a phone. What he did know with bleak certainty was that he could afford neither the installation fee nor the quarterly expenses.

‘You couldn’t ring Janet even if we did have a phone,’ he reminded Lisa. There was no phone at Rose Cottage and Janet didn’t intend to have one put in.

Lisa’s full red mouth looked sulky. ‘What’s your letter?’ she asked after a moment’s silence.

He glanced down at the envelope in his hand. ‘It’s only a circular,’ he said. ‘Some central heating firm.’ As soon as the words left his lips he knew his mistake.

‘We’ll have to get some kind of central heating put in before next winter,’ Lisa said with energy. ‘We must have the house nice and warm for the baby.’

‘There are gas-fires in the bedrooms.’ He drew a little sighing breath. Even the gas-fires, small and old-fashioned, would be expensive enough to run. And Lisa wasn’t by nature given to economy, she seemed to think she had only to express a wish and the means to gratify it would float in on the summer breeze.

‘If we sold this house and moved to Cannonbridge,’ she said coaxingly, ‘we could buy a lovely new bungalow with central heating already laid on. We could buy one out at Leabarrow, near Carole.’ Leabarrow was a newish development on the opposite edge of Cannonbridge.

Derek gave her a despairing look. ‘Ivydene isn’t ours to sell. Half of it belongs to Janet.’ As Lisa well knew.

‘I’m positive you could do something about that if you tried, if you went to see a solicitor. Carole says people can always get round that sort of thing if they really want to.’ Her tone now held a strong suggestion of a whine and her delicate eyebrows came together in a frown. ‘It’s so boring being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere.’

‘There’s no question of selling the house if Janet’s against it,’ he said. ‘And you know she’s against it.’ Lisa had put forward the suggestion some weeks ago and Janet had abruptly dismissed the notion.

‘Carole says we can force a sale, whatever Janet says, and split the proceeds.’

‘I’m sure that can’t be right,’ he said sharply. ‘We’d have to reach agreement with Janet on any course of action.’ He closed his eyes; half the proceeds of the sale of Ivydene would be nowhere near enough to buy one of the Leabarrow bungalows and he was in no position to raise or finance a mortgage.

He opened his eyes and his expression was once more easy and amiable. ‘You haven’t read Carole’s letter,’ he reminded Lisa.

She gave a moody shrug. ‘It won’t be anything important, it’ll just be to say when she wants me to go over there.’ She ripped open the envelope and drew out a single sheet covered with a few lines of bold scrawl.

Carole Gardiner was the wife of a welder on an oil rig; they had two small children. The Gardiners had moved to Leabarrow twelve months ago from an industrial town up north. Lisa had met Carole in the waiting room at her dentist’s and they had struck up an immediate friendship.

She glanced over the letter. ‘Mike’s away again. She wants me to go over there some time this week.’ Carole never wanted visitors when her husband was at home, his reappearances were a kind of regular explosive honeymoon. But in Mike’s absences she was delighted to have Lisa’s company. Lisa usually stayed the night and Carole arranged for a baby-sitter so they could go out for the evening.

‘I’ll go over there later in the week,’ she decided.

‘You could go over on Friday morning,’ Derek suggested. ‘It’s the clinic this Friday, you’d have to go into Cannonbridge for that anyway. You could stop over till Saturday.’ He never minded these brief absences of Lisa’s, they gave him a chance to draw breath, clear his thoughts.

She pouted. ‘I’ve nothing decent to wear.’ She gestured at her clothes strewn over the backs of chairs, scattered on top of the chest of drawers. ‘Everything’s getting so tight round the waist.’ It would never occur to her to pick up a needle and scissors, let the garments out. ‘I’ll be needing a lot of new things soon,’ she added. ‘And there’s all the stuff to buy for the baby.’

She gave him a wheedling smile. ‘There’s a Mother and Baby fortnight on at Hanson’s.’ This was the most expensive store in Cannonbridge. ‘They have such lovely things. I could go along there with Carole.’

She wouldn’t need to fatigue herself penning a reply to Carole’s letter, she could phone her from the neighbourhood shop just along the road. She popped in there at least once a day for a tin or something from the frozen food cabinet.

Derek was anxious to steer her away from thoughts of spending. ‘Would you like me to run you over to Longmead this evening to see Janet?’ he said. ‘You could find out if she’s coming to stay or not.’ They’d already paid a few visits to Rose Cottage although Janet hadn’t been very pressing about urging them to come over. ‘She may not have had time to write,’ he said. ‘She must be busy at the end of term. She may just intend to hop on the bus on Friday and come straight over.’

Lisa made no reply. ‘We could pop over there about half past seven,’ he persisted.

‘No, thanks,’ she said abruptly. ‘I don’t see why I should go running after Janet if she can’t even be bothered to answer my letters. And anyway,’ she added with a return to her childish manner, ‘I don’t need her now I’ve got Carole.’ Carole was fifteen years older than Lisa and so fitted comfortably into the mother/older sister slot that Lisa was accustomed to. She much preferred the company of people older than herself, she hadn’t kept up with any of her schoolfriends.

And Carole always had plenty of money, was always happy to pay for the steak dinners and wine, tickets for a show, drinks at a club.

‘Then if you won’t come, I think I’ll go over to Longmead on my own,’ Derek said. ‘I’ll ask Janet what she’s going to do about the holidays. I’ll explain that you’re upset she hasn’t written – ’

‘Don’t you dare!’ Lisa said with force. ‘I will not go running after her and I won’t have you going running after her either!’

‘I don’t for one moment think she’d see it like that,’ he said mildly. He gave a joking smile. ‘Of course she may have more ambitious plans for the holidays, she may be going off on a luxury cruise.’

She could certainly afford it. She’d been teaching for seven years now and she was the type to save. She’d been left some money in her father’s will – a sore point with Lisa who’d been left nothing; when her father breathed his last he had no idea that he’d begotten a second child.

Mrs Marshall made her will twelve months before she died and she had divided her estate between her two daughters with scrupulous fairness. The house and its contents were left to them jointly and her investments were split in two, Janet’s share to be paid over without delay as she was already of a sensible age, but Lisa’s to be withheld till she was twenty-five.

‘Promise me you won’t go over to Rose Cottage,’ Lisa insisted.

He moved his shoulders. ‘All right then, if that’s what you want.’

She sank back against the pillows with a satisfied air. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said suddenly, like a child.

‘I’ll make you some breakfast,’ he offered. ‘I’ve plenty of time. What would you like?’ He removed the little glass from the tray and set it down on the bedside table.

She put out a finger and touched the rosebud. ‘What a pretty colour.’ She gave him a delicious dimpled smile and he had a sudden sharp memory of North Africa, the golden idle days, the starry, scented nights. ‘I’ll have some toast and scrambled eggs,’ she said. ‘Some of that lime marmalade. And lots of coffee.’

‘I’m yours to command, Princess.’ He bent down and kissed her, picked up the tray and went briskly down again to the kitchen. The bills were still on the table but he gave them barely a glance as he swept them up into a pile and thrust them back into the drawer of the dresser.

CHAPTER 2

The morning session at Longmead school ended at noon. At five minutes past twelve Janet Marshall walked up Mayfield Lane and pushed open the little wooden gate of Rose Cottage. A trellis brilliant with the full flush of pale pink roses arched over the gate, scenting the air with their delicate perfume. She went up the path to the front door which was exuberantly garlanded on either side with great swags of climbing roses, red and white. She took a key from her shoulder-bag and let herself in.

The cottage was a good two hundred years old; it was small and set well back from the lane, a situation that gave it plenty of privacy without making it in any way isolated. It had a long narrow garden in front and an even longer strip at the back. The cottage belonged to Oswald Slater, the owner of Mayfield Farm, and stood upon his land. It had been allowed to lie empty for many years and had fallen into sad disrepair, but after the spectacular rise in property values in recent times Slater had considered the dwelling worth restoring and modernizing, and it was now a comfortable little residence with a new lease of life ahead of it. It suited Janet very well, standing as it did only a couple of hundred yards from the school.

She hung her bag on a hook just inside the front door. The tiny hall led into the single living-room which was simply and pleasantly furnished with pieces she had brought from Ivydene, pieces she remembered from her childhood in Ellenborough; they gave her an agreeable sense of continuity and tranquillity.

She switched on the radio which began to play light music, but she gave it no more than a fraction of her attention as she set about preparing her lunch.

She shook out a clean cloth and put it on the table in the centre of the room. She took out a jug of goat’s milk, butter and cheese from the fridge, reached down a beaker from the open dresser and brought a tin of crispbread from the pantry. At the sink she carefully washed a fine Cos lettuce she had grown in the garden and made it into a salad with cucumber and tomatoes she had bought on her Saturday trip into Cannonbridge. All her movements were quick, neat and methodical.

Before she sat down to eat she crossed to a small desk that stood against one wall and took out some opened letters. She began her lunch, looking over the letters again as she ate, frowning as she glanced through them. One letter was untidily written in Lisa’s small backward-sloping hand. ‘I’ve been expecting to hear from you,’ Lisa wrote. ‘To say when you’re coming to stay.’ To spend a couple of weeks acting as confidante and general dogsbody, Janet thought without enthusiasm; she’d had more than enough of that in her life.

Her father had died when she was ten years old and her mother, never the most independent and strong-minded of women, had immediately cast Janet in the role of man of the family. Her childhood seemed to end overnight. Her mother took to discussing every problem with her – and there was an endless succession of problems; Janet was called on to offer advice, weigh up situations, make decisions.

She sighed and glanced up from the letter and her gaze fell on a picture over the mantelpiece, a landscape, one of half a dozen watercolours on the cottage walls, executed by her father with considerable skill. He had owned and run an artists’ supply shop in Ellenborough and had cherished artistic ambitions of his own.

Janet resembled him in appearance, unlike Lisa who took after their mother. Janet was tall and had an exceptionally fine figure, slim and supple. Her head was set with particular grace on a long slender neck; her skin was a delicate olive and her large eyes a clear light hazel. Her naturally curly hair, thick and dark, was cut short and covered her head in close tendrils.

She stood up and took an apple from the bowl on the sideboard, and began to pace about the room as she ate it. She was strongly tempted to let Lisa get on as best she could with the life she had so defiantly chosen for herself. But then again, a young girl in her first pregnancy, no mother to turn to . . . She paused by the table and took a long drink of the delicious goat’s milk, creamy and icy cold. It was difficult to break the habit of shouldering responsibility, she had acquired the habit so young and had practised it so long.

After her father’s death her mother had put the shop up for sale, together with the house where they had been living; the house stood on the outskirts of Ellenborough. ‘What would you think of our buying a larger house and taking in lodgers?’ she asked Janet. Mrs Marshall rather inclined to the idea of businessmen, preferably transients, with whom it would be possible to preserve some distance. ‘I’m not a bad cook,’ she added on an increasingly hopeful note, ‘and I know you’d help me all you could. Do you think we could manage?’ After a semi-sleepless night Janet had decided they could manage and a search was immediately put in hand for suitable premises near the business area of Ellenborough.

For the next twelve years Mrs Marshall – with Janet’s unflagging assistance – did succeed in making a living for the three of them.

Janet worked hard at school – as well as at home – and did well. Her serious manner and responsible attitudes suggested teaching as a career and when she was eighteen she began her training. There was a good college in Ellenborough and she was able to attend as a day student. She would much have preferred to live in but there was no question of that, she couldn’t leave her mother to battle on without her. All during her training she carried the double load of her studies and her duties at home. Fortunately she was strong and healthy but by the time she had finished her training her mother’s health, never very robust, was beginning to fail.

‘I’ve had enough of hard work,’ she told Janet. ‘And enough of Ellenborough. I’d like to sell up, go and live in some quiet, peaceful place and take things easy.’ Janet was delighted at the thought that they might at last be about to bid goodbye to the long procession of business-men, and she rather liked the idea of teaching in a country school.

She found her first post at Stanbourne and as soon as she was appointed set about finding somewhere for the three of them to live. ‘I know I can leave it entirely to you,’ her mother said with long-justified confidence. ‘I’m sure you’ll find a house that will suit us all very well.’

In a short time Janet found Ivydene, a convenient bus-ride from Stanbourne and close enough to Cannonbridge for Lisa – at that time eleven years old – to be able to go in to school there every morning.

The Ellenborough house sold for considerably more than it took to buy Ivydene and Mrs Marshall invested the balance on the advice of her bank manager. And as Janet now had a salary coming in they were able to manage comfortably without lodgers and Mrs Marshall could at last put her feet up and take it easy.

A pity she wasn’t spared longer to enjoy her leisure, Janet thought with a sigh; her mother had had a mere half-dozen years before a stroke took her off.

She picked up another letter and glanced through it, pursing her lips in thought. It was from Alison Collett, a friend of hers from the day they’d first met at the age of five in the playground of the Infants’ school at Ellenborough. They’d sat side by side in the classroom, had gone on to the same secondary school, trained at the same college.

Alison had married a couple of years after qualifying and was no longer teaching. She lived now at Chalford Bay, an old-fashioned seaside resort some eighty miles from Cannonbridge. Her husband was a planning officer with the local authority and they had two small children.

‘When are you coming to stay?’ Alison asked in her letter. ‘Any time before September will suit us. Just pick up a phone and tell us what train to meet.’ Janet sat for some moments considering the idea, a good deal more tempting than a stay at Ivydene with the demanding and capricious Lisa.

She got slowly to her feet, still pondering; she began to clear the table and wash up the lunch things. The radio emitted the time pips and she switched over to hear the news; she rarely bought a paper. As she listened she dried the crockery and put it back on the dresser, then she carefully and neatly wiped over the painted surfaces of the kitchen. When it was all finished to her satisfaction she unlatched a door at the other side of the room and went up the narrow winding staircase to the bedroom.

She opened the wardrobe and looked through the garments hanging from the rail, she pulled out the drawers of a chest and glanced through blouses and sweaters. There were a couple of suitcases on top of the wardrobe and she stood on a chair to reach one down. She dusted the case and took the opportunity to run her duster over the other and also over the top of the wardrobe, then she moved the chair a couple of feet and gave a thorough dusting to the lampshade hanging from the middle of the ceiling. She stepped down again and glanced at her watch – time she was getting back to school. She returned the chair precisely to its place, shook the duster out of the window and went downstairs.

At twenty past one Janet came out of the front door of Rose Cottage and locked it behind her. The voices of the children in the school playground drifted towards her on the slight breeze as she went down the path into the lane.

The lane was very narrow, little used by traffic, barely wide enough for a single vehicle to pass along. The gateway of Rose Cottage offered no access for a car but this didn’t bother her; she neither owned a car nor wished to own one.

She went off up the lane at a steady pace. On her left was a pair of semi-detached dwellings, Mayfield Cottages, set close down beside the lane. They were farm cottages, also belonging to Oswald Slater.

There was no one visible in either dwelling but through the open windows she could hear the sound of radios and the clatter of pans and crockery. She walked briskly on to where the lane met the Hayford road.

On the other side of the lane, in the comer made by the lane and the road, stood a small bungalow, Brookside, built between the wars. Over the top of the trim hedge she glimpsed the silvery head of George Pickthorn, the owner of the bungalow, as he stooped over a bed of delphiniums.

At the sound of her step he raised his head and gave her a friendly wave. He was a short, wiry man, fit and active for his years. His face was deeply tanned, with a long pointed nose and a sharp chin; his expression was alert and cheerful.

She exchanged a casual word with him as she turned left into the Hayford road. A few more yards brought her to the gates of the school, a handsome Victorian building of local grey stone, standing on the left of the road.

As she walked up to the front door several children ran up to greet her, bursting with items of news, displaying treasures acquired in the dinner-hour, a curious stone picked up in the playground, a dead butterfly unusually marked. She smiled and answered but kept on her way into the building.

In the front hall the headmaster, Henry Lloyd, was standing beside a little exhibition of international arts and crafts that he’d arranged a few weeks back. He had brought a number of items from home himself and others had been lent by parents and villagers. He was fond of setting up displays of various kinds designed to bring a breath of the wider world into the children’s lives.

He was in his middle fifties, very tall and thin with an aureole of fluffy salt-and-pepper hair round a bald crown. He had a quiet manner and his habitual expression was of controlled calm.

On this warm day in late July he wore a tweed suit with a waistcoat, a watch chain draped across the front. His face, his hair, his clothes, were all in shades of sepia, brown and grey; he looked like an engraving in the front of a volume of Victorian sermons.

A boy was standing beside him, asking questions about a piece of jade-green pottery that the headmaster held in both hands, turning it so that the boy could study the elaborate design. The piece was fairly valuable; it had been lent by a parent whose father had brought it back years ago from army service in Malaya.

Lloyd turned and spoke a few words to Janet as she went by to her classroom. He never went home at midday but always took the school dinner-duty himself. His wife was an energetic woman involved in a great many local activities and she had no wish to chop her busy day in two simply in order to cook a meal for her husband. In any case it would have been a problem for him to get home and back in the time. The Lloyds lived at Parkwood, a large late-Georgian house a mile and a half from the school and they had only one car between them which Mrs Lloyd always used to shoot about on her various errands. So all in all it suited Henry very well to eat the school dinner and get on afterwards with paperwork or preparation of lessons.

Janet went on into her classroom. There were only two classes now at Longmead school and she taught the lower. Three or four children were already in the room, reading, drawing, chattering.

There were still some minutes to go before the bell would ring for afternoon school. The first lesson was Nature Study, very popular with the children and one Janet particularly liked herself. She went to a cupboard and took out a box of coloured chalks. She crossed to the blackboard and wrote on it in a beautiful flowing script: British Birds of the Garden and Woodland. The children fell silent, watching in absorbed fascination as she began to draw.

CHAPTER 3

After Janet walked on into the school playground George Pickthorn stood for a moment looking after her. The first time he’d seen her was a few months ago on a bright spring morning as he was coming out of his front door to start work as usual in his garden.

‘We’re going to have a new teacher,’ the children had told him as they stopped to chat over his fence. ‘She’s going to live at Rose Cottage.’ He had heard from other village sources that the new teacher was a good-looking young woman who seemed disposed to keep to herself. But nothing had prepared him for the impact of her appearance as she advanced along the lane towards him on that first morning.

He had lifted his eyes from a rosebush he was pruning and caught sight of that finely moulded face framed by tight classical curls, that proud head and beautiful neck, that tall, marvellous figure. Like the figurehead of a sailing ship, he had thought, and that was how he had seen her ever since.

Now he gave his head a little shake and returned to his gardening. In a day or two he must start painting the neat white fence again, he liked to keep it shiningly immaculate. Tomorrow or the day after he would go into Cannonbridge on the bus – he kept no car – to buy the paint.

He ran a hand along the top of the yew hedge that stood inside the white fence. It felt crisply resilient, thick and springing under his touch; it was greening up nicely after last year’s careful trimming.

Brookside was a small bungalow but big enough for George, who was a widower. The bungalow was bounded at the rear by a field, and on its fourth side by a meadow that stretched as far as the Cannonbridge road at the top of the lane. The meadow had not been cut and the green-gold grass stood tall and plumy in the early afternoon sunshine.

The brook from which the bungalow took its name was a sizable stream some four or five feet wide and fairly deep, murmuring and rippling by, full of trailing weeds and darting minnows. It ran along the edge of the meadow beside the lane, through a culvert in the Brookside garden, and reappeared at the other side of the Hayford road.

George Pickthorn was sixty-seven years old. He was not a native of Longmead but had lived in Cannonbridge until he retired five years ago from his job as a storekeeper for a firm of electrical wholesalers in the town. He and his wife had many plans for the years ahead. They had never had any children; this was always a grief to them but the marriage was otherwise happy and contented.

Then quite suddenly, without warning, his wife died. He went up one morning with her cup of tea and found she was still not awake. She never did wake up. The hæmorrhage of some microscopic blood vessel in her brain, the doctor said; it would have been quite peaceful.

That was four years ago. It took him some time to recover to any extent at all from the shock, the days slipped by in a grey dream. Then one morning several weeks later when George opened his eyes, an intention sprang fully formed into his brain; he would leave Cannonbridge and go to live in the country.

As soon as he saw Brookside he knew the bungalow would suit him. ‘You’re quite sure?’ the agent said; imagining the screeches and caterwauling drifting over from the school, the brickbats and thievings, the general uproar. But George had made up his mind.

Now, on this glorious summer day he was deadheading the roses when the bell rang at the end of afternoon school. The two little girls from Mayfield Cottages stopped as usual to chat to him. Pretty little girls, ten, rising eleven. Jill Bryant with her wide smile and long blonde hair tied back with blue ribbon, and her inseparable friend, Heather Abell from the cottage next door, with her gentle look, soft brown eyes in a heart-shaped face, short black hair cut in a fringe. They were both in the top class, taught by Mr Lloyd.

‘My Dad’s going to bring me home a kitten soon,’ Jill told Mr Pickthorn. Her father worked at Mayfield Farm and Mrs Slater, the farmer’s wife, had promised him the pick of the latest litter.

‘My mother won’t let me have a kitten,’ Heather said with stoic acceptance. She was the only child of a widow and accustomed to a certain amount of domestic austerity. He father had worked at the farm until his death a few years ago and her mother still did occasional domestic work in the farmhouse, as well as helping with fruit-picking in the season.

The cottage the Abells lived in was tied, and in the ordinary way Mrs Abell would have had to vacate it when her husband died. But Mrs Slater thought this a harsh practice and pressed her husband to find some alternative. After careful thought Oswald Slater decided that as a replacement for Abell he would in future engage a single man, who could be accommodated in the farmhouse. This would allow Abell’s widow and daughter – Heather was at that time five years old – together with Mrs Abell’s mother, who lived with them, to stay on in the cottage.

The arrangement worked well. The man who replaced Abell was a quiet, middle-aged bachelor. He stayed a good four years at Mayfield and gave excellent service; his presence in the farm household was never obtrusive. He left when one of his nephews bought a smallholding twenty miles from Longmead and asked him to go into partnership. Slater had taken on a younger man as his successor.

‘I’m going to let Heather share my kitten,’ Jill told Mr Pickthorn.

‘That’s right,’ he said approvingly. ‘It’s good to share.’ He took a bag of sweets from his pocket and all three of them dug into the bag with pleasure.

The girls went off a few minutes later with their arms round each other’s shoulders. The curve of the lane took them out of George’s vision before they reached the cottages.

There was the sound of a vehicle approaching along the Hayford road and George glanced towards the school. Prompt as always at half past four Rachel Lloyd, the headmaster’s wife, drove up in her old blue station wagon to collect her husband. As she turned into the playground George gave her his usual wave and Rachel waved back at him in friendly fashion.

This was George’s customary signal for tea. He went round to the rear of the bungalow and put down his secateurs and gardening gloves on the seat in the back porch. In this fine sunny weather he liked to come out again for an hour or two in the evening, after he’d cleared away his tea-things and listened to the news.

Inside the school Henry Lloyd heard the station wagon and at once began to lock up. In the classroom next door Janet Marshall also heard the car. She had already finished her own locking up and she came out of her classroom and handed her keys to Mr Lloyd.

‘On your way home,’ he said, ‘I wonder if you’d be kind enough to call in at Mrs Abell’s cottage and give her a message from me?’ In addition to her other activities Heather’s mother acted as school cleaner and caretaker; neither job occupied a great deal of time.

‘Yes, of course,’ Janet said.

‘Ask her if she’ll be sure to give the cloakroom a good turn-out this evening.’ The headmaster’s face looked strained and weary. ‘Please don’t imply any criticism of her work, she can’t be expected to perform miracles in the time she’s allowed – but the cloakroom has got rather grubby and it makes a bad impression.’

‘I’ll be suitably diplomatic,’ Janet promised. She went back to her classroom to pick up her things. As she came out of the front door a moment later she gave Mrs Lloyd – sitting waiting in the station wagon – a little wave and spoke a word of greeting. Mrs Lloyd nodded and smiled in reply.

Rachel Lloyd was a large, vigorous-looking woman, a couple of years older than her husband but looking somewhat younger than him. Her thick chestnut hair, lightly streaked with grey, was drawn back into a heavy knot at the nape of her neck; she had the fresh complexion and clear skin of a countrywoman.

Janet walked unhurriedly out of the playground and turned right, in the direction of Rose Cottage. As she passed Brookside she saw that Mr Pickthorn had gone in as usual for his tea. She paused for a moment to admire his delphiniums. They were very fine, a dozen or more delicate shades of blue, a colour she particularly liked in a garden; she must definitely try to grow some at Rose Cottage.

She walked on up the lane and turned in at the gate of the first of the pair of cottages. These were a good deal more modern than Rose Cottage, they had been built shortly after the First World War.

No. 1 was an exact twin of its partner except that it sported a magnificent white jasmine clothing the end wall and a blue ceanothus in full flower in the front garden. The late Mr Abell had been a keen gardener and had taken many prizes at local shows. He had tended the garden up at Mayfield Farm in addition to his duties there as stockman.

The light drifting fragrance of the jasmine greeted Janet as she walked up to the front porch. Mrs Abell’s mother, Mrs Perrin, kept a large rocking-chair on the porch in summer, she liked to sit out there knitting on warm afternoons. The chair was empty now, the knitting laid down on the cushions. The front door stood propped open by a large stone and Janet could see Mrs Perrin in the kitchen, standing ironing at the table in the middle of the room. She glanced up at the sound of footsteps and saw Janet coming up the path.

‘Do come in, Miss Marshall,’ she called out. She was a short, heavily-built woman in her middle sixties with coarse grey hair pulled up into a great bun on top of her head. She was solid and unflappable, healthy and active enough in spite of some trouble with her legs, stout tree-trunk legs encased even in the summer heat in thick stockings, to disguise the veins knotted and corded from years of standing over ironing-boards, cookers, sinks. She more than pulled her weight in the household.

‘I expect you want to see my daughter,’ she said as Janet stepped across the threshold. The kitchen smelt of warm ironing and ancient horsehair upholstery – from the two huge sagging black armchairs standing one at each side of the hearth. ‘She’s out in the garden, picking peas.’ Mrs Perrin nodded towards the long back garden carefully planted in geometric rows of vegetables, bordered by sternly disciplined bushes and fruit trees. ‘Heather’s next door, playing with Jill Bryant.’

‘I’ll go out and speak to Mrs Abell, if I may,’ Janet said after a civil enquiry after Mrs Perrin’s health. She went out through the kitchen door.

A belt of tall, thickly-grown trees encircled the far end of the two gardens, completely screening them from Rose Cottage. Halfway down the garden Janet could see Mrs Abell kneeling among the onions and carrots. She stood up suddenly and darted off to a row of peas, she stooped and began filling her wooden trug with plump young pods.

She was a little scuttling, sideways-glancing woman, colourless and careworn, full of anxieties about life, about managing, averting trouble and disaster. Bad enough when her husband was alive but ten times worse after he fell down dead five years ago from a totally unexpected heart attack among the plant pots and the wooden staging in one of the Mayfield greenhouses.

Janet delivered the headmaster’s message and Mrs Abell promised to give particular attention to the cloakroom. As Janet turned to walk back through the garden the two girls, Jill and Heather, came out of the back door of the adjoining cottage and ran down the garden, throwing a ball to each other, laughing and squealing. They caught sight of Janet across the fence and came to a sudden stop.

‘Hello, Miss Marshall!’ Jill cried and Heather gave her a smile. Janet waved and smiled in reply but said nothing and continued on her way.

Jill’s mother, Mrs Bryant, was standing in the back doorway of her cottage. ‘You’re not to pester Miss Marshall,’ she said to the girls in an easy, tolerant tone as soon as Janet had passed out of earshot. ‘I’m sure she sees enough of you children during the day, she must be allowed some peace.’ She yawned widely. ‘I’m going upstairs now for a nap. Don’t get up to any mischief and don’t go making a lot of noise.’

She went slowly upstairs. On her wedding-day twenty-one years ago Mollie Bryant had been slender and pretty with a fine skin, corn-coloured hair and bright blue eyes. She’d put on a great deal of weight since then. Her hair had darkened and she’d taken to bleaching it; it was now a harsh brassy colour. Her skin had grown lined and weather-beaten and had developed a permanent shade of light brick from stooping over the oven in her kitchen.

She was fond of cooking and served a substantial high tea every evening when her husband and son came in. Nowadays she felt more and more the need to toil upstairs out of the hot kitchen in the sultry afternoons, put on something loose and cool, lie down and close her eyes. She opened the bedroom door and began to unbutton her dress; five minutes later she was fast asleep.

Shortly before six her husband Ken walked down from Mayfield Farm for his tea. He would go back again afterwards to work in the turkey sheds for an hour or two.

He came through a wicket gate set in the screen of trees and walked up the back garden towards the house. He was a tall, powerfully-built man in his late forties, with straight black hair sleeked back from his forehead and dark bushy eyebrows meeting across his nose. His sleeves were rolled up, showing muscular brown arms with a strong growth of black hair.

The two girls ran up to him, besieging him with questions about the kitten.

‘I can’t bring it home for another day or two,’ he said, laughing as Jill swung on his arm. ‘We can’t take it from its mother yet – you don’t want the poor creature dying on you.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ Jill said reluctantly. She went with him into the house and Heather ran home next door for her tea.

Ken pushed open the back door and went into the kitchen. Mollie had already come downstairs again, somewhat refreshed after her nap. She hadn’t bothered to comb her hair or powder her face – she wasn’t going anywhere and she wasn’t expecting visitors. She had merely slipped on a cotton kimono and thrust her bare and unlovely feet into a pair of flat mules.

She had laid the table and was now busy cutting bread. ‘You’re back then,’ she said to her husband in ritual greeting, looking up at him with a cheerful smile.

He gave her a nod, mastering his irritation at her slatternly appearance. He had to discipline himself these days not to snap at her. He’d tried friendly suggestion, diplomatic hints, outright advice that she should lose weight, do something about her hair, her skin, her clothes. He still felt it not impossible that out of that slack flesh, the lines and folds, the slim nymph of twenty-one years ago might somehow be conjured up again.

But none of his efforts produced the slightest effect. ‘I’m not a girl any more,’ Mollie said with easy acceptance. ‘Can’t expect to stay young and beautiful for ever.’

Ken made a stern effort now to speak amiably to her as he went over to the sink to scrub his hands. ‘Warm old day,’ he said. ‘We’ll end up with a storm if this keeps on.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a drop of rain.’ She began to butter the bread. ‘It’d cool things down.’

He studied her reflection in the mirror above the sink. The kimono was gaily coloured with a jazzy design in lemon, apricot and orange. Mollie had always had a fondness for bright colours and they’d suited her well enough when she was a girl. She had bought the kimono on holiday a couple of years ago to wear on the beach, now it was downgraded to housewear in hot weather. The belt kept slipping and the kimono fell apart periodically to reveal a dingy nylon petticoat straining across her bosom before she clutched the folds about her again and refastened the belt. He dried his hands on the roller towel, closing his eyes briefly against a glimpse of vast bare thighs, quilted and dimpled, pale as lard.

The roar of a motorbike sounded in the lane, growing louder as Dave Bryant drove up to the cottage, dying away again as he parked the machine at the side of the house. He came in through the back door a couple of minutes later, carrying his crash helmet under his arm.

‘Hello, Mum, Dad.’ He grinned at Jill. He was a sturdy lad of twenty, nothing special in the way of looks, a frank, intelligent face and a generally likeable air, the kind of lad an employer would probably engage on sight.

He was apprenticed to a Cannonbridge firm of builders on a day-release scheme, working three days a week for the firm and spending the other two days at the local technical college. He was an industrious lad and a good student, he had taken more than one prize.

‘Sit down, everyone!’ Mrs Bryant commanded. She patted her frizzed hair into place and began to dish up. They all ate with keen appetite, there was never any trouble with finicky eaters at Mollie’s table.

‘This is a very good rhubarb tart,’ Dave said with keen appreciation towards the end of the meal. He and Jill never regarded their mother with criticism, they took her as she was, not having known her in her willow-slim, com-gold days.

‘I’ll bake you a couple of tarts for the party on Friday if you like,’ Mrs Bryant offered expansively. The party was an end-of-term social at Dave’s college and she’d already promised half a dozen goodies.

‘Oh yes, please,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘That’d be great.’

‘Are you inviting Clive to the party?’ Jill asked her brother.

‘I did ask him,’ Dave said without much interest, ‘but I don’t think he’ll come. He said he’d let me know.’

‘You should try to persuade him,’ Mrs Bryant said as she stood up to fetch a massive fruit cake from the larder. ‘He never goes anywhere, he sticks in those digs all the time, making his models – it can’t be healthy for a lad of his age.’

Clive Egan was twenty-one years old, the only surviving child of Mrs Bryant’s cousin. His parents were dead and he lived in lodgings in Stanbourne with a Mrs Turnbull, an elderly widow. He was employed as a general building worker by the Cannonbridge firm where Dave Bryant was apprenticed.

‘It would do Clive good to go to the party,’ Mrs Bryant said with a jerk of her head. ‘It’s not much of a life, living in digs.’ She poured herself another cup of tea. ‘Mrs Turnbull’s a good sort but the lad needs more life at his age.’

Ken took a huge slice of cake and bit into it. It was undeniably excellent, full of plump raisins and glacé cherries. His mood softened. ‘Go on, Dave,’ he said. ‘You ask Clive again. You’ll find he’ll go to the party with a bit of persuading.’

CHAPTER 4

Five miles away, in the village of Stanbourne, Clive Egan and his landlady were about to begin supper. Clive had been working in Stanbourne for the past ten days, assisting with a central heating installation in one of the large houses. He was a tall, heavily built young man with broad shoulders and strongly muscled arms. His fair hair was clipped close to his head, his eyes were a deep clear gold with a restless darting gaze.

‘I expect you’ve nearly finished on that heating job,’ Mrs Turnbull said as they sat down to cold bacon-and-egg pie and salad. She was a perky little woman with quick neat movements and sharp brown eyes; her thin grey hair was dragged back into a scanty bun.

‘Another couple of days should do it,’ Clive said. ‘Then I’ll be working over at Longmead, a roof repair and guttering job.’

She glanced up. ‘Oh – if you’re going to be over Longmead way, perhaps you wouldn’t mind calling in at Mayfield Farm for me, ordering a turkey from Mrs Slater.’ Her oldest sister and her husband were celebrating their golden wedding early in August and Mrs Turnbull had promised a turkey for the family reunion dinner.

‘Yes, sure,’ Clive said. ‘That won’t be any trouble.’ He helped himself to potato salad. ‘I can walk up to the farm in my dinner-hour.’

‘I shall want a good big bird.’ She inclined her head, considering. ‘Be sure to explain to Mrs Slater about the dinner, tell her it must be a top-quality bird, I don’t mind paying. And ask her if they still deliver or if I’ll have to arrange to have it fetched.’

Supper had already been eaten at Parkwood, the Lloyds’ elegant late-Georgian house on the edge of Longmead village. Rather a meagre supper; it hadn’t taken the Lloyds long to despatch it.

Rachel didn’t feel called on to provide much in the way of an evening meal during the week in term-time. Henry could eat as much as he wanted in school at midday and in the course of her own driving hither and yon about the neighbourhood in execution of her many duties she was usually given a sustaining succession of cups of tea and coffee, home-baked cakes and cookies, slices of pies and quiches.

Not that Henry was disposed to be critical of his supper. He had little appetite nowadays, had grown steadily thinner over the last few years and scarcely noticed any more what was set before him.

When the supper things had been cleared away Rachel fetched her embroidery basket and settled down in an easy chair in the sitting room with the radio tuned in to a concert of classical music. There was no television set at Parkwood. ‘I’ve never felt the need of one,’ Rachel said when anyone commented. Her parents would have been horrified at the idea of introducing such a time-waster into the household and she had never seen good reason to depart from their attitudes and strictures. Parkwood had belonged to her parents and she had lived there with them before she married Henry fourteen years ago.

In his bachelor days Henry had been accustomed to television. He had lived with his widowed sister in a snug little house in Cannonbridge and they had watched many an entertaining or instructive programme together in the placid evenings.

They had led an agreeable, uneventful life that flowed steadily on and seemed as if it would continue in the same tranquil way forever. Henry was at that time deputy head of a Cannonbridge primary school with good hopes of a headship somewhere before long.

And then one February evening his sister, engaged in a little dressmaking, providing herself with a pretty new blouse for the spring, went upstairs to fit the blouse in front of the long mirror in her bedroom. Some alteration in the way the garment hung upon her caused her to frown, some difficulty in getting a good fit over one breast, but she pushed the little anxiety to the back of her mind, went downstairs again with resolute cheerfulness and altered a dart in the bodice. Eighteen months later she was dead.

The snug little house had belonged to her and on her death it passed to her son, a professional man, married with a young family, living in Scotland. ‘We don’t relish the thought of uprooting you,’ he told Henry at the funeral, ‘putting you to inconvenience, but—’

The snug little house must be sold and Henry must provide himself with somewhere else to live.

In the course of his many visits to the hospital during the last six months of his sister’s life, Henry had become acquainted with Rachel, who was an active member of the Friends of Cannonbridge Infirmary.

She befriended Henry and was very good to him in those bleak and difficult days. She was energetic, formidably competent and strong at a time when he felt he lacked all those qualities himself and so was particularly disposed to admire them in others.

Rachel soon discovered that he was hoping to find a headship as well as somewhere to live. She knew that the headship of the village school at Longmead would fall vacant within the next year and she also knew that the governors were hoping to find a candidate who wouldn’t need to live in the headmaster’s house attached to the school. It was a dwelling of no great size and the governors wanted to incorporate it into the school to provide some badly-needed extra facilities.

It was a hopeful and expansive time then, in the village as well as in the nation at large. Longmead seemed poised on the brink of growth, there was talk of a light industrial estate being built, a garage and a filling-station, new houses and shops.

The notion that Henry should apply for the Longmead headship soon insinuated itself into the air between himself and Rachel and at very much the same time another idea also found its way into the atmosphere – that they should marry.

The headship wasn’t precisely what Henry had in mind. ‘But it will do very well as a stepping-stone,’ Rachel pointed out and he was inclined to agree. He was also aware that an energetic and competent spouse, well bred and well heeled, would be no drawback on the road to higher things. He applied for the headship and became engaged to Rachel in the same month.

At the time of his marriage Rachel’s parents were old and frail and Rachel informed Henry in a tone of authority that they couldn’t be expected to live much longer. She was their only child. ‘Parkwood will come to me,’ she assured him. So also would the antique furniture, the pictures and objets d’art, together with the substantial investments on which her parents lived. After the old couple had dutifully passed on Henry would in due course be able to apply for a better headship elsewhere; the house was readily saleable and would fetch an excellent price.

But things hadn’t worked out quite like that—

Henry’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted as Rachel glanced up from her embroidery and said, ‘By the way, I’ve got a very good com dolly for you, I was given it this afternoon. It will go admirably in your little craft exhibition.’ She had spent the afternoon with an arthritic village woman who had to be driven into Cannonbridge twice a week for treatment. The woman had been clearing out a cupboard and had come across an elaborate dolly she’d made some years ago, before the disease attacked her fingers; she knew Mrs Lloyd was interested in such things.

Rachel passed the dolly across to Henry without glancing at him; she scarcely ever looked at him directly. He wondered sometimes if she had any real notion of what he looked like, if she had ever seen him properly and fully, even at their first meeting in the hospital corridor.

He took the dolly and looked at it, turning it over to study it. Beautiful, intricate workmanship; ancient, mysterious pattern.

‘Do thank her for me,’ he said. ‘The children will be most interested.’ All his exchanges with Rachel were touched on Henry’s part with formality and courtesy. No expression altered the set of his features as he spoke to her. He had learned over the last few years to keep his face calm and still at all times and as a result it was unusually free from lines without looking in any way youthful.

He crossed the room and put the dolly where he would remember to take it to school next morning. He paused by the window and glanced out at the soft blue sky, ‘I think I might do an hour or two in the garden,’ he said as he had said on a great many other fine evenings.

Rachel made no reply, absorbed again in the music and in her stitching; she was embroidering a set of kneelers for the church. She took great care over the work, knowing it would stand as a measure of her skill for years to come. Henry wondered if he had actually spoken, she gave no sign of having heard. He experienced again the curious unpleasant feeling that had begun to afflict him of late, that inside the precincts of Parkwood he no longer existed, that if he were to pause to look in the hall mirror he wouldn’t be able to see his face. A thought that terrified him sometimes when he woke in the night was that he might soon begin to find he was ceasing to exist in other places as well, and might end up before long not existing anywhere at all.

He left the room and Rachel scarcely noticed that he’d gone.

He went up the graceful curving staircase to his bedroom across the wide landing from his wife’s room. He changed into an old pair of trousers and a superannuated shirt and went downstairs again and out through a side door into the garden.

The air was warm and dry. A few feet from the door a great bed of cream and pink spiræas flaunted its full splendour but he gave it only a passing glance. He went over to the toolshed and selected a billhook, then he walked with his head lowered down to the far end of the garden, overgrown and midgy, full of birdsong and humming green shadows.

He began to lay about him with ferocity, slashing at the grassy tussocks and the long arms of brambles, laying low the great strong flowering weeds, putting paid to the offending growths for the time being, if not unfortunately finishing them off for ever.

The evening air was still warm and caressing when Janet Marshall came out of the back door of her cottage and walked up to Mayfield Farm for her goat’s milk. She bought the milk as she needed it, usually three or four times a week.

Facing her as she walked up the field was the end wall of the turkey sheds which had been constructed some years ago from existing farm buildings. The sheds formed three sides of a rectangle, the open side facing across the field to the back of the school. She could hear the clatter from inside the sheds and as she drew nearer, the raucous cries of the birds.

Ken Bryant, her next-door neighbour from Mayfield Cottages, came out of the rear of the main farm buildings some little distance ahead on the right and walked down the field towards her, on his way home.

He glanced over and saw Miss Marshall with her lithe, slender figure, her beautifully shaped head covered in close curls. How neat and trim she looked in her casual outfit of jeans and check shirt. He closed his eyes for a moment in a brief shudder at the thought of his wife in a similar rig.

He raised a hand and called out to Miss Marshall. She halted and stood waiting till he came up to her. ‘I wanted to have a word with you about Jill,’ he said. His dark eyes showed open admiration.

‘Yes?’ She gave him back a courteous, neutral glance. A strong growth of black hair showed at the open neck of his shirt. He gave off a powerfully masculine farm odour – by no means disagreeable – that no amount of baths or changes of linen could ever totally remove.

Ken was ambitious for his children and he was currently anxious about his daughter’s maths. ‘She’ll be going to the Cannonbridge Comprehensive in September, as you know,’ he said, ‘and I’m afraid her maths are going to let her down. I shouldn’t like her to get off to a bad start.’ He’d be grateful if Miss Marshall would agree to coach Jill in the holidays. ‘You’ll be here for some part of the time, I’m sure,’ he added. ‘Of course I’ll pay whatever’s right and I’d see she wasn’t a nuisance to you.’

‘Jill’s not in my class,’ Janet pointed out.

‘I know that but I don’t like to ask Mr Lloyd, he’s got a lot on his plate. And Parkwood’s a good mile and a half away, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as handy for Jill. I’m sure Mr Lloyd wouldn’t mind you coaching her.’ He saw her hesitate. ‘Think about it,’ he urged. ‘You’ve no need to give me an answer right away, I’ll mention it to you again later.’ He went off down to his cottage, whistling.

As Janet passed the open front of the turkey sheds the young resident farmworker, Neil Fleming, came out of one of the sheds. He’d already changed out of his white overalls and was shrugging on a drill jacket.

‘Hello there!’ He gave her a friendly smile. He’d given her the eye, bowled over by her looks, when she first came to Longmead back in the spring, not many months after his own arrival at Mayfield, but it had taken him very little time to realize she wasn’t interested.

He walked with her towards the dairy on his way to the farmhouse. ‘I’ve got quite fond of goat’s milk myself since I’ve been here,’ he told her with a grin. ‘I’d never drunk it before, never fancied it. I always thought it’d have a rank taste but now I’d sooner have it than cow’s milk.’

He was a pleasant-looking lad with a fresh open face, curling sandy hair and a thickly freckled skin. He had a very full lower lip and his grin showed a milk tooth surviving in the front of his mouth. It gave him a touching, boyish air. He was twenty-five years old, studying and saving in the hope of getting into farm management; he felt there was precious little chance of ever owning a place himself.

He went on through the rear entrance of the farmhouse, a large old dwelling of mixed period and considerable charm, while Janet turned aside into the dairy, fresh and cool, lined with white tiles.

Mrs Slater was standing by a window, carefully setting a shallow pan of milk down on a slabbed surface. She glanced briefly up as Janet came in and gave her a friendly nod, then she gently settled the pan into place. She straightened up and wiped her hands on a towel. She drew a long breath and moved her shoulders, easing them.

She was a small slim woman in her middle thirties with a clear, fine skin and short light brown hair simply cut. Her lips were curved in a faint habitual smile and her customary look was one of amiable reserve. Over her freshly laundered dress of flowered cotton she wore a white overall with the sleeves rolled up, showing her pretty arms, smooth and rounded, with delicately tanned skin.

‘It’s the end of term on Friday, isn’t it?’ she said as she poured the milk for Janet. ‘I’m sure you’re looking forward to the holidays, it must be tiring dealing with youngsters all the time.’ The Slaters had no children. ‘Have you made up your mind yet if you’re going away?’ She stood chatting for a few minutes.

Margaret Slater wasn’t a native of Longmead, she came from Stanbourne. After eighteen years of marriage she was still looked on by the village – and still looked on herself – as an incomer. Not that anyone in Longmead disliked or resented her but she wasn’t Longmead born and bred and never could be.

She had come to Mayfield Farm as a girl of sixteen, when Oswald Slater’s mother was still alive. The old lady had begun to ail and had been ordered goat’s milk by her doctor. ‘I’ve been thinking of getting someone to live in, to give me a hand with the housework and cooking,’ she told Oswald. ‘If I can find a sensible girl who also knows something about livestock, we could buy a goat and she could look after it as well as helping in the house.’

Within a short time she found Margaret, neat, capable and well-mannered, the daughter of a Stanbourne smallholder. Margaret had kept goats since she was eight, and regularly took prizes at shows. She also reared turkeys and was doing well with them on a small scale.

Twelve months later old Mrs Slater died and shortly afterwards Oswald asked Margaret to marry him. She was hard-working, easy to get on with and accustomed by now to Mayfield ways. Above all she was there. No need for him to go to all the trouble of putting on his best clothes and embarking on the long and tedious business of running round the countryside trying to locate a suitable bride.

Oswald was thirty-seven at the time of his mother’s death and had never had much time or inclination for courting. He was a powerfully built man of medium height, with large hands and little small talk.

He consulted Margaret’s parents before speaking to the girl and they in turn had a long chat with their daughter when she rode over on her bicycle for tea the following Sunday afternoon. It was agreed all round that it would be a fine match for her. She was happy to agree, she liked living at Mayfield and saw her future there as peaceful and secure. The marriage was settled and took place without delay.

Shortly afterwards Margaret suggested that she might introduce turkey-breeding to Mayfield and Oswald was rather taken with the idea. ‘But I’ll have to go into the costs,’ he said cautiously. The costs proved reasonable and he approved the plan which Margaret promptly put into operation, overseeing the whole enterprise and subsequently managing it; it had prospered well, expanding over the years.

Now she wiped over the surface of the table as Janet picked up her milk. ‘You’re not going away yourself?’ Janet asked her.

Mrs Slater shook her head. She’d never been brought up to holidays, had never formed the habit and certainly never felt the need. And Oswald Slater wasn’t a man to encourage such flighty notions.

‘I wouldn’t know what to do with all that free time,’ she said with her little smile. ‘And what about my goats? I couldn’t leave them to someone else to look after.’

As Janet walked down the field back to her cottage she glanced over at the school. The window of the headmaster’s office overlooked the field but the building was empty now. Mrs Abell had finished her cleaning and locked up for the night.

I think I’ll put in an hour on the vegetable patch, Janet decided as she opened the wicket gate leading into her garden. The ground had been long neglected when she came to Rose Cottage but she’d wasted no time in getting to work on it. Now there were lettuces and peas to pick, radishes to thin out, scarlet runners to inspect. There was still a fair-sized stretch to clear and dig, as well as the regular chores of weeding and hoeing, but they were all tasks she enjoyed.

She let herself in at the back door. Flickering shafts of sunlight strayed into the living-room through the branches of an apple tree, there was a light pervasive scent of roses. She hummed a tune as she put the goat’s milk away in the fridge.

CHAPTER 5

Early on Friday morning, when the horizon was streaked with rose and gold, the first blackbird uttered a soft whistle in the Brookside garden, followed a moment later by a missel thrush. In his narrow bed George Pickthorn heard the sounds in his sleep and smiled with pleasure. In his dream he was running over the common – the old common, the common of his childhood – with his little Jack Russell terrier, dead these sixty years. Some part of George’s waking adult mind leaned into the dream and formulated the thought: I could get a little dog, a Jack Russell, no reason why I shouldn’t have one now, why didn’t I think of it before? I’ll start looking out for one right away.

Along the lane at Rose Cottage, Janet Marshall lay sound asleep in her little bedroom, dreaming she was shut tight inside a box. Outside the box something breathed and panted, trying to get in at her, scratching and tearing at the wooden sides, but she felt no fear, knowing herself safe and snug in her stout little nest.

A mile and a half away, in the best bedroom at Parkwood, Rachel Lloyd lay at ease in the large double bed that had been her parents’. She wore a faint smile on her dreaming face. She was skimming along the fields and hedgerows of the village like a bird, soaring up over the church into the cloudless blue, looking down on the houses and farms spread out below.

Across the landing in the second-best bedroom Henry woke, as always these days, thirty seconds after the first bird uttered its morning note. He had been trying to make his way through a dense black wreathing fog but his feet and legs were weighed down, his arms heavy and powerless.

He came fully awake. Friday, his brain registered, the last day of term. He stared up at the ceiling with its ornate mouldings. How many more terms would he see? Year by year the school roll fell relentlessly. Fourteen years ago there had been three teachers, now there were two.

It was only a matter of time before Longmead went the way of other village schools and closed its doors for the last time. He had no illusions about what that would mean for him. It would be almost impossible at his age to get another teaching job of any kind, let alone a headship.

And in any case Rachel wouldn’t dream of moving away from Longmead. He believed now that she’d never had any such intention, she had merely allowed him to believe she had.

Her parents hadn’t obligingly departed this life as early as he’d been led to expect. They had lingered on into ripe old age and year by year the city headship had receded. It was ten years after the marriage before Rachel’s father died and her mother had finally closed her eyes only twelve months ago; by then it was far too late, the dream was over. All he’d amounted to was the head of a dwindling school in a little village.

He viewed with horror the thought of continuing to live in Longmead after the school finally closed. One by one all the other services and functions of the village would wither and die, Longmead would slide into stagnation and decay.

The rosy visions of expansion had come to nothing, there was no industrial estate, no blossoming of new houses. Already the parish had been amalgamated with that of Stanbourne, there was no resident vicar now at Longmead.

At one time when Henry thought of retirement he had looked forward to it as an exciting, fertile time of life. He saw himself active and energetic, speaking at conferences, lecturing to interested groups up and down the country, writing on educational matters for the national press, being interviewed on television and radio. Now he knew he would simply be stranded here in this tiny backwater, isolated, growing old; nobody would give a damn what he thought about anything.

It was a struggle every morning now to rouse himself to tackle the day’s work. He dreaded to think what his state would be when there was no longer even that regular stimulus to spur him up out of the dark pit.

He threw back the covers and got out of bed, thrust his feet into slippers. When he and Rachel returned from their honeymoon Rachel had firmly indicated that at Parkwood they would occupy separate rooms. ‘In case Mother needs attention in the night,’ she told him. ‘It will mean less disturbance for you.’ Now, as he went silently down the wide staircase, he was deeply thankful that he had his own room and could wander about when restlessness woke him, could read or listen to the radio.

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