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right sort for your mother we all thought.”
    â€œWhy that? Why did she need an effacing husband?”
    Mr. Bradshaw considered.
    â€œYou know, in this job one sees an awful lot of marriages, with an enormous variety of combinations, successful and unsuccessful. One I’ve come to recognize—and as often as not it’s a successful combination—is the determined, ambitious, strong-minded woman married to a quiet, supportive man who enjoys being in the background. I suppose it’s a direct reversal of the Victorian pattern, but it works very well sometimes. It’s the Mrs. Thatcher and Dennis pattern, isn’t it?”
    â€œOh dear,” said Eve. “I don’t think my mother would like that comparison. She called Maggie Thatcher ‘the milk snatcher’ to the end of her days.”
    â€œShe probably wouldn’t like the words ‘ambitious’ and ‘strong-minded’ for herself, but she was both.”
    â€œBut she stayed here for thirty-odd years.”
    â€œWhen you’re head of a good primary school, there’s nowhere else to go except into administration or politics. I suspect that neither prospect attracted your mother.”
    â€œDefinitely not. So you met my father—where?”
    â€œOh, a couple of parents’ evenings, I think. He came along to fetch May at the end, with the baby—you.”
    â€œYes, me. Do you have any other memories?”
    â€œNot really. Gentle, persuasive, quietly humorous. I’m not being very helpful, am I? But it’s a long time ago.”
    â€œI’m very grateful to you. And you’ve told me at least one thing I didn’t know: that my father came down with my mother to Crossley.”
    And she had also learned that Mr. Bradshaw, though probably close to his seventies, had an excellent memory for small matters. Perhaps in his profession it was helpful never to forget a face.
    When she reached home she felt as though she was riding on the beginnings of a wave. And the name of that wave was John McNabb. She wandered around the downstairs rooms, identifying places where things might be put away and then forgotten. Her father had died when she was a small girl and it was perhaps most likely that at some point anything that had been kept that referred to him would either have been thrown out or transferred to the attic. Still, at some stage she was going to have a clear out, so it was natural to start now. She got a stepladder from the garden shed, then the biggest cardboard box that she could find. She climbed up to the highest cupboard in a seventies-style set of units, where the television and the CD player sat, along with open spaces for china and glass and big cupboards for games and toys at the bottom. The top cupboard was very high, and from the moment she opened it she realized that its contents were miscellaneous. She brought down stage by stage piles of newspapers and cuttings, odd prints in simple frames, a box of letters and forms, none of them personal, then a pile of old books that had outlived their usefulness—old Companion Book Club volumes, Jilly Cooper novels, a children’s encyclopedia and at the back an old, shiny but cracked photograph album.
    She climbed down carefully, cradling it to her breast, and took it to her old chair in the sitting room. It was only half used—her mother had never been much use at photography, or had much time for people who took photos instead of concentrating on the experience itself. A picture of May, her sister and their parents on the front porch of their house in Melrose began the book. The hostilityto photography was mirrored in May’s face. Her grandparents Eve did remember, particularly her granddad, who had died when she was eighteen. May had never been close to her sister, who had died a couple of years ago. There were one or two other childhood photos, and then one with a male friend probably from teachers’