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going to sell her own house in Essex, put the money towards the capital they needed, and have a flat with them. Did they hope I might consider doing the same? I wondered. I preserved an unimpressed silence, countered Paul's remark as I left that evening that the car I was driving – bought six weeks before Charles's sudden death – was too big for me with the reply that I needed it to pull our caravan, which I intended to go on using, and never heard from them again.
    Â Â There was likewise a man who lived at the other end of the village but was grazing some goats in a field further past the cottage. He always used to stop and chat to Charles, but after his death would pass by, when I was in the garden, looking straight ahead and pretending not to see me – until the day when, after a tremendous gale during the night, I was standing on top of one of the big flat cottage gateposts, chainsaw in hand, preparing to deal with a branch of the damson tree that had split off from the main bough and was hanging like a vast, leafy curtain across the front gate.
    Â Â The goat man, trudging past on his usual morning visit, stopped and looked across at me. Oh good, I thought. He was going to offer to hold the branch while I sawed. Like heck he was. Would I be going out that afternoon? he asked, and when I said I wouldn't he said he and his wife would be away for the rest of the day and one of the goats was due to kid. Would I keep an eye on her and phone the vet if necessary? I said that I would and he went on his way, apparently without noticing that I was arched on the gatepost like Nelson on his column, preparing to saw off an awkward branch, and might have appreciated assistance.
    Â Â That was why I put up with Mrs Binney's visits as patiently as I did instead of, as Father Adams and Fred Ferry continually advised me, 'giving she a kick in the pants'. They meant it, metaphorically, of course. Father Adams, who'd been at school with her, always referred to her as Old Mod (her name was Maude). Old Mod, he said, had been a misery for as long as he could remember. She was a widow too, though. Always referring to the fact. Always talking to me of 'people in our position' or 'people of our age' – which at times made me feel like taking Father Adams's advice since she was, I knew, a good twenty years older than I was.
    Â Â But she was obviously lonely. Probably felt as bereft of people who cared about her as I did at times – which was why my mouth fell open and stayed that way when she told me one day that there was somebody in the village who was keen on her.
    Â Â 'Spicy bit of news then?' enquired Father Adams, happening to pass by as usual at the crucial moment.
    Â Â 'Oh... no...' I managed to get out, while Mrs Binney gave him a look that should have withered him on the spot. It wasn't just spicy, it was electrifying. The revelation that Mrs B., of all people, had an admirer.

THREE

    T hat was her interpretation of events, at any rate. There was, with its headquarters over in the centre of the village so that living a mile and a half away in the valley I knew little of its goings-on except by hearsay, a Friendly Hands Social Club which catered mostly for the over-sixties but, in order to augment its numbers, welcomed widows and widowers of any age. I'd been invited to join it myself after Charles died, but I felt that life held more for me yet than the excitement of a monthly communal visit by a chiropodist from the local health centre, or annual holidays by coach to Aberdeen or Durham, where the party stayed in the unoccupied university hall of residence during the students' vacation and was shepherded on daily sightseeing tours by the enthusiastic element that inevitably emerges as leaders of such organisations, and so I made my excuses. I was fully occupied with the cottage, the cats and writing. I took my van away on holidays. I didn't go out in the evenings if I could help it – not