Mother's Boy

by Patrick Gale

Genres: LGBT Lesbian

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER comes MOTHER'S BOY, a superb historical novel of Cornwall, class, desire and two world wars.

'One of the joys of Gale's writing is how even the smallest of characters can appear fully formed, due to a charming wickedness alongside deeper observations' Irish Times

Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura's husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius.

As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.

MOTHER'S BOY is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.

'A writer with heart, soul, and a dark and naughty wit, one whose company you relish and trust' Observer

(P) 2022 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: March 1, 2022

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 416

Sample

The ship was under attack and horribly exposed by a clear night and a full moon. Until a change in the weather brought fog or cloud, ideally both, all they could do was fight back and hope they were not outnumbered or outgunned. Sometimes an explosion would shake them from so close that Charles almost forgot, in his stifled terror, to feel sick. Sometimes the sounds of their guns going off or the shouts and stamping boots of their crewmates would stop long enough to let them hear the piercing cry of someone wounded.

Signals came through constantly so there was no time to do anything but deal with them, and certainly none to talk. Talk was impossible in any case because Dizzy had his headphones on. These meant that when he swore, as he sometimes did when the ship was especially badly shaken, he did so at the top of his voice, which made Charles jump almost more than the explosions did. Occasionally the speaker tube’s thin peeping sound would summon Charles, to receive instructions from the bridge, or be asked to make a report on the latest signals to come through.

They worked at fever pitch in the hot little office, Dizzy barely turning from his console to flick signals he’d deciphered from Morse across to Charles so that he would decode them into something like English. Dizzy had said once that Morse was enough for him to focus on and that it would have scrambled his brains if he’d attempted to guess the meanings hidden under the second layer of code. He passed Charles neatly filled-out pages from his pad, lines of letters and numbers, always in groups of four.

Charles knew to resist the urge to interpret or anticipate. Accuracy was all. He decoded four letters or digits at a time and only read to check for sense once he had the whole signal down. Sometimes it would be gibberish, and he would know that Dizzy, or whichever wireless telegraphist was on with him, was tired.

In this case, he swiftly recognised the code shorthand for a powerful battlecruiser. He knew before getting two words further in the missive that this was one he’d need to take to the bridge in person at once, rather than shouting it to a junior officer through the voice tube. He tore the page off his pad, folded it neatly and tucked it into his pocket to protect it from spray. As he pulled on his duffel coat, Charles tapped Dizzy’s shoulder and pointed upwards so he’d know he was heading to the bridge, then stepped out.

The cold on deck was a shock after the heat generated by all the electrical kit in the Signals office, but it was the painful intensity of the noise that momentarily confused him. The enemy ship they had engaged had approached from the starboard and they must have swung round to present a narrower target. Charles could see both forward guns blasting shells into the darkness. The weather was changing, thank God. Poor visibility might soon give them cover to slip away to the south. The swell was such that he was amazed the guns could be aimed with any accuracy.

Climbing to the bridge, he knew to avoid looking out at the sea for fear of making his sickness worse but, even so, he had to pause a moment before climbing further as a judder of nausea ran through him, making him dry-heave over the railings and break out in a sweat the Atlantic wind immediately chilled.

There was never mayhem on the bridge, but the sense of group focus was intense. It was known that because of the skipper’s slight deafness he would tolerate no unnecessary talk. Charles saluted, and handed over the signal. He waited to attention while it was passed to the skipper and the skipper read. Often there was a signal to send in reply, but this time the skipper simply shook his head, betraying nothing of the horrors he had just read.

‘Back to your watch, Causley,’ he said, then checked Charles’s leaving. ‘Causley?’

‘Sir?’

‘Did you know anyone on board?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m sorry. You know the drill, though. Not a word.’

Which was when an explosion lit up the night and caused several of them to lose their balance and grab at the nearest handhold. One of the officers swore.

‘Off you trot,’ one of them told Charles as the skipper calmly demanded damage reports.

The fire crew was tackling a blaze on the deck while the MO and his small team were pulling the wounded to safety. Everyone seemed to be yelling and one of the wounded was crying out in a thin, high voice as though astounded by the pain he was in. The MO was following two sailors, who were stretchering one of the wounded to the sickbay, when he cursed roundly and turned.

‘Causley. Good man. Bring that for me,’ he called.

Charles looked where he was pointing. It was a hand and part of a forearm, cleanly severed, smeared with oil, a dusting of golden hair on the skin. It wore both a wedding ring and a wristwatch.

Charles froze.

‘Come on, man. We’ve not got all day.’

Charles picked up the hand by its wrist, averting his eyes the moment he made contact with the skin, and hurried it over to the stretcher where the MO received it on a napkin of bandage before heading inside with the shattered patient.

There was another terrific blast of shell fire as Charles staggered into the nearest heads to throw up.

A boyhood friend – his best friend, arguably – had been on the ship in the signal he’d just delivered, reported sunk in the Denmark Strait with only three survivors, and he could tell nobody. Now it seemed quite possible they were to be blasted out of the water as well.

Charles washed his face and hands, then sat on the heads for a moment, stilling his breathing. He conjured the greenish midsummer water of a small municipal swimming pool, the soapy smell of the rough beach towel beneath him, birdsong from surrounding trees, the artless chatter of the friend lying in the sun at his side.

Laura was in the garden cutting a bay leaf and chives for one sauce and parsley for another when she heard the gate clang and, startled, turned to see him. He was tall – about six foot two – and dark, and smartly turned out in a plum-coloured drill waistcoat and had a matching cravat tidily tucked into a very well-laundered shirt. She took in no details of his face beyond that he was conventionally handsome – like an illustration in a library romance – because of the unconscious little boy held in his arms, who was bleeding from a wound to his head. The man looked so smart that it didn’t occur to her to show him to the kitchen.

Without a moment’s hesitation she said, ‘This way, sir,’ and hurried ahead of them to open the front door and lead the way to the parlour where she indicated the chaise longue below the bay window.

Then he said, ‘What about the blood?’ in a harsh Devon accent, and she knew him for a servant.

‘I’ll fetch towels,’ she said, grateful, for the chaise was upholstered in silk. There was a lavatory off the hall, a room whose luxury still surprised her, with a mahogany throne, a pretty view across the orchard and a beautiful sink of blue and white china, which pivoted to tip its contents into a lead chute below. She fetched towels from the cupboard in there and hurried back to spread them over the chaise longue where he carefully laid the boy down.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked.

‘I hope not. He ran out chasing his hoop and I couldn’t stop the cart in time. We were on our way to a patient.’

She saw him now, his high-boned handsomeness and the way shock was turning him pale.

‘I’ll fetch hot water and bandages,’ she told him, thinking she should bring tea as well. ‘Afternoon, sir,’ she added to Dr Butler, who had just come in. He was lame from a childhood illness and rarely strong enough to drive his own cart, much less carry a wounded boy. His black bag was weight enough for him.

‘Good girl,’ he told her. ‘A palmful of salt in the water, please. Have you witch hazel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That, too. I apologise for intruding but yours was the nearest house. The Frasers are out, I take it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

She hurried down to the kitchen. It was Mrs Ashbridge’s day off and she had gone to her sister in Exeter, leaving Laura to make a cod pie and a redcurrant fool. Her employers were still out for lunch in Dawlish, for which she was grateful. She swiftly gathered together all she imagined the doctor might need. She was relieved to hear the little boy groaning softly when she came back to the parlour.

‘Concussion and a nasty cut,’ the doctor murmured. ‘He was lucky to be thrown clear of the wheels. Do you know him?’

She took in the pinched face, the too large boots worn without socks, and knew him for the cheeky scamp who sometimes followed her down the hill on her errands, singing saucy songs and asking if she had a sweetheart. She nodded.

‘From the cottages,’ she said, and the doctor sighed, knowing which cottages she meant.

‘Are you squeamish?’ he asked, and she shook her head. ‘Good. This will hurt him and you’ll be a comfort.’

So she sat with the boy’s head on a towel on her lap and held his hand while the doctor cleaned out the wound, then threaded a needle and stitched it in several places to hold it closed. She watched, fascinated that skin could be stitched and stretched just like cotton, and thinking of the stitching on the back of her best kid gloves as the child clutched her hand hard. She murmured to him, ‘It’s all right, John. Soon be over. Brave boy . . .’ Nonsense like that to keep him still.

And all the while she knew the other man’s gaze was on her, like a lamp.

The hall clock chiming three seemed to bring the doctor to his senses.

‘I must go to Miss Ramsay, Charlie,’ he said. ‘I can walk from here but you can collect me when you’ve driven our young patient home. Perhaps . . .?’

‘Laura,’ she supplied.

‘Perhaps Laura can show you the way?’

‘Of course,’ she said, glancing up at the other man, now named, and realising he was her age.

‘Dress the wound with this liniment,’ he handed her a small jar, ‘then make a dressing and a bandage. I doubt he’ll keep it on for long but at least it will give the wound a clean start towards healing. I’ll see myself out.’

The boy was crying silently, from the pain and shock, she supposed. She used her handkerchief to wipe his eyes, then dressed the neatly stitched wound on his forehead, laid a pad of gauze over it, tapped it carefully into place, wincing in sympathy as the boy flinched. Then she bound it to his head with three turns of bandage.

‘There,’ she told him, ‘you look like a right little soldier now, back from fighting the Boer. Cup of tea?’ she asked Charlie. ‘I think we all need one. You stay here with the patient and I’ll be right back.’

She brewed a pot of tea and cut three slices of seed cake. Mrs Ashbridge always baked with duck eggs for the good rise they gave and the cake was butter yellow from their rich yolks.

Everything was topsy-turvy, Laura thought, with her serving tea and cake to a fellow servant and an urchin in her employers’ parlour, so she restored a measure of order by serving it on the sturdy kitchen china and using the brown teapot. Her employers drank tea from bone china you could see daylight through. She was so nervous of breaking it that sometimes she had to pause in washing it to step back from the sink a little and calm her hands. She had been raised to labour and her grip was as strong as a man’s. It amused Mrs Ashbridge to pass her pickle jars to open.

The cake revived the boy, who sat up, taking in his fine surroundings with sly eyes. ‘Are you going to be more careful where you chase that hoop in future?’ she asked him, and he nodded. ‘You are a very lucky boy. The kick that pony gave you might have cracked your skull.’

‘If I’d died,’ he asked slowly, ‘would he go to prison?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Charlie told him. ‘I kill boys like you every week. It’s a community service, like rat-catching.’

Laura clucked at the harshness of his humour but the boy was amused and grinned.

‘Come on, then,’ Charlie told him. ‘We’d best get you off and out before the bosses come home.’ He scooped the boy up in his arms with a tenderness at odds with his humour and watched as Laura bundled the blood-splashed and muddied towels and gory cloths together and left them on the kitchen stairs to deal with on her return.

The pony and trap had been left in the sticky shade of the lime tree. He passed the boy into her arms while he turned the pony back to the lane.

‘Uphill or down?’ he asked.

‘Up,’ she told him, and handed him back the child so that she might climb up beside him. It felt exposed and unsafe somehow and she didn’t like to have the boy on her lap so they wedged him on the bench between them.

The cottages weren’t far, just half a mile away. Long predating the smart villas that were still going up along the valley below them, they were little more than a low roof. There were so few windows that people left their doors open for extra light on a fine day.

The mother looked not long out of childhood herself, in a much-mended dress cut for a larger woman. Leaving Charlie to turn the trap round again, Laura took charge of the boy and of calming his mother. She explained he had run out in front of a horse but did not say whose, as it was a small community and the doctor a charitable one when his patients were poor. As the child had suffered a blow to the head, she should try to keep him from sleeping until bedtime, Laura told her, and the bandages should be kept on as long as a little fidget would agree to wear them. Taking in the earth floor of the hovel where the young family lived, she held off from telling her about keeping the stitches clean. She had grown up in such conditions and knew both the extra labour they made of even basic hygiene and how house-proud they could make a person. Instead she simply handed back the boy’s hoop and stick and said they were to call on the doctor to have the stitches taken out in a week, sooner if they began to hurt or if the wound felt hot, smelled bad or needed attention. The boy clung to her as she left and embarrassed her by having to be prised off.

‘Go to Mother now,’ she told him, and nervously told the girl, ‘I gave him a piece of cake for being so brave.’

‘That’ll do it,’ the mother said, and ushered him inside with no sign of tenderness or concern.

Charlie drove Laura the short distance back down the hill in silence and she wondered if, like her, he was haunted by memories summoned by the glimpse of poverty. But it seemed he was merely a little shy.

‘Sorry we broke in on your afternoon,’ he said eventually. ‘You’ll have a lot to do now, I expect.’

‘A fair bit.’ She appreciated the skill with which he drew the trap up so that it aligned neatly with the gate, and saw with relief that the Frasers were still out.

‘When . . .?’ he started, then faltered.

‘You’d better go too,’ she said. ‘Dr Butler will be waiting.’

‘He’s seeing Miss Ramsay. That’s never fast.’

Miss Ramsay was a rich invalid known to be a demanding employer.

‘Poor woman,’ she said. ‘I expect she’s lonely, with no family in that big house.’

‘When’s your day off, Laura?’

She thought again of the library romances that she’d started borrowing from Mrs Ashbridge until they became her regular guilty pleasure. ‘By rights,’ she said, ‘you should call me Miss Bartlett.’

She was teasing, of course, but he seemed to take her seriously.

‘Forgive me. Miss Bartlett, I was wondering when you are allowed out.’

She laughed. He was very handsome.

‘When you get home,’ she said, ‘don’t go putting soap on that bloodied cuff or you’ll set the stain. Just leave it to soak in cold water with plenty of salt added. That’ll lift the blood out. Wash it after that.’

‘You think I wash my own shirts?’

‘No, now you mention it. A man would never get them so white. But you’ll be doing whoever washes them a kindness. Sunday afternoons. I’m free from after church until supper.’

‘And what do you like to do?’

‘Well, it’s not enough time to go home to my family in Launceston so I usually just walk, if it’s fine.’

‘Might I walk with you, Miss Bartlett? If it’s fine?’

She felt herself smile. ‘Of course, Mr . . .?’

‘Causley,’ he said. ‘Charlie Causley.’

She dropped him a mock curtsey and turned up the path to the house, hearing him click his tongue to set the pony in motion again. She had parsley sauce to make and redcurrant fool to finish. She had made shortbread fingers for the fool that morning and allowed herself one now before she shook salt in the copper, pumped in cold water and set the bloodstained towels and cloths to soak for the night.

The shortbread was good, made with vanilla sugar, an exotic ingredient she had not encountered before coming to Teignmouth to take up her position.

Her job was hard work, with long hours, and only Sunday afternoons and every fourth Monday free. The Frasers, a brother and sister, were not especially rich and could only afford two live-in staff – herself and Mrs Ashbridge. There was a local girl who came in to do the rough work every morning, clearing and laying the fires, sweeping and polishing, but Laura was somewhere between cook and housemaid. She performed the daily shop, to spare Mrs Ashbridge’s legs, and did all the cooking on her superior’s day off, but she was also charged with the household laundry and expected to answer the door to visitors and wait at table. Happily the Frasers lived very quietly and did little entertaining.

She had come to them at sixteen. This was the first position she had held so she had no points of comparison, but she heard stories of harsh employers and knew the Frasers to be considerate ones. She had been bitterly homesick on arrival. Miss Fraser had been especially kind when she once caught her crying after missing her brother’s birthday, and fetched her a glass of Madeira ‘as a restorative’ and told her of her own unhappiness at being sent back to boarding school when their parents were weeks and weeks away in India.

For all the long hours and hard work and the homesickness, which continued to flare up if she so much as heard a Cornish accent, the position was full of comparative luxuries. As a child she had always shared a bed with one or two siblings. Before he was hired at the slate quarry, her father was a farm labourer, entirely dependent on the seasons, weather and fortunes of local farmers for his livelihood. If he was injured or fell ill the situation could rapidly turn desperate, for they had no savings or security with which to pay rent or buy food. Growing up in deep countryside, they all knew how to find food in the wild, from berries and mushrooms in season, to whatever rabbit, hare, pigeon or trout could be caught by her brothers. Here there were the comforts of a warm bed in a room of her own, with linen sheets that had never been resewn sides to middle to wring new use from them, of a well-stocked larder and bottomless fuel supplies. There were carpets and thick curtains and beautiful, interesting things to admire. She was allowed two baths a week in a proper modern bathroom with a gas-powered device called a geyser to heat the water. And although the attic had no lavatory, obliging her to use a potty as she always had at home, at least here she did not have to walk outside to empty it.

All cooks were called ‘Mrs’ out of respect, but Mrs Ashbridge was a real one. She had re-entered service as a young widow with money worries and she encouraged Laura to see the benefits of a servant’s life.

‘You’ll never be cold or hungry,’ she said, ‘or have to worry about the roof over your head.’ And she shocked Laura deeply by saying she was lucky to have lost her husband, at Laing’s Nek, before he could make her a mother. Laura longed for motherhood, or thought she did. She had mothered her baby brother Stanley and been left with a kind of hunger for it ever since. She came from a large family. It had never occurred to her to question her own assumption that she in turn would have one; it was what the Bible expected of women, and those who didn’t or couldn’t were objects either of fun or pity. But as she taught Laura to make different kinds of pastry, or how to pour bone jelly down a funnel through the crust of a turkey and ham pie, Mrs Ashbridge made her see, through her countless anecdotes, that marriage could be a kind of slavery to women, and childbirth a downright danger.

It had never occurred to Laura that her mother had not wanted to have so many children or might have been better off an old maid. Imagining this, imagining a different reality in which she and her siblings had never been born was like trying to will smoke back into a log and it made her dizzy.

On her half-days Laura would walk along the seafront or cross the river by the footbridge to admire the pretty gentility of the houses across the way in Shaldon. And of course she would notice men and boys. How could she not? It was a resort, so there were always men at leisure, showing off their prowess at bowls or tennis or swimming. But it was also a busy port. If she walked west of the waterfront villas and terraces to the older, less gracious quarter, she would see weather-baked fishermen mending nets or hauling out creels of glistening fish, or the thick-muscled dock workers using stout hooks to hurl clods of clay quarried upriver from the decks of river barges into the holds of boats bound for the sea. And sometimes one of these would catch her eye or tip his hat to her or call out some comment to make her blush. And yet her fantasies were never about men and courtship, going dancing, being swept off her feet, risking heartbreak and disaster, for all that she loved reading about such things. Her fantasies were all about motherhood.

Laura liked nothing better than to find a space free on a seafront bench where a nursemaid was minding her growing charges or a mother was dandling her baby or adjusting the sunshade on a stately perambulator. If a baby smiled at her or a disoriented toddler grabbed her skirt to right its balance, she felt a warmth well up in her unlike the smaller surge she felt when a man winked at her or whistled.

Mrs Ashbridge had explained early on that what Laura did in her time outside the house was her affair, but that whether she got into trouble or got married, a man would lose her her job. Of course there were openings sometimes for a husband-and-wife team as cook and groom or even cook and butler, but it was not common. Pressed, Mrs Ashbridge said she supposed it was to do with innocence and loyalty. Unmarried people were held to be more innocent so less likely to gossip about their employers and they could give their employers their primary trust – be wedded to their jobs, in effect.

Laura’s bosoms were a danger, apparently. Like her sisters and mother before her, she was what one aunt called ‘made for babies’ and another called ‘stately’. ‘All the Bartletts are stately, my girl,’ the aunt had said, admiring Laura in her best black at a funeral. ‘We carry all before us.’ But Mrs Ashbridge was built like a tallboy, all thigh and bottom and smaller up top.

‘I see you’ve a bosom on you,’ she had said at their first interview. ‘That’ll make hard work harder.’

‘Why?’ Laura asked.

‘Because of the extra weight,’ she said. ‘Still, I suppose you’re used to it. But careful when you go out. Don’t wear anything too tight or revealing. Men can be beasts, and bosoms bring out the farmyard in them.’

Laura had never been self-conscious before – her body was her body, healthy, serviceable, lacking in particular merits or flaws – but Mrs Ashbridge’s way of regularly commenting on it, on her ruddy complexion, her admittedly wayward hair and the prominent nest of temptation in her blouse, made her so. The walk down to the shops and back, hat pinned on her, shawl tied or coat buttoned so as to reveal nothing to the beasts of Teignmouth, basket clutched close like a wicker shield, might have become a torment to her had she not learned to distract her thoughts by reciting in her head in time to her walking. ‘Three yards pillow ticking. One pound sugar. Half a dozen eggs. Brisket. Dripping. Allspice berries. Reckitt’s Blue.’ But the rhythm of a shopping list was too irregular and could even cause her to trip if some item suddenly eluded her, so she tended to fall back on poems her mother used to have her recite for an elderly neighbour whose eyesight had failed: ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’ and ‘I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree’. Or the psalms and prayers they had been obliged to memorise and laboriously chant in school. The Benedicite worked especially well because of its constant repetitions and the stimulus of needing to remember in time what or who must praise the Lord next. That had been accompanied in class by a sort of march on the clanking piano by one of the unmarried ladies who ran the school, while the other led them in her rich contralto, and Laura had always rather liked its simple, unrewarding tune.

O YE fishes of the SEA, bless ye the LORD:

PRAISE him, and MAGnify him for EV-ER!

O YE birds of the AIR, bless ye the LORD!

In no time she would be in the bustle of Teign Street, rootling in her bag for her shopping list. Here the Frasers had accounts with every shop she was called upon to visit. Goods were handed to her or tucked into her basket tidily wrapped. There was a murmur of greeting and thanks and she left the shop. It was all beguilingly clean and easy. She knew most of the shopkeepers by name and many of the other servants by sight, if not to chat to. It was an unspoken rule that servants shopped early, for food and mundane supplies, and their employers ventured out later for more personal things, like books, gloves, medicines or visits to milliner or dressmaker. There was a sense of two parallel Teignmouths not quite overlapping. Laura felt no resentment at it. She liked the town first thing, when the pavements were still wet from sweeping and rinsing down, and staff still energetic and friendly. She imagined the atmosphere changed later in the morning when it was all would Sir this and might Madam that.

Both sides came together on Sundays. For a small town Teignmouth offered a big range of churches from burning handbag Catholic to every shade of Protestant. The Frasers expected their live-in staff to attend with them but were not fervent Christians – one service a week sufficed, and they would discuss the service on the walk home afterwards with a keen interest more of the brain than of the spirit. Laura was glad they were Church of England and not too high or low. Adjusting to worshipping in a place with incense and statues would have made the change to living away from home so much harder. As it was, the weekly return to familiar words and ritual, to hymns she knew so well, felt almost like a visit home to Launceston. She drew comfort from the thought that her mother back in St Thomas’s, with the river swirling past just outside, would be singing the same psalms, hearing the same readings and quite possibly lowering herself to arthritic knees at the same moments. It was like being just around the corner in the same room.

The church the Frasers attended in Teignmouth was more temple or circus than barn, being octagonal, almost circular, which took some getting used to as you had to work harder at stopping your gaze straying from the business in hand. Its thin, elegant pillars soared up to a lantern through which beams of seaside light slowly travelled around the pale walls. There was no gallery, no gentry chapel or family pews. At first glance it seemed as even and equal as Adam and Eve’s nakedness, with servants and masters entering through the same door and being handed their hymn books with the same welcome. By unspoken arrangement, however, the Frasers and their friends sat in the pews nearest the altar, while servants ranged themselves in the pews to the rear. Even the lame, like old Mr Potts, whose manservant all but carried him in, and formidable Miss Ramsay, whose hefty maid wheeled her to a pole position in her invalid carriage, were only joined by their staff to be settled into position, handed rugs, prayer books, hymnals and so on, then left among their equals.

Mrs Ashbridge always led the way to the same spot on the far left-hand side because, she said, sun fell there in the morning and at least gave the illusion of warmth, and because they could easily see the Frasers from there should they signal that they had need of anything. In practice she liked the way the pew gave them a fine view of any new arrivals or people of interest. She knew all the principal families by sight and, through her mysterious channels – for she rarely went out now that she had Laura to do the going-out on her behalf – was quick to find details of any sons or daughters-in-law, births or deaths, attacks of gout or arthritic hips.

Laura had never discussed religion with Mrs Ashbridge but sensed that for her it was something she could put on or off with her Sunday hat. Laura could never have been the sort of person who talked boldly about it. She’d have worried in any case that talking might cause it harm, like bright sunlight on coloured fabric, but God for her was a daily presence, almost a constant one.

She knew that most people stopped saying bedtime prayers when they reached adulthood – she knew from growing