She started to talk when he entered the house, followed him to the kitchen, touching, almost stroking his arm to ensure that she retained his attention as he cooked their meal. Usually she talked of his father. Her bitterness towards him had not ended with his death. She was a slight woman, still vain, still attempting to make herself attractive. Every month a girl came from the village to set and dye her hair. Whenever she went out and before Bernard arrived home from work she would apply make-up to her face. Despite her thinness she ate heartily and there was some relief as they took their meal in the dingy kitchen, but even as she ate she continued to talk. Real freedom came later. But tonight he would have to postpone it.

“Mother.”

She seemed surprised that he had spoken, and stared at him, her pink, glossy lips a little apart.

“Mother, I had a letter today from Kenneth Wallis. Do you remember? He used to teach with me.”

“I didn’t see a letter.” She was insulted that she had not shared in this detail of his private life.

“He wrote to me at school. If you remember, he was Scots. He’s teaching now in the Highlands and he’s invited me to stay with him to see some of the breeding birds there.”

It was out now. He should have broached the subject more carefully, more tactfully. But then she would not have understood him.

“That was kind of him,” she said sweetly, absentmindedly.

“Then you wouldn’t mind if I went to stay with him, just for a long weekend. Mrs. Simpson would come in every day to check that you were all right.”

She stared at him in horror.

“Oh no,” she said. “ Oh no, you wouldn’t want to go all the way up there.”

She pouted her face to cry and two tears washed a furrow down the powder on her face, like rain on a dirty window.

“No, of course not, Mother,” he said.

As he always did, he made her a cup of tea, sat in front of the television, switched on her favourite soap opera and said:

“I’m just out to the marsh for a while, Mother. I won’t be long.”

She did not seem to notice him leave the house.

Every day he went out on to the marsh after tea. As he walked away from the house he could feel that his face was flushed and sticky. The breeze from the sea made him aware of it. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to relax, to forget school and his mother. As he did so he watched a small group of waders on a pool no bigger than a puddle right at the edge of the road. Then he began to walk along the boardwalk, which he had helped to build, across the marsh to the main hide. He would just sit there a while, watching the avocets.

The avocets had only recently come to Rushy and they had young. Cranshaw had a passionate, a loving interest in them. They were his birds. He had found the nest and he had cared for them. On one occasion he had seen a group of strangers who were taking too great an interest in the birds and the nest, and had sat awake all night, hidden behind a bank of shingle, in case they had come to steal the eggs. He would have done anything to protect the eggs, to protect his birds. Now the young were paddling around the edges of the pools, feeding themselves.