She turned her face to the hedgerow and pressed her body into her suitcase, one hand down amidst the foxgloves. No one was going to stop her now. It was already set, suddenly, immediately, as if it had been waiting – the mile walk, the distant past of her children, the life she’d lived before. She thought of this morning, how she’d got up as usual, another normal day, and not known that this would be her last. How she’d looked in on the nursery, at Fagus being dressed and Finetta being fed, at Ian who had a sniffle and hadn’t slept: her children, already separated from her by other, much better, hands who knew how to coddle and calm. With every step she took away from Cherry Trees, they became, more and more, an instant action that must un-happen, a play that was over, a fallacy that could not last. The car sped past and leaves flicked up at her shins. She crouched and steadied herself, stood up and faced the road again.

The light was beautiful, the air clean from yesterday’s rain. Through the overhanging branches of an oak tree, sunlit blue mingled with white through intense green. A light breeze lifted the furthest leaves and cooled her face. Cow parsley leaned with foxgloves and daisies from the verge. A steady trickle of water, run off from the fields, dug deeper the groove at the road’s edge. At the brow of the hill she put down her case and sat for a minute, perched on the flattened handle, the case precarious beneath her. The view spread out in waves of fields and woodland: a farmhouse and dairy indistinguishable from the land around them. There was no separation: man and nature met at rough edges, encroached and drew away, draped their limbs upon each other. No matter where one was, the other touched it. She got up, refreshed, and began her descent to the railway.

The boy behind the grill had blond wavy hair stuck under a cap that was too small for him, as if he was filling in for his little brother at a toy station in the countryside. He looked at her with eyes that said he didn’t want to be there. “Which way?”

Which way. The tracks stretched long and straight in either direction. “London.”

“Twelve-o-four. Further platform.” He shoved a ticket through the dip and went back to his annual.

Enid dragged her case up and down the stairs, and sat on a bench at the furthest end of the platform. The wind blew a little colder. The sun shone through the trees and an address blinked repetitively in her mind. It had been printed in the flyleaf of Science and Health, the one Douglas had burned. Didlington Hall. Swaffham. She changed stations in London and boarded a sleeper to Norfolk.

Enid, 1964

17

Enid, 1964

Someone was shaking her shoulder. “Enid? Enid, love?”