The old woman upstairs had been dying since Helen could remember. She had lain like a wax woman in her sheets since Helen was a child coming with her mother to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to the dying. And now Helen was a woman under her apron and print frock and her pale hair was bound in a bunch behind her head. Each morning she got up with the sun, lit the fire, let in the red-eyed cat. She made a pot of tea and, going up to the bedroom at the back of the cottage, bent over the old woman whose unseeing eyes were never closed. Each morning she looked into the hollows of the eyes and passed her hands over them. But the lids did not move, and she could not tell if the old woman breathed. “Eight o’clock, eight o’clock now,” she said. And at once the eyes smiled. A ragged hand came out from the sheets and stayed there until Helen took it in her padded hand and closed it round the cup. When the cup was empty Helen filled it, and when the pot was dry she pulled back the white sheets from the bed. There the old woman was, stretched out in her nightdress, and the colour of her flesh was grey as her hair. Helen tidied the sheets and attended to the old woman’s wants. Then she took the pot away.

Each morning she made breakfast for the boy who worked in the garden. She went to the back door, opened it, and saw him in the distance with his spade. “Half past eight now,” she said. He was an ugly boy and his eyes were redder than the cat’s, two crafty cuts in his head forever spying on the first shadows of her breast. She put his food in front of him. When he stood up he always said, “Is there anything you want me to do?” She had never said, “Yes.” The boy went back to dig potatoes out of the patch or to count the hens’ eggs, and if there were berries to be picked off the garden bushes she joined him before noon. Seeing the red currants pile up in the palm of her hand, she would think of the stain of the money under the old woman’s mattress. If there were hens to be killed she could cut their throats far more cleanly than the boy who let his knife stay in the wound and wiped the blood on the knife along his sleeves. She caught a hen and killed it, felt its warm blood, and saw it run headless up the path. Then she went in to wash her hands.