Chris said sensibly that Ma shouldn’t be silly, it was likely that she would outlive them all. And Ma said she hoped to God that she wouldn’t, if there was anything that cumbered the earth it was some old runkle of a woman body living on with no man to tend and no bairns, a woman stopped living when she stopped having bairns. And Chris laughed at that and said What about men? and Ma said Och, damn’t, they never live at all. They’re just a squeeze and a cuddle we need to keep our lives going, they’re nothing themselves.

And Chris went out in the Sunday quiet to the little patch of garden behind and worked there tending the beds of flowers she’d put in early in blinks of the Spring, sooty and loamy and soft the ground, clouds were flying high in the lift beyond the tilting roofs of Duncairn, the hedge by the house next door was a-rustle, soft green, with its budding beech, far off through the hedges some eident body was at work with a lawn-mower, clinkle-clankle, a bairn was wailing in a bairn’s unease as Chris dug and raked, watered the flowers, pale things hers compared with Segget’s. And somehow Ma’s daft words bade in her mind, those about a woman having finished with things when she finished having bairns, just an empty drum, an old fruit squeezed and rotting away, useless, unkenned, unstirred by the agonies of bearing a bairn, heeding it, feeding it, watching it grow—was she now no more than that herself?—a woman on the verge of middle age content to trauchle the hours in a kitchen and come out and potter with weeds and flowers, all the passion of living put by long ago, wonder and terror and the tang of long kisses, embracing knee to knee, the blood in a stream of fire through the heart, the beat and drum of that tide of life that once poured so swift in those moments unheard—never to be heard again, grown old.

And, kneeling, she stared in woe at the fork in her hand, at the prickly roses that leaned their pale, quiet faces down from the fence: well, was she to greet about that? She had had her time, and now it was ended, she’d to follow the road that others took, into long wrinkles and greying hair and sourness and seats by the chimney-corner and a drowsy mumble as she heard the rain going by on its business in a closing dark. Finished: when her heart could still move to that singing, when at night in her bed she would turn in unease, wakeful, sweet as she knew herself, men had liked her well long ago, still the same body and still the same skin, that dimple still holding its secret place—Och, Ma would say that she wanted a man, that was all about it, as blunt and coarse as a farmer childe that watched his cattle in the heats of a Spring.