I appeared sallow and tired, I’m sure. I’d spent the past week living at the lodge, guiding my mother through her grief with very little space to navigate my own. She moved beyond shock and began excavating her anger – her husband’s promised retirement years had been stolen. He was off, as she put it, ‘lamping foxes for the rest of eternity’. This image – completely of her own creation – enraged my mother, yet it soothed me. To think that he was still out there, working the land, and at some point, when he was hungry, he would head on home for his tea.

I had decamped to the lodge with nothing but the black funeral clothes I stood up in. I’d sent Ben away; he seemed so surplus to what was going on, having never known my father. My mother was an enigma even to me. I wanted no witnesses as I failed, over and over, to find the right way to soften her pain. While staying there, I wore her clothes, along with some leftover items from my teenage wardrobe – a bobbled sweater, some wide-legged trousers with a forgiving, elasticated waist. On one occasion, I pulled a red checked shirt of Dad’s from the clean laundry pile to wear.

‘Take it off!’ my mother snapped. ‘Do you think I could even bear it?’

Moments before she had admonished me for not talking about Dad enough, for not keeping a sense of him alive. I knew then that it was time for me to go home. Her anger had cooled into an indiscriminate petulance about everything I did. I bundled the red checked shirt into my bag when she wasn’t looking, and I was wearing it – symbolically, perhaps – as I stood before Viola Kendrick in the yard of that rundown farmstead. The sleeves were rolled up, the tails tucked into one of my neat teaching skirts. On top, I’d unbuttoned my heavy winter coat and loosened my scarf. January was merciless with its temperatures, as always, yet I’d broken into a sweat from trekking up the hill.

Viola wore an oversized checked shirt too, a blue one, the coincidence feeling like a sign – a good omen. The rest of her was less appealing. Her jeans were muddy at the knee and her hair was a heap of curls, an orange candy-floss haze. I considered asking her to change, to bind her hair into a long, fat plait of the kind I’d seen her wear in chapel.

‘Viola, isn’t it?’ I said.

She nodded.

‘And you know who I am?’

She gave a nod to that too.

‘Well, I hear you’ve been hanging out at the stones with the Eldest Girls,’ I began.

This came out more accusatory than I had intended and Viola was ready with her next defence.

‘Don’t worry,’ I leapt in. ‘I’m not here to tell you off.’