After service, Viola’s mother joined in with the preparation of teas and coffees in the nave, didn’t wait for an invitation. She fussed, she bustled, she made herself useful. Viola would sit in a pew, at a distance, cup, with a saucer and biscuit on her lap, banging her heels against the wood until it was time to go, an audience to her mother’s convincing performance of eagerness. It was hard to believe this was the same stricken woman whose head had rested in the cradle of her hands for days on end at the kitchen table back home.

Then one Sunday morning in July, there was a shift. Viola watched as a small, busy-looking woman pulled Deborah Kendrick aside for a quiet word. The woman started speaking and her mother’s enthusiastic smile twitched, then tilted, before righting itself into something not even passably genuine. Viola understood straight away that she was the subject of this exchange; her mother’s eyes skittered towards her in the pew, then back to the woman. It was a nervous action, one of someone who was all of a sudden on guard. It was a chink through which Viola glimpsed once again the broken, tormented woman her mother had been on the mainland.

Later that same week, the busy woman had landed on the doorstep of the farmstead. Out of the kitchen window, Viola saw the Customs Officer leaning against the bonnet of his Land Rover – acting as taxi driver again. His head was down, which she translated as embarrassment at being there.

The woman announced herself formally to Viola’s mother – ‘Miriam Calder, the school administrator’, her emphasis hitting the definite article – and Viola’s mother had responded with a sweet but terse reminder that they had met several times before and this introduction was unnecessary.

‘You need to enrol your daughter in school,’ Miriam said, in lieu of any pleasantries.

‘More forms!’ came Deborah Kendrick’s reply, the humour forced. ‘Goodness me! When does the paperwork stop?’

Viola had slid into the hallway then, had seen how Miriam took in the yellowing wallpaper and the trail of dry leaves blown in from outside. Her mother attempted to close the front door, keeping her voice bright as if this might soften the rudeness of her actions. ‘I’ll be sure to pop up to the school soon and get that done!’

‘I have the forms here,’ said Miriam, her hand meeting the wood of the door, its peeling paintwork. ‘We can fill them out now.’

Her mother had reluctantly let Miriam in, but not offered her tea. She filled out the lines and boxes of the forms briskly, belligerently, her pen piercing the paper every time it encountered a deep groove in the battered kitchen table. Miriam stood over her, casting an eye about the room, collecting its details – the bread left out on the board, the sleeping dog, the dripping tap.