The sound of the stream was mesmeric. Hugh dozed. Matilda might not belong to the W.I. but she was capable. ‘I’ll go back presently and they’ll be there. No more running.’

When Matilda came back with her shopping and the papers she found the cottage empty. Her feelings of relief were equal to her sense of disappointment. She was not used to ambivalence, it worried her. She looked closely in the looking glass above the sink, trying to read her feelings in her face but it was the same face as usual, a mask for whatever feelings or thoughts there might be inside this middle-aged face which was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor ugly, just her face as usual which protected her from the prying world.

8

MATILDA LAID THE papers on the kitchen table, put her shopping away, sat down to read. The Matricide no longer rated the front pages. No mention of him in the Guardian. She had not been able to buy either The Times or the Daily Telegraph, only the Mirror, the Sun and the Express.

‘Thought you didn’t read the Express, Mrs Poliport,’ the postmaster, Mr Hicks, had remarked, taking her money.

‘Fascist rag.’ Matilda smiled. ‘Very occasionally I like to see it, keeps the mind open to read lots of papers.’

‘I read the local.’

‘Yes, that tells you all you want and it’s unbiased.’

‘That’s so.’ Mr Hicks, a stout bald man, gave Matilda her change. ‘Is there anything else, Mrs Poliport?’ He pronounced it ‘Pollyput’ as did most local people.

‘Oh, I nearly forgot. I need a dog licence.’

‘A dog licence?’ Mr Hicks had been astonished. ‘I thought –’

‘I know, I said never again. I know I did. I’m weak. It’s a mongrel from the Lost Dogs, just a little mongrel.’

‘Said you didn’t want another dog, didn’t want to be tied.’

‘I know. I changed my mind. There it is.’

‘You were offered that Boxer, pure bred.’ Mr Hicks could be seen thinking even less of her than usual.

‘Well, this is a mongrel. How much is the licence? I forget.’

Mr Hicks had found a licence form. Matilda could hear him presently telling Mrs Hicks that Mrs Pollyput got a mongrel from the Lost Dogs when she could have had that Boxer almost free. They would sigh together over her folly.