She sat on the log seat under the eaves, looking down the garden. The sky had become golden now. The sunlight gilded only the tops of the trees on the hill before her. She looked to the right down the valley into a deep gloom where the dark trees grew close to the stream on both sides, and the marshy area, just below the Shepherds’ garden was dense with dark rushes and the broad leaves of the wild iris. To her left she could not now see very far because the birch trees grew thick on that end of the Common and were now in full leaf, their white black-flecked trunks awash in the waves of pale grass. The sky was becoming a violet blue, a blue of immense depth, of eternal distance. Suddenly she saw a single star, bright and still, which seemed to nail infinity back against the vaults of heaven. Between it and Marion’s eyes the swifts, very high and small, were darting and wheeling, chasing each other, slipping sideways in flight. Then, with a flick of wing, soaring up again, and all the while screaming faintly.

Perhaps it was the stillness of the luminous air, and the tiny birds swooping about so high and so far away, giving vastness to the intangible dome above, that made Marion’s thoughts turn from the immediate and practical, where they usually dwelt, to the eternal and unknown. This is my life, she thought, my only life. This is all there is for me. Why was it me that my mother bore, not another? Soon – it could be any time – I will be dead and cold in the churchyard and I will know nothing any more and soon I will be as forgotten as … but how could her thoughts supply the names of the forgotten? She knew the story of how one day God would come and judge the world and the graveyard tombs would open and their inhabitants would stumble out, confused in the unusual light. But this was a story and Marion had heard many stories in her life, and though they had given her areas for thought to indulge in, they were not real, not as getting water or bringing in logs were real. History, the stories of what had happened; prediction, stories of what might happen; descriptions of places outside the village – all were stories, and only stories to Marion. Neither time nor place outside her life and outside the village had any reality. She looked up to the brightening star and the swallows and swifts still screaming high above her. They will still be there, she thought, whizzing about, after I no longer see or hear. Days and nights, unknown to me will follow, and will be forever unknown.

Peter came trudging up the path again and sat down beside her.

‘Where’s Peterkin got to?’ he asked, but at that moment Peterkin appeared round the corner of the cottage. He was carrying a flat basket. ‘Look what Joan’s given me,’ he said, displaying a number of buttered scones with shiny tops and crumbling edges. ‘It’s the overs. She said Dick told her to give them to me because I’d helped with the shearing.’