‘Well,’ she said ‘you don’t mind me telling the truth. Someone has to.’

‘I agree,’ said the rector. Oh, how I agree with you, Miss Docker,’ she hoped she heard.

But he went inside at that point, and Miss Docker continued mowing the grass.

‘What is it, Gregory?’ asked the rector’s wife.

Again she noticed the balaclava cap.

‘I have come in to write my sermon,’ he said.

So she closed the door softly, as she did on sermons.

Gregory Wakeman sat, blank. It was his common condition, he realized. He would fail to assist the ghosts of ideas which struggled to escape from his skull. A handsome man, whom ladies loved – spiritually. They brought little presents to him. Who had nothing to offer his divine love. As he sat with his fists further hollowing his hollow eyes, the vision of crimson rhubarb flitted from his wife’s kitchen, and the sticks of rhubarb were more articulate in praise than the chaos of his dark mind.

He who had failed to justify himself presently went out.

‘What is it, Gregory?’ asked his wife.

She had come round the side of the house, along the brick path where the uninitiated often slipped, past the smell from the kitchen outlet.

‘Is there anything?’ she vaguely asked.

The rector was standing on the tips of his toes. Of his army boots. The seat of his pants was shiny green. There were all those cannas at the back of the rectory. The cannas were rapidly taking over.

Gregory Wakeman stood on his toes, trying to retrieve some elusive object.

She realized, then, the balaclava knitted by Miss Docker was suspended from the crest of the cannas, and that her dearest husband could not reach it.

He turned and looked at her horrified.

What could she do? Not that he asked anything of her but to suffer alone. She had married him, she was sure, for the wrong reasons, but together they had succeeded, at last, in disembodying themselves. Otherwise they might have clung together, and kissed, in the distressing smell of dishwater, behind the rectory.

Until Miss Docker called:

‘Enough for today, Mr Wakeman. I have put the mower in the shed. Hope I have done a decent job.’

The balaclava twitching on the cannas.

‘ ’Bye for now,’ Miss Docker called.

But she could always be relied on to return.

She would sit in the pews reserved for the choir before the choir had been disbanded. If he had not seen her come and go, an observation might have assumed Miss Docker was rooted there, far less ephemeral than timber, riddled as it was with border and dry rot, or the crumbly bricks the convicts had baked in the beginning. Miss Docker would sing, her leathery soprano lashing the architraves. She always knew the places where it was traditional to repeat a line, and sometimes added numbers to the board, for the pure glory of singing an extra hymn. Nobody noticed now. Not since the crisis at All Saints, Sarsaparilla.