Mrs Polkinghorn opened the lacquered box. There was quite a bundle of letters inside. All unopened. Several days of them.

At that point she began to dread something she might not be capable of understanding.

The first moment after stepping outside into the brilliant, fleshy garden, Charles Russell Polkinghorn had sidled rather. The light blinded his sandy eyes. He held on to the letter, though.

The morning had grown silent in which old Norman squatted, to fiddle with the mowing-machine.

Charles paused, because one did.

‘What is it, Norman?’ he asked. ‘A cog?’

Norman never looked up for Charles.

‘Cog! It’s the bloody maggy!’

Charles Polkinghorn might have been relieved.

‘Patch it up!’ Norman complained. ‘Patch up the bloody maggy!’

Because, she had said, I shall spend nothing further on the mower. Horrid thing. If it had been something attractive.

Charles Polkinghorn continued on through what his mother was pleased to call the Great Eastern Shrubbery. He was picking at the sliver of dry skin which grew alongside one of his nails. As a little golden boy he had begun to take an interest in those pieces of dead-seeming skin, often fraying them till he bled. He would stand beside the wood-shed, or slip inside the shrubberies, to pick.

‘Don’t you find them interesting, Auntie Maud? The corners of skin. Except you sometimes pick too hard.’

To Maud Bles her god-son was a most fanciful little boy.

‘Yes,’ she said.

And touched his hair.

Married to a poor clergyman of acceptable family she had failed to reproduce.

Charles Polkinghorn walked up the road to Sarsaparilla. It was his road, though nobody knew. Although his shoulders were narrow, and his waist thin, in the black pin-stripe he was wearing out, he walked purposefully now. Nor did he turn his head, though suspecting faces. There were, too. Ladies would pause, in their dusting or conversation, to observe ‘that Mr Polkinghorn’.

Who arrived at last. And skirted round. To slip the letter, quietly, deftly, into the box.

As soon as done, he escaped. Not even the postmistress had seen: Mrs Sugden, of straight, upstanding hair, for whom he had the affection.

Not a bad lot this morning, a pretty respectable bunch, Mrs Sugden used to remark in the days when Charles fetched the letters from their private box.

Charles Russell Polkinghorn was returning jauntier than he had come.

He had been to the circus with his Auntie Maud. The clowns began to terrify, especially the one who broke his neck. Poor, poor Charles, she comforted; now you may look, it was nothing, only horseplay. Horseplay? There hadn’t been any horses, only terrifying clowns. Just a lot of silly nonsense, she reassured. He raised his head slowly from her breast. She smelled of nothing, he was surprised to find. But kindness. Her hand, chafing his skin, looked so natural, he continued staring at it after the clowns and his terror had vanished.

It wasn’t real, she explained; it wasn’t meant.

Charles Russell Polkinghorn had often wondered what is meant. Now he whimpered a little going down the hill.