‘You aren’t overdoing it, darling?’ She would peer, and call formally, frowning with anxiety.

For he had taken to wheeling manure up the hill, in a barrow, from the paddock the horse-coper rented.

‘Can’t let all this good stuff go to waste,’ he said, ‘when the shrubs are crying out to be fed.’

‘But you might overdo it. Your heart,’ she protested.

He grunted, still pushing. Hessell Mortlock liked to be reminded of what he should not do. It was when he wasn’t that he grew surly.

‘I’m not a crock. And I’m not an idiot,’ he replied, as he struggled with the arms of the barrow, his feet slipping on the fat turf.

She grew anxious finally, and cast about for a plan. Then one afternoon she hit on it, and came down the slope carrying a coil of stout cord she remembered noticing in the shed.

‘Now we shall see,’ she said, laughing.

‘See what?’ He had stopped pushing, to satisfy his curiosity, as well as to pause for breath.

She did not answer, but uncoiled the cord and attached it by its two ends to the barrow. Then she stepped inside the loop, wound it once more round her body, plaited her arms with the tautened cord, and announced to her husband: ‘You will push. And I shall pull.’

Already she had begun, and as he caught on, he struggled forward on the arms of the barrow. Pushing.

‘That’s something like a bright idea!’ He snorted, and laughed.

Sometimes he would look up, at his wife’s back arched against the hill. Or at her shoulders, momentarily straightening themselves, throwing off the weight of labour.

Then he would chortle: ‘Gee up, Neddy!’ this aged schoolboy enjoying the game,

And she would bend and exert herself again.

With Mrs Mortlock it was all seriousness, part of the necessary ritual she must evolve by inspiration to help her bear her chosen existence. So she bent and heaved. Her ribs strained. Her neck grew ugly. Sharp daggers of pain stabbed at times into her back. As she pulled, and bit her lips. To suffer thus enduringly was to ensure her continued happiness.

And afterwards they would sit and eat buttered toast with swollen fingers. Stuffing it into their mouths. Breathing too heavily.

‘Who wouldn’t remain independent,’ Hessell Mortlock once remarked, ‘of all, bludging, hired labour!’

That afternoon the bell sounded, and it was the boy from the post office. He smiled at Mrs Mortlock in the manner of those who know, and handed her the telegram.

When she returned into the darkened sun-room she said simply: ‘It is Dad. He has died.’

Hessell Mortlock sat there in the almost darkness, his neck thickening from the very personal news which had been forced on him with so little thought or warning. It wasn’t as if he had entertained any affection for his father-in-law, except perhaps briefly, when the latter was a young man. Youth, or more candidly, the theory of it, stimulated Hessell Mortlock.