‘Connie,’ her father called, ‘come and sit with us.’

‘All right, Dad. Just a minute.’

She breathed deeply again and looked out at the shared garden, and beyond to the grey stone church on the next road, and the graveyard that backed onto their garden, where her mother was buried. At the funeral, her heart had broken watching her father throwing a handful of dirt into the grave.

She forced her mind back to the present. To their garden, where weeds throttled the beds. The walls surrounding the lawn were patched and crumbling and smothered in ivy. There was a sprawling magnolia to the side and more trees in one corner, apple and pear, but no one bothered to pick the fruit, and every autumn it was devoured by wasps or left to rot on the ground.

Tea towels were pegged on the line. A pile of rubbish had been left in one corner. At the end, bushes obscured a section of grass. Kenneth had a rose garden and there was an old shed that leaned precariously to one side. An arched doorway had been built into the far wall as access to the churchyard, the door a heavy, studded affair. Connie avoided going that way to her mother’s grave. She disliked the shadows and sudden transition from garden to tombstones, the oldest graves broken and lopsided, as if the dead were restlessly shifting beneath the earth.

When she was small, before Kenneth began to grow roses, her mother had a vegetable patch in the rear section of the garden. Connie had helped her look after it, bending to heave out carrots and potatoes. It had amazed her that vegetables could grow in the dark, cold ground. It was a place for dead things, wasn’t it, like in the churchyard where bodies rotted and worms feasted? She had woken in the night, gasping with fear, her dreams full of bodies caught under that weight of earth, like the story she had found in the bookshop about the old man stuck beneath the floorboards, his tell-tale heart beating louder and louder.

How cold must her mother be in the ground? Connie wanted to cover the grave with a blanket or lie on top of the stone as if her warmth might permeate the earth. She would do anything to have one more day, one more hour, a single moment with her mother. For the chance to touch her face, her hands, to smell her perfume and hear her voice.

Suddenly, hands grabbed her waist and pinned her to the sink. Victor had come in so softly she hadn’t heard him.

She brushed away her tears. Turned grief into anger. ‘Get off me,’ she said, pushing hard against him.

He held her fast, nuzzled his nose into her neck.

‘Get off me,’ she hissed again, shoving at his hands. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ She jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow and whipped round. ‘What do you want?’