His wife glanced often from the inner doorway or, when there was nobody there, came out to him in the shop. She would sit beside him, mending. Sometimes she would merely sit, to sit and offer the kind of remarks that fit no conversational pattern, the words of a deeply felt relationship. The dim, withdrawing Mrs Goose, handsome now, if you came to think, more individual too than the presence of her husband sometimes allowed, had an almost gothic line, sitting beside him in the shop. Her hair drooped from its knot into a gothic wave. Her hands were the shape of unbroken gothic stone. All the more incongruous beside the square, cracked hands, stained perpetually in the cracks by the dye and polish that he used, the mobile, muscular hands of Mr Goose. Perhaps her origin and childhood had shaped the hands of Mrs Goose. The Sundays sitting in a high pew listening to her father preach, when the mind, drifting, touched on a gothic shore, the more actual images in painted wood.

The daughter of an Anglican parson, sermons and rood screens made a background to her life. She did not question these. She was not the questioning sort. Meeting her husband by chance, in a farmyard where she had gone for eggs, and overhearing his remark that parsons were a perverse, prying, pillaging, hypocritical lot, she was at first decently shocked. And then, perhaps her own fallow moments during many sermons, perhaps the warm pissing of the milk against the metal buckets, as the farmer and his boys sat with their heads against the cows and milked, perhaps the hen-cluck and a scent of steaming nettles, made her accept the speaker’s voice, if not the substance of his words.

Why, she said, coming forward, with surprising ease and a kind of timid conviction, there’s as much good in parsons as, well, in anyone else.

This was the first and only critical remark Mrs Goose had thrown at her husband’s system. Marrying out of her caste, and admittedly not the questioning sort, it was her habit to accept what her life had dealt her. She was also in love with her husband. There was no time over for any existence apart.

The closed circle of two people in love, people with whom you are intimately connected, in humdrum detail, the everyday routine, was one of the first mysteries that Kitty Goose had failed to solve. Suddenly coming into a room, to realize your own intrusion, that words couldn’t deny. Sitting on the floor in the same room, playing with a doll, she would pause sometimes and sit up on her haunches, feel the distance that separated her from two present, yet oblivious beings. There was nothing you could do, say. There was no asking for an explanation of something you could only sense. You could only accept the diluted, even if real, affection that came to you from each of these absorbed beings. But separate, essentially apart. And it made her wonder sometimes, especially on wet days, humming and screwing her mouth into odd shapes against the shop-front glass.