Looking back, I can understand well enough. Her baby were there. Scattered on the wind. It was somewhere she could feel close to him and who was I to deny her that? She might have been a snooty sort but nobody deserves to lose a bairn. Not like that. When she lost him it were the first time I’d heard anybody in Gilsland say a kind word about her. Up ’til then she were pegged as a snotty cow. Nose in the air trying not to breathe us in. That were the story, any road. Stayed up there on a farm she couldn’t work, playing with a baby who looked nowt like his father. And the father were no sort of man. Great walrus of a man. Something in London, so we were told. Worked for the government doing one of those jobs they do in the films. A bowler-hat-and-umbrella kind of job. Not short of cash and happy to spend it. No great brains on him, according to our John. Said you could charge him whatever you liked and he’d pay. Reckoned people up here were honest and decent and wouldn’t try and charge more than they thought was fair. Daft apeth learned he were wrong, in time. Lads fleeced him down to the bone. But they did the work he paid them for. Made the old place habitable. Decorated inside and out. Tidied the garden and the pasture and hacked back the apple trees so she could see the view across the river. She didn’t even offer them a cup of tea. Just sat with her baby on her knee, reading to the little lad from a book, as if he had the first blooming clue what she was saying. When he died, story changed. After that people were saying how lonely it must be up there on her own. Saying how she idolized the little man. How they’d seen her in the post office and her eyes were so dark it was like she’d been working down a mine. I should have gone up there then, I suppose. But you don’t like to, do you? Don’t like to put yourself forward.