All afternoon, as the rain fell unceasing outside her window and the sky turned from dull to black, Verity stayed shut up in her room. She alternated between lying on the bed, face down, and pacing between the door and the window. She was supposed to go to the dance in town but how could she go now? When Jack had asked her, just over a week ago, it had felt like a small but important victory. The thing between them would no longer be hidden and sordid but something else. But so much had happened since then: the argument yesterday and then, today, Arthur. Now it felt like a cruel, horrible joke she had played on herself.

Tea came and went. She couldn’t face eating. The wind began battering the windows and Peter stomped out into the rainy afternoon to make sure the cows were secure in the cowshed. Still, she didn’t change, her face remained bare. Finally, she stripped out of her clothes and sat in front of the dressing table in her room. Her face was blotchy and red, her hair a mess. It was hard to reconcile the image of the girl in the glass with what she had done. She was a coward, a craven coward. Unable to tell Arthur the truth, she had done something much much worse. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. She gagged and reached the sink in the corner of the room just in time to retch into it, a thin acid yellow stream of bile dripping into the sink. She sank to the floor and held onto the pink ceramic, her face pressed against its cool edge. The room darkened. Downstairs, she heard a door slam. Slowly, she pulled herself up, filled the sink and washed herself with her flannel, wiping the smell of the vomit away. She brushed her teeth. It felt good to be clean. Her heart was still beating too hard, as if it was waiting, getting ready to fight or flee.

The downpour became a patter and a drip and then stopped. The moon was rising and silver droplets covered the garden hedges. She looked at her bedside clock. Nearly five. The dance would already have started. She stood again by the glass in her slip and tried to see herself as Jack saw her – something worthy of attention. But she scowled at her image. In her dressing table drawer, poking out from beneath her underwear, the Turner postcard and the exhibition brochure he’d got from America. The fact that he’d found these precious things for her meant something. To decide what to do, she had to see him. She took them out and propped them against the mirror, then flung open the wardrobe.

*