I sit beside her when they put in the tube, watch her clutch at the bed as they feed it through her nose, watch her gag, her face turn red and then pale again. They wheel the bed off for an X-ray to make sure the tube is in place, then bring it back to allow the feeding to begin. I suppose we are lucky they have these facilities on board, but all I can think of is how much it hurts her, and I know that it isn’t the pain of the tube but the pain of eating. The loss of control. I know how much her stomach will hurt afterwards, how painful it is for that shrunken vessel to expand. I stroke her arm and begin telling the stories again, because she doesn’t speak. Because if I don’t say something the silence is unbearable.

•

The weather grew warmer, the trees began to bud, and Roy and I grew less tentative around one another. They planted the tobacco seeds in a small field near the house where they could cover them, protect them from late frosts, and just the beginning of these seedlings seemed to give us all hope. He tried, some nights, to talk to me before we fell asleep. He held me against his shoulder when I wept over Jack’s death, my sobs dampening his laundered pyjamas. He picked the first of the wild violets which grew at the edge of the woods and put them in a jam jar beside the bed. Each flower had four purple petals, green leaves, a white stamen and a delicate pale stem. They didn’t last long, wilting before I could make the beds the following day.

That morning I heard Mrs Jackson calling me from the kitchen downstairs.

‘Sarah? Sarah!’

I came, holding the jam jar with the wilted violets.

‘Fetch me the eggs, would you?’

There were none beside the icebox, so I went with the basket out to the chicken yard. The hens were sprawled in the dust, their feathers fluffed, lounging in the early spring sun. There were six hens and a single rooster, his shiny blue-black feathers a sharp contrast to the reddish brown of his girls. He strutted towards me when I entered the yard, making a low warning sound in his throat, but I swung the basket at him.