Which would be never, but she had to keep up appearances.

I pulled out my pocketbook, but Mrs Jackson was already paying him from her own. ‘Here,’ I said, trying to pass her a bill. She pushed my hand away, looking down her nose at me.

‘Don’t be a fool. You are going to need that money more’n I will. Now here.’ She thrust the ticket into my hand. ‘Platform two, and it’s leaving in ninety minutes. I can’t hang round and wait; I’ve got lunch to put on before the men come in from the field. You’ll be fine?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

She patted my arm, her lips pursed, and a dimple showed in her cheek for just a moment, a sign of how glad she was to be rid of me. How quickly it all happened. I hardly realised what I’d done.

The porter appeared with my trunk then outside the station office. ‘Platform two, boy,’ she hollered. ‘And don’t you go bangin’ it around like it’s full of stones. She doesn’t want to get there and have her things all smashed to pieces.’

‘Bye now. Send a letter.’ Those were Mrs Jackson’s last words to me and I waved as she clambered into that big truck and drove off, not once looking back. She’d get home, make lunch and tidy the bedrooms as though nothing at all had changed. I would try my very best to forget that farm and Roanoke altogether. Roy’s blank face, the flies gathered on the glassy dead eye of a horse. The mistakes I’d made, the way I left.

Memory is a strange creature, no doubt about that, for it can shove things behind the bureau for years and then suddenly they pop out like a jack-in-the-box, something lost suddenly found. They can still make you jump, and once you blow the dust off they feel like they happened only yesterday. I heard one of those brain doctors talking about it on the radio the other day. He was saying that you’re more likely to remember something if you’re in a similar place or state of mind, or the same piece of music is playing or you see the same kind of weather. I tried my best to forget Roy and his family, but there were things which always brought back those memories. The smell of fried ham in the morning or of Sloan’s Liniment, which I stole from the medicine cabinet and rubbed on the horses. The sight of a man with a lump of chaw in his cheek, the smell of fresh-cut tobacco leaves, sappy and sharp. My time at the farm would come back to me when I least expected it, and always with a needle of regret—for my cowardice in running away without even saying goodbye.

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