When Hannah and Mary came splashing towards us we pulled Bella’s husband to them and when we had him on the door we floated him to the shore and carried him over the grassy mounds between the channels and laid him on the shingle between the marshes and the road and that was when we saw Bella High heading along the road in her rubber boots and her long jumper and her yellow skirt.

Even from this far off, it was obvious she didn’t know yet. You could tell by her walk that she hadn’t seen anything.

‘You go and tell her Peggy,’ said the others but I said I couldn’t do it. I knew I couldn’t be the one to tell her. I knew the words would lodge in my throat like a splint of wood and I would stand there looking at Bella High’s lovely face with its sparkling grey eyes and its sweet mouth and all those glossy chestnut curls falling over her shoulders like a shower of bells and I knew I didn’t have the strength for it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to drag the words up. They would stay there like a big clot, or a hard pebble, stuck in the narrow tightness at the dark back of my mouth. You could tell none of the others wanted to do it either. No one had the stomach for it, not even Hannah, not really. Annie looked at her feet. They were cold and dirty and covered in black sand. She was shivering. Mary was gawping at the bloated mound of Matthew stretched out upon the door.

At last Hannah said, all right she would go. She would go home and put on her mourning bonnet and then she would go to Bella High’s house and tell her to prepare for a funeral and then the rest of us could bring Matthew to her.

We watched as Hannah set off towards the road above the shingle beach and Bella, further up, carried on along it in her yellow skirt. Moving against the stone walls and the dark gorse at the road’s edge she looked like a piece of sunlight or a daffodil petal or a rich curl of fresh butter, and I felt a kind of burning in my chest, looking at Matthew lying with his flabby upturned face upon the door.

She was at her gate with Hannah when we came up to the house, her hand to her mouth. There’d been such a tension among us, all the way – me and Annie and Mary – carrying him back, all of us silent, getting ready to show him to her. I can still feel it, the weight of him on the door, the huge squashy bulk of him, like a vast fish or a great dense jelly, the way he flopped and bounced.

Matthew High, here. Matthew High home. Returned, delivered.