We sat, we sorted laundry, we quartered fruit and cooked it and packed it in jars. We walked, we planted out her garden for winter – onions and kale and some pale flat wrinkled beans I’d never seen which she said wouldn’t mind the frost and would be soft and tender and delicious by early summer, and I remember thinking that it was a good sign, that she was talking about the summer as if she looked forward to it, and a picture came into my head then of me and Evangelina Hine sitting down to a plate of new beans on a table in her garden in summer. Later, too, another picture came: in my mind, winter has always appeared like a big, dark shoulder, or the long curve of a road up ahead, and once you are round it, it is all downhill and I remember standing on the ridged earth in Evangelina’s garden between her quiet house and Joseph’s empty forge behind it, seeing the two of us, me and Evangelina Hine on a sledge, in the last of the winter’s snows, somewhere up on the fells, Evangelina clinging on tightly behind, our heels stuck out to the side, our toes pointing up, hurtling down, shrieking and crying out and laughing.

I began to hate the stupid coat. The way she clung to it, its woollen crust. Its grey shell. All her hopes crowded into it, all her passion and all her faith, as if just by hanging there, all limp and droopy and old, it was some kind of promise or pledge, a sign that he would come back to her one day, warm and safe and whole.

I made up my mind to tell her what I thought, what everyone thought, about Joseph having another sweetheart somewhere and her being too blind to see it.

‘Evangelina,’ I began slowly, but there must have been something in my voice that suggested I was about to say something she didn’t want to hear. She was sitting opposite me at her kitchen table, peeling the apples we’d brought in from the shed behind the forge where we’d stored them in the autumn. I thought how thin and tired she looked.

‘What?’ she said, keeping her eyes down. I watched while she picked up a fresh apple and dug the blade of her knife into its wrinkled skin and carried on, more briskly and fiercely than before. She had never looked so stubborn. She began dumping the peeled apples into a pan and drawing the loose peel together into a mound between her hands.

‘Perhaps, Evangelina – ’ I began, but she cut me off.

‘How is Harold?’ she said, in a bright way.

I took a breath.

‘Harold is fine,’ I said. ‘Busy at the bank.’

Harold is fine, I wanted to say, but he is not you.