Lenny looked at the pie, in its ancient spring-form pan, resting on the open palm of the girl’s small right hand. It had a blackened fluted crust and it was piled high with a custardy filling. Lenny could smell the vanilla, the fat in the cream. She watched as the girl, like a diminutive baseball pitcher, drew back her thin sinewy arm. Lenny held her breath. She waited for some kind of instinct to kick in but nothing happened, nothing happened that made her cry out in a loud and urgent way LOOK OUT DON!!!! THERE’S A GIRL HERE WITH A PIE!!!! Nothing at all that made her want to run out into the aisle and throw herself like a stampeding elephant across the chancel steps in front of her thirty-five-year-old son and save him from the pie. The only feeling Lenny had as he came striding towards them along the crimson carpet with his flaxen-haired bride on his arm, was that she didn’t have any interest in him, or his bride, or the little girls they had with them who were dressed like tiny princesses, or the little boys who were wearing velvet knickerbockers as if they all still lived in the eighteenth century. The only feeling Lenny had as she watched the long slow parabola of the pie moving out into the aisle and travelling like a spinning planet towards his face, was that she preferred this dark-haired girl to any of them; the only feeling she had when the soft squashy sound came, and the muffled cream-filled shout, was that she wanted to reach for the girl’s hand and run for the back of the church, fly out through the big doors into the wide and busy street and hail a cab; the only feeling she had when the driver turned and looked at the two of them thrown together in the back – Lenny breathless, her heart racing, the girl still holding onto her hand – was that she’d lived her whole life till now in a kind of dull enchantment, and when the driver asked them, Where to, ladies? the only feeling she had was that she was completely, fully awake.

Creed

Creed

SHE COULD SEE Creed’s place now, up ahead, not more than another three quarters of a mile.

On the big flat stone at the top of the path she stopped to rest, pushed back her sticky hair and wondered again what he would do when he saw her – what he would say and how he would be and what he would look like too, close-up, after all this time.

For years now, for most of her life, she’d seen him only from afar, mending his walls or checking on his sheep or coming down off the high fell with a bucket to the spring above the waterfall, a bulky hatted figure.