For a time, she’d let her brother and sister drive her back with them for a few days. But in town she discovered, as the years went by, that her clothing attracted attention, that her appearance shocked people. One cold Christmas when Pam came to collect her she’d got in the car wearing both her dresses, her blue one and her knitted fawn one, one on top of the other. Pam had been ashamed. All that week Ruth saw her making silent signals with her eyes to her friends. She discovered also that she’d aged more quickly than these people. Carting water off the fell to her house in a bucket, hauling fodder from the pasture on a sledge for her cow Charlotte, chopping wood and breaking sticks and stuffing them into the stove and picking up scraps of slate off the hills to mend her roof – it had all made her age more rapidly than Pam and these other women who came to Pam’s house and tried not to gawp when Pam said, ‘This is my younger sister, Ruth.’ Like Pam, all the women still had dark hair and neat unbroken fingernails and attractive teeth. She couldn’t imagine how they managed it. She cared a little about it, this difference between the way they looked and the way she did, but not much. She told Pam she’d not be going back with her again. She was happy where she was, she’d no urge now to leave.

She’d stayed on to look after the church. When no one came to replace her father, it had been impossible for her to think of leaving it untended and unused. In winter she put holly in the alcoves. In spring, hawthorn and valerian. On Sundays she stood in the cold in front of the empty pews and read aloud the lesson. She patched the roof and polished the coloured window in the nave and the blackened script engraved on the brass plaque her father had screwed into the lintel over the door when he first arrived here from the coast. It was still her favourite Psalm: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord.