Each sister-in-law, like a bad fairy, had a different form of words with which to attack me, from ‘Syl not married yet?’to ‘How good of Syl to look after you so well’, an implication that I was a monstrous mother, destroying her son’s chance of a future, of fulfilment and happiness. I could not explain that there was nothing I wanted more than that Syl should leave me: go away and leave me alone. In a way I was protecting him by letting the world believe that his state was all my fault. It seemed preferable to the view that he was a hopelessly inadequate human being. My annoyance at being cast into this role was vitiated by my awareness that, like it or not, there was some truth in it. I did not like it at all. I did not care to remember that my own marriage had left much to be desired, that I had not married the man I loved and that when Syl had started to grow up I had indeed preferred his company to that of his father. Now I no longer needed company. I had had enough and I wanted to be left to think about things I had not had time to think about. Increasingly I remembered my childhood, the beginning: the dark spaces of the farmhouse, the endless moors and the perfection of smallness in the hawthorn, white with birth, bright with death. I thought more of winter than I did of summer. It seemed to me that those Northern moors were designed to receive snow; intended for the winds to pass untrammelled. Summer was a dull season. In spring things were growing; in autumn they were harvested; in winter they were waiting. Summer was pointless, designed for idleness. An inbred Yorkshire puritanism led me to despise it. I wondered why I was thinking of summer with winter all around me.

It was the egg sandwiches that reminded me. Shaking white pepper into the mashed egg, I was back in a more recent past than the one I habitually roamed: only about fifteen years ago, which is nothing. It was cold in the pantry. I had chosen this house because it was just a little like the stone-built houses of the North, of my childhood. Jack had favoured a more exotic residence which had also been on sale just up the road, but I put my foot down. There were some things I could be stubborn about, and I refused to live in a house designed, as far as I could tell, on the lines of a Dutch dairy. Jack had decided that we should retire to this neighbourhood, indeed to this particular road. One of the firm’s bosses had lived and died here. Something about this ill-expressed, incoherent estate represented worldly success to Jack and I didn’t really care enough to question the assumption.