‘I didn’t mean that exactly – though the rudeness and the defiance seemed to me to be out of character, assumed. No, what mystifies me is the way she sides with her grandmother.’

‘Surely that is an indication that there is nothing very much wrong in their relationship.’ He was silent for a moment, and Miss Mayfield could hear the soft sad cry of the wood-doves from the trees beyond the allotments. ‘I haven’t spent all my life in this peaceful backwater. For four years, immediately after my ordination, I was a curate in a very poor parish in East London. A case or two of cruelty to children came to my notice there, and I assure you that no child, even in the safeguarding presence of strangers, would have dared speak to the person who had ill-used it as Ethel Rigby just spoke to her grandmother.’

‘Unless it had been told to, as part of the deception, so the people who asked questions should come away saying exactly the thing which you have just said.’

He stopped still on the path.

‘How very shrewd!’ he exclaimed. Then, walking on, he said, ‘It might be true in some cases, I suppose. But not in this. They had no time to concoct a tale. The old woman opened the door and called Ethel in. Ethel’s performance was quite unrehearsed, I am sure. I can’t seriously imagine old Granny Rigby laying on the stripes and saying, “If anybody asks you, whack, how you came to be beaten, whack, you’re to say, whack whack, that you’d been running round with boys.” Can you?’

‘Not when it’s put like that,’ she said a trifle wearily. ‘But there could be a kind of over-all understanding that any inquiry was to be fobbed off, lest something worse should happen.’

There was a slight grit of impatience in his voice when he next spoke:

‘I do think, you know, that you’re making it all unnecessarily complicated. I’ve known Phoebe Rigby all my life. She isn’t a sadistic, scheming, deeply cunning child-beater; she’s a poor simple old woman whose one darling daughter ended up on the streets and who is terrified of her granddaughter going the same way. By the same token, she’s known me a long time, too, and when I say “Go easy on Ethel”, she takes it as the order it was meant to be. I have my village well in hand, Miss Mayfield, casual as I may seem. Now, let’s speak of a more cheerful subject. How are the scenes from history shaping up?’

They had by this time almost reached her house, having taken the little footpath directly across the Green.