‘The point’, said Claire a little stiffly, ‘is educational.’

‘For education, a man must be educable,’ Dr Murphy said. ‘I will try, Claire, but I promise nothing.’

Sarah my grandmother was not so sophisticated: for her, mortification was guaranteed. How could a functional illiterate possibly imagine herself as a teacher? In those days, anyway? Dr Murphy probably was educable, though perhaps less so than his disarming speech implied. Sarah wasn’t. She just plain wasn’t. She might have had a better chance today, somebody just might recognize what was doubtless dyslexia and be of some help to her. We’re all a little dyslexic, we third-generation Carricks, children of her children.

Over the months that followed Jonathan pared his food to the minimum and used no heat. He worked eighteen hours a day. By Christmas he’d managed to sell his crop at a good price, plant two hundred apple trees, and the first two acres of strawberries – that most precious of crops, the crop on which he pinned the future – and there was profit to spare. He made a down-payment on a piano. Every week he wrote to Rayner and every week received a letter in return. He learned that Sarah was studying hard, then that she had had a baby girl called Ruth, then that the teaching examination was very soon. He heard nothing for many weeks after that.

At last came the letter Jonathan had known would come. He wrote immediately, enclosing money he’d put by for his family’s journey back home.

11

The Jonathan who met Sarah when she returned was not the Jonathan she’d left. Sarah – this woman who could not read even as Wify Stoke could not read, this woman who had breached his defenses – Sarah, his Sarah, had deserted him, taken his children from him. She had defied him. She had betrayed him. So the man who met her was not the man whose mysterious fears and angers had moved her so deeply; he was instead the figure who terrified me as a child even though he was long dead by that time: a distant, implacable judge who demanded superhuman effort and total obedience, and who exacted maximum punishment when these demands weren’t met. Which is to say that this was when Atlas’s man of fire became the man of ice who terrified my father, too, even when my father was a middle-aged professor of economics.

Sarah’s betrayal was not the whole of it, either. During the time she was away, the Methodist minister of Hannaville died. Jonathan wrote an impassioned appeal to the District Synod; and the District Synod, lacking any other suitable candidate, made him the dead man’s successor. Jonathan did this for the small pickings of money it would bring in; he did it for the piano and the pelmet; he did it for Sarah because he loved her and wanted to please her despite her betrayal: which is to say, he followed her betrayal of him by betraying himself.