A ridiculous idea, upsettingly wrong. She swings her head from side to side and flaps her good arm at her son. “Oh, oh,” she says.

“I’m sorry I’m so hopeless, Bridie.”

She groans again, this time with an almighty glare at Philip.

“Oh, Mum.” He sighs. “You’d feel so much better if you had something to eat.”

I pour out two cups of tea. We all drink in various kinds of silence—mine remorseful, Bridie’s frankly grumpy. Philip’s silence is tense, his eyes shifting around the room.

“For a while, when I was a young man, I had no appetite at all,” I tell Bridie after a while. “People put food in front of me, and I couldn’t imagine getting it inside me, there was so much. It was like asking me to eat a mountain.”

She gives me a quizzing glance.

“My strategy was to concentrate on the foothills. Take it from the edge of the plate. It was much easier when I had a tiny helping on a saucer, like this one.” I glance at Philip for confirmation of this idea, and he nods. “And perhaps a teaspoon.” I put both items on the table. “Do you think you could tackle a snack this size?”

I watch her considering the idea. Half of her forehead frowns. Is it curiosity?

“I’ll think about everything you’ve told me,” I continue, “and I’ll come back, let me see, tomorrow afternoon, if that would suit you. And we can talk again.”

She leans her head back against the chair, emitting a single exhausted, “Yes.”

I leave her with her son and rejoin Terry Shaw, who hands me this week’s Hampshire Chronicle and directs me to read out the prices for animal fodder to a skeletal lady in a hairnet and dark glasses. “Mildred Chant farmed sheep on her own for fifty years,” Mrs. Shaw tells me, nodding toward the lady. “Until she got too blind to see them at dusk.”

“I know some girls called Chant,” I say. “They come to Bible study.”

“You’re joking.” Terry is highly amused. “The Chant sisters?”

“They don’t stay long,” I say with a grin.

Miss Chant tuts when I read out the price of hay. “You’d think it was spun gold,” she booms from her tiny, hollow chest. She deplores the way Beacon Hill has been plowed halfway up its lovely side. “They did it in the war, you know, when we needed the arable. But they never put it back to grass. Spoils the look of the hill.”

I say goodbye and she thanks me absentmindedly, perhaps still musing on the view she can now see only in her mind’s eye.

Philip Moore follows me as I make my way down the corridor toward the front door. I notice how pale he looks, his mouth open but unspeaking.

“How are you, Philip?”

“Fine. Worried about Mum, that’s all.”