What Julian saw, from the tail of his eye, was a face set on placid lines; a face with a translucent pallor, and those pale eyes. She seemed strong, composed; she held her white hands on her lap, the one reposing confidingly in the other.
“What did the bikers say to you, to make you run offlike that?”
Sandra thought, then said, “They criticized my garment.”
After a moment, they both yelled with laughter, the noise filling the shabby body of Anna’s car. A gust of wind, blowing inland, peppered the rain against the glass.
“Well, I admit “…” Julian said. “Why do you wear it?”
“We got it donated,” Sandra said. “I can’t afford clothes like they’ve got. It’s funny, I always think—when you’ve got a bit of money you can afford cheap clothes, you can throw them away when they fall apart. But if you’re poor your clothes go on for ever. You get given things the Queen would be proud to wear.”
“Who was it gave it you?”
“Some church. My mum has her contacts. She used to clean for a churchwarden’s wife. So we get remembered when it’s jumble sales.” She paused. “It’s just our size she forgets.”
They began to laugh again. The windscreen wipers swished; ahead of them, toward Wells, the horizon had the pearl sheen of brighter weather. “I dare say it’ll outlast me, this old jacket,” Sandra said. “I once ran through a hedge in it, and it didn’t flinch.”
By the time they reached Holkham, the mist was clearing. Flashes of light struck from the dwarves’ windows of flint cottages, little houses tumbling toward the coast; flint sparkled like gemstones in the wall of a round-towered church. “Turn off here,” Sandra said, directing him toward the sea. They turned between high hedgerows, leaving behind a wide view of windmills and the red roofs of distant barns. The road narrowed. “I live down this track,” Sandra said. “Do you want to come in? You could have a cup of tea.”
The car bumped down an incline. “My mother calls this ’one of the foremost hills in Norfolk,’ “ Sandra said. “Okay—stop here.”
They came to a halt in front of a huddle of low buildings, the doors facing inward, out of the wind. There was a pear tree on a sheltered wall, geese on a pond, a vegetable plot screened off by an amateur windbreak. There were some rotting henhouses, an old cartwheel leaning on a fence, and by the front door a wheelbarrow filled with something shrouded in polythene. They got out of the car. A woman came to the door. “That’s my mother,” Sandra said.
Mrs. Glasse seemed taller than Sandra, not very old. She wore patched jeans and two shapeless pullovers, the one underneath longer than the one on top. She had red hair too, longer than her daughter’s, scooped up with pins. Julian saw that bits of it straggled down her back as she turned to lead the way inside. For the first time, he wondered how his own mother managed to keep her hair fixed in its dark cloudy shapes, arrested in its whirls and coils. There must be an art to it.
Mrs. Glasse had been working outside. Her muddy gumboots stood by the door. There was a wide lobby, full of swirling air—peg rugs on the floor, an accumulation of dark furniture.
“You’re not one of the bike boys,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Come through, I’ve got the kettle on.”
He followed her to the kitchen. It was a big room, light, square, tiled underfoot. Two hard chairs stood by an old-fashioned range, in front of which some clothes were drying. There was a smell of burning wood and wet wool. Mrs. Glasse hoisted the clothes away, and dragged up a third chair, manipulating it with an agile foot in a fisherman’s sock. “Where d’you find him, Sandra?”
Expecting no answer, she gave him a mug of tea, the sugar already stirred into it. Julian could not think of anything to say. Mrs. Glasse did not make small talk, or ask again where her daughter had been. He sat facing the back of the house, watching the light fade. Through an arched doorway, down steps, he caught a glimpse of a small dairy, with its deep stone shelves and recessed windows. Feeling the draft, Mrs. Glasse leaped up and closed the door. He snapped his gaze away. He had wanted to step into the dairy, and run a hand over the icy, ecclesiastical curves of the walls.
As he left the house and drove away, he noticed a glasshouse, its panes shattered; a gate, off its hinges. He felt like stopping the car, going back, offering his services. But then he thought, you can’t ask people to rely on you, if you’re going away at the end of the summer. Between now and October I couldn’t make much of an impression on that place. It would only break my heart.
After this, Julian did not see Sandra for some weeks. But in June, driving back from a friend’s house in Hunstanton on a bright windy day, he saw by the roadside two women selling vegetables from a trestle table. He knew them at once, with their white faces and long flapping scarves. He pulled over and climbed out of the car. “Hello there, Julian,” Mrs. Glasse said. She had a bag of money slung about her waist, like a market trader. Sandra pulled her woolen hat further over her brows, and smiled shyly at him.
“We’ll have strawberries shortly,” Mrs. Glasse said. “That fetches ’em.”
“Is there a lot of trade?”
“Passing trade,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Golfers on their way home, full of golf courses this place is.” The wind ripped the words out of her mouth. “In high season we get the self-caterings. I do vegetables, peeled and quartered, slice the carrots, whatever, put them in polythene bags, if they don’t sell we have to eat them. I do samphire, not that the self-caterings know what that is. We make bread when we’ve got the oven going, when we’re in the mood. I’m learning from a book to make bread into patterns. I can do plaited loaves, wheatsheafs, prehistoric monsters, frogs, and armadillos. The armadillos get a lot of admiration—but all you do is make a monster, and squash it, and bake the top in points.”
“It must be hard work,” Julian said.
“Labor-intensive,” Sandra said. “Of me.”
“We get bird-watchers, I make them sandwiches. We get that lot going to Brancaster and Burnham Thorpe, studying the haunts of Lord Nelson.”
“Early haunts,” Sandra said. “Birthplace.”
“We do goats’ milk, duck eggs. Sandra pushes it all up in the wheelbarrow. This table’s a bugger, though. We have to carry it up between us.”
