Ralph shook his head. “Sorry, I get—well, I lose my patience. I’m sure it is a mystery, to the children.”
“You’ve not been open with them, have you?”
“No.” He picked up his glass and drank off his whiskey and asked for another.
They ate their ham and chicken and baked potatoes, and he turned the conversation, from past to the present, parents to children. He was curious about her life but he could not expect her to reveal anything, when he had been so obstinately unrevealing himself. They ordered some chocolate mousse and some coffee and another whiskey, and then she said, “Better get on with the day, I suppose.”
He drove her home. As he prepared to turn down the incline to the house a police car pushed its snout into the road. Its two occupants, carefully expressionless, turned to look at Mrs. Glasse. One of them spoke to the other. Ralph waited for them to pull out. After a moment they did so, and drove away.
“It’s a good thing I don’t have a gun,” Amy said, “or I’d probably have shot that pair by now. They’re always grubbing about round here. They made sure they took a good look at you.”
“Is it because you had that trouble with your tax disc?”
She looked sideways at him. “Ralph, you gave me the money. Thank you.”
“No, I—no, forget it, I wasn’t trying to remind you or anything.”
“What it is, it’s because we do the markets, me and Sandra. They think we’re receiving. Stolen goods, I mean.”
“And are you?”
“Would I tell you if I were?”
“I would like to know.”
“For your son’s sake,” Amy said, finishing his thought for him. “Well, I can understand that. But you can put your mind at rest. Do you think I’m stupid? I know they watch me. Do you think I want to see Sandra dragged in front of a court?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“I couldn’t go to jail. Not like you. Anna must be a very brave woman, it seems to me. I’d bash my head against the bars until they let me out or it killed me.”
“If they’re harassing you, you must tell me. I can make a complaint.”
“And where would you be when the complaint came home to roost?” She smiled, to take the offence out of the words. “Come in. I’ll make us another cup of coffee.”
“Better not. I ought to get on.”
If she’d said, do come, do, it will only take five minutes, he would have agreed. He wanted to be persuaded. But she said, “Okay, I know you must be busy.” She opened the car door. “I did like that, it was a treat for me, a change. Nobody ever takes me out.” She leaned back into the car, kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Ralph.”
He said nothing. Drove away.
Three weeks passed, in which he sometimes returned. On each occasion, he made sure his son was somewhere else.
Ten o’clock, a blustery morning, Daniel Palmer at the back door: he did not like to turn up uninvited, but this morning he had prepared an excuse. “Hello, Kit. So you’re home for good.”
“I’m home for the summer,” she said.
“How did the finals go?”
She shrugged. He followed her into the kitchen. “Me and Jule have just put the kettle on,” Kit said; not ungraciously, but so that Daniel would realize that no special effort was to be made on his behalf.
“How are you, Julian?” Julian nodded. Daniel began to take off his new acquisition, his riding mac; it was a complex coat, with many flaps and buckles, and pockets in unlikely places. “Been over to Wood Dalling to look at that barn,” he said, “you know the one? For a conversion. Get four beds out of it.”
“If you must,” Julian said.
Kit raised her eyebrows at him.
Julian said, “They put in windows where no windows should be, and doors where no doors should be.”
“What do you expect people to do?” Kit said. “Go in and out of the big doors, as if they were cart horses? And live in the dark?”
“Of course, you would side with your boyfriend,” Julian said.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Look,” Daniel said easily, “I take your point, but the alternative to conversion is to let the barn fall down.”
“At least that would be honest.”
“I don’t understand it,” Daniel said, “this reverence for the original. Because it’s not, you see. I’ve looked into it, its history. The whole roof pitch was altered sometime in the 1880s. Probably that’s when it began to fall down. For the last hundred years it’s been patched up anyhow.”
Julian thought of this crumbling barn, of its roof: lichened, sway-backed, with its many mottled and graduated shades. “It seems right,” he said, “however it got that way. It’s been that way as long as I’ve been seeing it.”
“I suppose we tend to exaggerate antiquity,” Kit said. “Take, for instance, Daniel’s coat.”
“Make sure you do it properly, then,” Julian said.
“Are you setting up as a vigilante, Julian? A barn warden?”
