‘I mean the royals. Very strange people. You never know. I bet the Queen could sleep in a potting shed if she wanted to, though. Who’s to stop her? “I’m the Queen, and I’m sleeping in this shed and if you don’t like it you can fack awf”.’
Lizzie laughed at that.
‘Finally, she cracks a smile.’
‘I’m serious, Mum.’
‘I know, darling, you have always been one of the most serious people I know. I love you for it. And I love you for coming all this way up here to tell me to stop being such a silly old cow.’
‘You’re not a silly cow. And I love you too.’
‘Moo.’
‘Stop that.’
Dennie made up the bed in Lizzie’s old room and Lizzie came to help her on the allotment for a few hours. She took Viggo on a long leg-stretch along the country lanes outside the village where they had walked as a family on Sunday afternoons, and in the evening cooked them a vegetable stir-fry for dinner which they ate while watching Emmerdale. And when Dennie went to bed that evening she didn’t have to listen for strange echoes because the noises in the house came from her daughter moving around, brushing her teeth, coming in to kiss her goodnight, and for the first time in a long time the house felt like a home again.
* * *
Marcus Overton was also having an unexpectedly good evening. He was up in the attic looking for his passport. Admittedly, this might not have seemed to be anybody’s idea of a fun evening, let alone a septuagenarian ex-schoolmaster, but Overton hadn’t been able to climb a ladder for the best part of ten years. Come to that, he hadn’t been able to get upstairs comfortably for the last two. The carer woman who came around every week had helped him set up the downstairs study as a small bedroom so that on really bad days he didn’t have to make the painful attempt at all. But this morning he’d awoken with the swelling in his joints gone, and the feeling of being pain free after so long was like slipping into a pool of clear calm water after a long day’s hike in the hot sun. He had expected to find that he’d overstretched himself on the allotment and that his knees would punish him for it, but they hadn’t. He’d taken himself out for a meal in town, then a drink at the Golden Cross – sitting at an outdoor table with a pale ale and a copy of Professor Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and not having to worry about the effects of damp or cold – and then walked all the way to his home in Greenlea later in the evening with a literal spring in his step, wondering how long this miraculous respite could last and how much further he could exploit it. It was as he stepped through his front gate and between the mock Doric columns of his front porch that the answer came to him: he would go on a holiday. To Italy.
In his long career at the chalk-face one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching young men and women had always been the opportunity to take them on overseas excursions to show them the treasures of antiquity that they would otherwise only read about or see on the tiny, ugly screens of the phones to which they seemed perpetually glued these days. Mr Overton’s Overseas Trips (or MOOTs as they became known), had been legendary fixed feasts in the school calendar, always heavily oversubscribed and spoken of with fond remembrance at Old Pupils’ reunions. The cruel irony of retirement had been that at just the age when he had found himself free to travel for his own pleasure, his body had decided that it was no longer willing to get him upstairs to the main bathroom let alone to the Mediterranean.
Yet now, it seemed, it had changed its mind, and he was determined to take advantage of this situation before it changed back again. Carpe diem, and all that. Carpe patellam: seize the knee. He chuckled as he climbed.
His passport had ended up in a packing box in the attic when the study was being modified and he’d had a clear-out of his old desk. Of course, it would have expired by now, but you still needed the old one to apply for a renewal. All the boxes up here were carefully labelled, and it was exactly where it should have been. He tucked the passport into his trouser pocket, closed the box, climbed back down to the upstairs hallway, retracted the loft ladder and pulled the cord that shut the loft hatch.
All without so much as a twinge.
He was so excited by the idea that he completely lost track of time googling destinations, flight options, hotels, and jotting itinerary notes, and when the front doorbell rang he looked up in surprise and realised that it was one in the morning.
‘What on earth?’
He put the door on its chain because you never could be too careful, even in a quiet place like Dodbury, and opened it to see that nice young lady who had organised Sunday’s garden party. Arwen – no, Ardwyn, that was it. A peculiar name but quite lovely, much like the girl herself. She was looking anxious, however, as she stood on his doorstep. It was raining lightly, and she looked damp and cold.
‘I’m very sorry to trouble you so late, Mr Overton,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got a bit of an urgent problem and I wonder if you could help me, please?’
‘Why my dear, of course!’ He took the door off its chain and opened it for her. ‘Whatever can I help you with?’
Behind her, a huge shape detached itself from the shadows of his front garden and rushed at the doorway. He glimpsed a giant of a man, a mouth snarling impossibly wide, and then a fist that
