Is there anything she can get Sarah?
No, thank you. She has everything she needs in here.
There is something about her calmness, her placidity, which frightens Dennie deeply. ‘Sarah, please, if you’ll just let me tell them—’
This gets a reaction. ‘No! We’ve been over this! What good will it do? I’ll still be in here whether it’s ten years or twenty, not that it will make much difference anyway because after the little one arrives I won’t be here at all.’
‘You need to stop talking like that. They’ll let you keep her. They’ll—’
‘In a cage? No, Dennie, I can’t allow that. I grew up in locked rooms. I won’t have that for her. I won’t.’
One of the prison officers notices that Sarah is becoming agitated, and comes over. ‘I think that’s enough for today, Miss,’ she tells Dennie. Her eyes and voice are both steel. There’s nothing Dennie can do – nothing except the one thing that she promised Sarah she would never do, and that deep down she is too scared to do, and so she leaves in a fog of tears and shame at her own cowardice and her head ringing with the confession she can’t make.
I helped.
For a moment Sarah was still there when the world came back. She was sitting in her prison clothes at that small table on the grass next to her own grave, except this time instead of a round belly she held Dennie’s old rag doll Sabrina on her lap, and then she was gone.
9
GRAFTING
APRIL ON BRIAR HILL ALLOTMENTS CAME IN A tumbling cloud of blossom and gauzy sunlight. The days warmed and lengthened, the weather woke up from winter and began falling over itself with sprees of hot sun followed by days of drenchings. From its elevated position the allotments had a view of the river ribboning along the valley, through a patchwork of fields, gleaming with pools, meres and wetlands. Curlews had arrived for the breeding season even earlier this year, and the grasslands echoed to their looping cries. The soil seemed hungry for planting – a crop sown would be springing shoots in a matter of days. Bean poles and netting were going up, tomatoes were coming out of greenhouses, and the ground was being prepared for courgettes, pumpkins and asparagus. Even the old Neary plot was defying the pessimistic older timers’ predictions and starting to green up. But the excitement was tempered with caution; there was still the threat of a late hard frost, and everybody remembered last April’s Storm Hannah that had wrecked people’s fruit cages and bean trellises and threatened flooding all along the Trent.
For Dennie it was time to graft her tomatoes. After a run of several bad years in which blight had taken a heavy toll on her harvest she had decided to learn how to graft the fruiting ‘scion’ of the plant onto a hardier and disease-resistant rootstock. The seedlings had been doing well in her little greenhouse since mid-March, and on the first warm day in April she sat out with some plastic bags, grafting clips and a wickedly sharp craft knife. She’d let them settle for a week or two before planting them out, and hopefully get a better crop this year, if the god of slugs looked favourably on her.
The Association meeting in the Pavilion bar on the first Friday of the month was particularly well attended and had only one item on the agenda: that of the upcoming VE Day celebrations. This year the government had moved the May Bank Holiday, which would ordinarily have been on the 12th of May, back four days to coincide with VE Day on the Friday before, so that the country could celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II with a three-day weekend. The topic had been raised in Association meetings now and then since the change had been announced last June, but typically it was with only a month to go that any sense of urgency began to be felt. Angie led the charge, of course, having been asked by Dodbury Village Council to come up with ways in which the allotments could contribute to the festivities, and she spent the meeting begging, cajoling and browbeating anybody who showed even a hint of interest into forming subcommittees for the production of bunting, vintage costumes, cakes, and even sandbags to give it an authentic feel. Hugh Preston and Ben Torelli were excused on grounds that, being ex-servicemen, they would be participating in the wreath-laying ceremony at the cenotaph on the village green. Then Margaret and Fred Pline, another pair of married old-timers, announced that they were going to build an actual Anderson shelter on their plot this year so that the younger generation could get a sense of what it had been like to endure the Blitz, which caused much excitement.
With all this activity it wasn’t surprising that it took a good fortnight for Dennie to realise that Marcus Overton hadn’t been working his plot. To be fair, he hadn’t been working it for the last few years anyway, but after seeing how vigorously he’d been attacking the weeds back at the end of March she’d thought to have seen him around the place a bit more. The chances were that whatever respite he’d been enjoying from his arthritis had been short-lived and he’d probably gone and made it worse for himself by overdoing it, but if that were the case then maybe someone should have been looking in on him. He was known
