The Lent Lily

The Second Spring

The daffodils had come out all at once, the way grief does, so that Little Hemlock woke one morning drowned in gold; and Dilys Ashcroft, who had no one to bring her a posy and never had, put on her coat to go and be glad for everyone who did.

The greenhouse light had burned till two. She had not meant it to. She had gone out after the ten o'clock news with a torch and a mug already going cold, meaning only to check the paraffin heater against the frost the wireless promised, and had stayed among the seed trays until her breath fogged the glass and the little lamp threw its warm world out against the dark. That was new. For the first winter she had gone out there to stand where Hugh had stood — among his empty pots and his labelled string, married to a man who was not there. Now the pots were full. There were other people's cuttings on the staging: Miriam's salvias, a tray of leggy tomatoes belonging to the Bunce child, a row of pelargoniums she was bringing on for the church. It was, God help her, a working greenhouse again. Hers. She had begun to think of it as hers, and the thought had crept up on her in the dark, warm as the lamp — not his light still burning, but hers.

She came in cold to the knees and found Wellington asleep in the good chair.

"That," she informed him, "is Hugh's chair." Which was a lie, and an old one, and the dog knew it. He opened one amber eye, weighed her, and declined to move, folding his long grey nose more deeply beneath a leg-of-mutton haunch. The lurcher had a genius for occupying the exact warm hollow a person had just vacated, and no shame in the world about it. She had surrendered the chair to him sometime in the autumn and only afterwards noticed she had done it. So she sat on the arm instead, laid a chilled hand on his flank, and felt the great slow bellows of him work under her palm, and for a while the cottage held the two of them and the tick of the range and nothing else at all.

The bed, upstairs, was still cold on the far side. Two years, near enough, and she had never once rolled to the middle of it. She woke each morning on her own edge with the other half smoothed and level as a field under snow, and she had stopped waiting to stop. Grief did not leave, she had decided. It only moved out to the greenhouse and let you have the house.

It was Mothering Sunday. She knew it the way she knew a frost coming — in the skin, before the calendar caught up. The fourth Sunday in Lent, refreshment Sunday, the small easing at the halfway of the fast. The children would be at the church door with their posies. Every kitchen in the valley would smell, this one morning, of somebody being thanked. And Dilys, who had buried a husband and no children, who had never once in a full and beloved and forty-year life had a hot small hand shove a bunch of squashed primroses at her across a pew, folded the fact away as she folded it every year — small and hard and quick, the way you fold a letter you have decided not to answer — and put it in the place she kept it, and buttoned her coat to the throat.

"Come on, then," she told the dog, who was already at the door, being a lurcher, and lied about the chair.

Outside, the village had committed its annual indiscretion. There was no dignity to it and never had been; Little Hemlock did spring the way it did everything, prettily and without restraint. The lane ran down between banks foaming blackthorn, white as a boiled sheet, the first blossom out ahead of one green leaf; and beyond the blackthorn, wherever a garden gave onto the road, the daffodils stood in their gross gold battalions, and on the sills behind the little dark windows more of them leaned in jam jars, forced and paper-pale, straining at the glass. She went down through it with Welly ranging the verges, and she thought, as she thought every March of her life and could no more help than breathing: what a name to give a place that drowns itself in poison every spring and calls it Mothering Sunday.

For that was the joke of it, the joke she had married into and never tired of. Narcissus. The Lent lily, the daffadowndilly, the flower of the fast and the day, gold and nodding and got up like innocence itself — and every green inch of it, leaf and stem and above all the fat brown bulb, packed to bursting with lycorine and needle raphides, so that a child who mistook a bulb for an onion would learn, very fast and only once, the difference. The prettiest thing in England, and it would kill you. She had lectured on it forty years and it had never stopped delighting her, the way the loveliest and the deadliest so often turned out to be the very same plant, grown from the very same soil, and only a fool or a botanist could tell you which was which.

At the bend she came level with the Merridew place and slowed, the way one does at a house where someone has died.

The old nursery had been shut two years now — since the summer she did not care to think about too closely — and it wore its closing badly. The long glasshouses had gone blind, pane after pane starred and gone, and the beds behind the sagging chain-link had bolted to a wilderness, all last year's brassicas run to seed and the standing stools of chrysanthemums black and skeletal. Bindweed had the gate. Somebody's daffodils, the ghosts of an old ornamental border, had come up faithful along the front all the same, gold in the ruin, keeping an appointment nobody was left to notice. Dilys stood a moment and grieved for it properly, as she grieved for all abandoned growing things, and did not yet know — though she would, by luncheon — that the Merridew site had a new future waiting for it, drawn up in an office in Kingsbourne and typed onto a list.

She went on, and where the lane rose to the churchyard wall she did a thing she did not usually do, which was to stop again, and look up the manor drive at the walled garden.

It stood above the road, Hemlock Manor's old kitchen garden, behind eight feet of mellow Georgian brick going soft and rosy in the morning; and set in the near wall, where a door had plainly once been, was a rectangle of newer, colder brick, laid up flush and pointed hard, closing the garden against the world. Bricked up. Whatever had grown in there had been growing, or dying, for the length of her widowhood and longer, in the dark behind that wall, unwatered, unpruned, unseen. She had walked past it a thousand times and let it be somebody else's business. This morning, for no reason she could have named — perhaps only that the greenhouse light had been hers and not his — she stood and looked at the bricked-up door until Welly came back to see what was keeping her, and she said, aloud and quite crossly, "Well, somebody ought," and had no idea yet what she meant by it.

The churchyard, when she came to it, took her breath as it did every year and shamed her small folded ache into silence. The wild Lent lilies had naturalised there down all the generations of the dead, and they had come — drift on drift of them, the true small wild narcissus with its pale twisted petals and its deep gold trumpet, nodding all one way in the cold air off the Hemble, gold running between the leaning stones like water finding its level. It was the loveliest thing in the parish and it grew, every scrap of it, out of what lay underneath, and Dilys, who knew exactly what lay underneath and exactly what the flowers were made of, loved it without one grain of the less.

Someone was on her knees in the middle of it.

Connie Alder had a sacking mat under her, a trug at her elbow, and her hands in the cold ground, and she was doing what the truly happy do, which is to be entirely absorbed and to have forgotten she can be seen. She was lifting a clump of the churchyard daffodils where they had crowded themselves blind, teasing the bulbs apart with her fingers, shaking the crumbs of soil from them, and dropping the small firm ones — brown-skinned, pointed, papery at the neck — into an old onion-net looped over the handle of the trug. Beside the net stood a jam jar crammed with primroses, the pale wild ones, and a scatter of them already made up into little tight posies bound with wool.

"Morning, Connie," said Dilys.

"Oh!" Connie came up out of her absorption blinking, and smiled the way she always smiled, apologetically, as if she had been caught. She was seventy-something and looked, as she had looked for twenty years, like a woman doing her best not to take up room. "I didn't hear you. I'm making a shocking mess. But they were so crowded, look, they'd have gone all leaf and no flower another year, so I thought while the ground's soft — one has to divide them, or they sulk." She turned a bulb over in her earthy fingers, fond of it. "I do love a job you can do on your knees on a Sunday. Feels like the right sort of prayer."

"You'll have the whole churchyard replanted by Easter."

"Oh, I like to give them away." She was already netting the divided bulbs, neat and unhurried, a lifetime's small competent movements. "There's never a garden hasn't room for more. Here." And she gathered up one of the finished posies and held it out — a fistful of primroses, cold and faintly sweet, the wool binding damp from her hands. "For you, dear. You mustn't go up to the door with nothing."

Dilys took it. She had not expected to be moved and was, absurdly, and covered it by bending to it as though for the scent. Primroses have almost none.

"They're the mothering flower, really, primroses," Connie said, gone quiet, looking not at Dilys but off across the gold to the church wall. "Not the daffs. Everyone does the daffs, but it's the primrose is the tender one. Small, and it comes back, and it doesn't mind the cold." She tucked a strand of grey hair behind her ear with the back of a muddy wrist. "It's a hard day, though, isn't it, for some. All that thanking. One forgets there's people it's a hard day for." She said it lightly, to the flowers, and then seemed to hear herself, and reached to gather her trug. "Listen to me. You'll want to get on."

Dilys would remember that. Not then — then it was only Connie being kind, and Connie was always kind, in the small, self-erasing way of a woman the village kept and did not count — but later, a good deal later, she would stand very still somewhere and hear it come back to her whole: one forgets there's people it's a hard day for.

She did not remember it now. Now the vicar was coming across the grass with an armful of posies and a harried face, cassock hem darkened with dew.

"Dilys! Bless you, you've been given one — Connie's, I see, good — I've run clean out and there are three families still to — " Clemency Odell pressed a spare posy into the hand that already had one, out of pure overflowing habit, and did not notice. "Will you be at the hall? Say you'll be at the hall. Marion's on the warpath about numbers."

"I hadn't thought — "

"You have now," said Marion Kettleby, arriving.

Marion arrived the way a summons arrives, and had clearly been arriving toward this sentence for some minutes. She fell in beside Dilys with the air of a woman docketing a resource. "The Mothering Sunday luncheon, Dilys. The WI. Twelve o'clock in the hall. We are stretched, everyone is stretched, and it is no good pretending you have a family Sunday dinner to see to." A small, not unkind pause, delivered like a place setting laid just so. "Since you've no one to cook for, dear, you may as well come and be useful to those of us who have too many. You can see to the teas."

"How lovely," said Dilys, "to be wanted for my urn."

"Precisely," said Marion, missing it entirely, or choosing to, which with Marion came to the same thing and was half of why Dilys had come, over three years, almost to like her. "Twelve o'clock. Do not be early — Beryl will be there being impossible about the soup, she is always there being impossible about the soup, and there is no sense two of us — "

And here the morning, which had been a spring morning, acquired its engine.

You heard Beryl Verrall before you saw her, the way you hear a low-flying aircraft: the church notice-board rattled with it. She came down the path from the lych-gate at full sail, seventy-six years old and built like a buttress, correcting the world as she came — the daffodils in the porch urns were crammed, whoever had done them wanted their eyes tested; the fête sub-committee had put the bring-and-buy against the sun again; young Katie Bunce was to take her elbows off the wall, walls were not for leaning on. She scattered the loitering as a stone scatters sparrows. Clemency's face did a complicated thing and set into professional welcome. Marion drew herself up half an inch. Connie Alder, on her knees among the gold, went very quiet and small and busy with her netting, and did not look up, and Beryl swept past the kneeling woman as one sweeps past a garden roller — a thing that is simply there, and does not signify.

"Well," Beryl said, planting herself, foghorn set to carry to the water-meadow. "You've heard, I suppose."

Nobody had heard anything. That was the point of Beryl; she supplied the news and the verdict on it in the same breath, and left you no room to have had an opinion first.

"Thornfield," she said, and let the word sit there like a dropped plate. "They've filed. Gone in with it — the whole application, chapter and verse — the Glebe Field, the water-meadow, the Merridew ground, the lot. It'll be pinned to that board" — a jerk of the head at the church notice-board — "by Monday morning for anyone with eyes to read it. Houses. Forty of them, they're saying, though you may double it before they're done." She looked round the little frightened cluster of them with a kind of terrible satisfaction, a general who has at last been given her war. "So. That's where we are."

"Surely," Clemency began, "there's a process — a consultation — "

"There is a process," said Beryl, "and I mean to be the worst part of it." Something in the set of her jaw at that moment was, Dilys had to grant her, magnificent; whatever else the woman was — and she was a great many things, and had made a district weep at desks and hospital beds for fifty years doing them — she was the one soul in Little Hemlock entirely unafraid to stand in the middle of the lane and shout a developer down, and everyone standing in the gold that morning knew it, and knew they would need her, and could not for their lives like her. She had been at the parish council, at the WI, at every good cause the village mustered, the loudest voice and the hardest, and she gloried in it. She was also, Dilys noted, standing directly over Connie Alder without appearing to know the woman was there at all; and as she turned to go she said, over her shoulder, to Connie, in a lower register that did not carry past the three of them — a dry, private, gloating little aside, meant to land and be dismissed — "Still at your bulbs, Constance. You'll want to keep an eye on what comes up. One never knows what one's dug in." And she laughed, once, without warmth. Connie's hands stopped in the net. Then Beryl was moving again, war declared, and the moment closed over like water, and nobody thought about it, least of all Dilys, who took it for Beryl being Beryl, which was all anybody ever took anything of Beryl's for.

"She's not wrong, worse luck," Clemency murmured, watching her go. "We'll want her. Heaven forgive me, but we will."

"You'll want everyone," said a cheerful young voice, and PC Owen Fettiplace came up the path in his off-duty jacket with a posy of his own — for his mother, over at Ferny Bank, Dilys knew — and a look about him she could not place, some new thing he was carrying carefully, half pride and half fright. "Morning, Mrs Ashcroft. Big morning. Did you hear about the — " He caught himself, glanced at the retreating buttress of Beryl, and grinned. "Not that. I've — well. I'll tell you tomorrow. It's not settled." He touched the posy to his cap like a salute and went on up to the door, and Dilys thought, now what's that boy got himself into, and let it go, because the bells had started, and the children were forming their scramble at the porch, and Connie was gathering her trug and her net of clean brown bulbs, and it was, after all, only the loveliest morning of the loveliest spring the valley had had in years.

She went in and sat through the service with two posies in her lap — Connie's and the vicar's — and no one to give them to, and when the children went up she looked at the daffodils on the altar and thought about nothing at all, very hard, which is the only way that works. Afterward she meant to go straight home, make a soup, keep her head down, and let Marion have the teas and Beryl have the war.

She got as far as the lych-gate.

"They've filed," said Beryl Verrall, to the whole lane at once, in the voice of a woman who has never in her life been asked to lower it, "and I mean to see every last one of them in the ground before they lay a brick on that field." And Little Hemlock, which feared her and needed her in exactly equal measure, did not yet know that of the two of them — Beryl and the field — it was Beryl who would be in the ground by Easter.

Beryl's Own Onions

There is no institution on earth so gentle in its manners or so absolute in its cruelties as a village Women's Institute the morning of a luncheon, and Little Hemlock's was preparing to feed itself with the grim efficiency of an army that has never once lost a war it started. Dilys Ashcroft came in out of the gold March light through the double doors of the village hall and stood a moment on the mat, letting her eyes adjust and her ears take the temperature, which was, as ever, a degree or two below open hostility.

The hall smelled of scrubbed pine and warm pastry and — under it, and over everything — of narcissus. Somebody had put daffodils everywhere. They stood in jam jars along the sills, in a copper jug on the piano, in a fat white bowl on the trestle by the tea urn where they had no business being and would be moved within the hour by a woman who had opinions about bowls. Lent lilies, most of them, the small wild sort with the pale twisted petals and the deep gold trumpet, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, gathered no doubt off the churchyard bank where they naturalised so thickly you could not set a boot down in April without regret. Connie Alder's work, all of it. Connie was always first in.

She was there now at the far end, at the little card table pushed against the stage that was hers by long custom, doing the posies. A row of them already, tight and neat, primroses ringed with their own crimped leaves and bound with wool: the Mothering Sunday posies the children would carry up the aisle at St. Anselm's and hand out at the door, one to every woman, mother or not, which was the one kindness the day reliably performed. Connie's hands moved among the pale flowers without her seeming to look at them. She had a gardener's hands, brown and quick and sure, and Dilys, who valued such things above conversation, thought them the most restful sight in the room.

The least restful was the cake table, and the least restful thing at the cake table was the arrangement of the cakes, which was not an arrangement at all but a map — a relief map of forty years of village feeling, laid out in Victoria sponges. Dilys had learned to read it the way she read a hedgerow, by what grew next to what. Marion Kettleby's lemon drizzle held the centre and the high ground, on the good glass stand, flanked by the two safe allies of the committee. Miriam Pardoe's seed cake, honest and unfashionable, had been set a little apart with the respect due a woman who did not care where her cake went. And down at the low end, past the fairy cakes and the tray-bake nobody would admit to, sat a lemon polenta thing, glazed and rosemaried and faintly foreign, which could only be Josie Corfield's, placed as far from the glass stand as the table allowed without actually being on the floor.

"They've put her in Siberia again," said Miriam, appearing at Dilys's elbow with a stack of side plates and following her look. "The polenta. Marion says it 'eats damp.'"

"It doesn't eat damp."

"Of course it doesn't eat damp. It's the olive oil Marion can't forgive." Miriam set the plates down. "Come and be useful, for pity's sake, before somebody organises you. There's a mountain of watercress and I've hidden the good knife."

Dilys let herself be led, and let herself, against a resistance she no longer quite meant, be glad of it. Two springs a widow, and there were still mornings the empty half of the day yawned at her over the breakfast things; and then there were mornings like this one, with the light coming in low and gold and a working kitchen going full tilt beyond the serving hatch, and the plain animal pleasure of a job with an edge to it and people to do it beside. She took the good knife off Miriam and addressed the watercress. Marion, passing with a clipboard and the expression of a general who has found the ammunition improperly stacked, said, "Dilys. Thin. Beryl likes it thin," and passed on before Dilys could ask what business Beryl had with the watercress, which was for the general tables, and not, thank heaven, for Beryl at all.

For the kitchen proper — the real theatre of the morning — held two soups, and everyone in Little Hemlock knew the difference, and the difference was the whole of the morning's weather.

There was the general soup, the good green spring soup that would go out in the big white tureens to the ordinary tables and be praised and forgotten. That was Josie's. She was at the range now with her sleeves shoved to the elbow and her dark hair coming down, three great pots on the go and a rhythm to her chopping that Dilys, no cook but a fair judge of competence in any field, admired at once. Shop onions, a whole net of them, ordinary and golden and pungent; leeks by the armful, split and rinsed; the first of the year's nettle tops and a bag of frozen peas she was unashamed of. She wept steadily and cheerfully over the onions as anyone chopping four pounds of onion must, and swiped her wrist across her eyes, and kept on.

And then there was Beryl's soup, which was not for the tables at all, or not for them chiefly. Beryl's soup was for Beryl, and for the head of the room, and for the greater glory of Beryl, and it was made by no hand but her own in her own tureen, the big brown-glazed one she brought from home, from onions she had grown herself and would let no other woman touch. This was not a preference. In Little Hemlock it had the standing of scripture.

"You'll not credit it," Josie had said to Dilys once, early on, before she had learned not to, "but I offered her leeks. Beautiful leeks, out of my own garden, and I offered them as a — a peace thing, you know, a gesture. And she looked at me like I'd offered her a dead rat."

Beryl was not in the hall yet. You always knew, in the same way you know a front coming in over the down, that Beryl was not yet in the hall, because the barometer had not dropped. The women worked, and gossiped, and the urn muttered, and Katie Bunce came through with two dozen glasses on a tray and set them down too hard and got told, and it was all, for the moment, the ordinary weather of the day.

Then the doors went, and the pressure changed, and Beryl Verrall came in in full sail.

She came the way she did everything, chin first and at the top of her voice, in a good coat and a worse temper, with her net of onions swinging from one hand like a censer. Seventy-six and built like a lych-gate. "Well," she said, to the room, to the county, to God, "I see nothing's ready and everything's in the wrong place, so that's all as usual." She put the net down on the end of the long kitchen table — her end — with the small proprietary thump of a queen setting down her orb, and began to draw off her gloves finger by finger, surveying her kingdom for treason.

She found it, as she always did, in the smallest and the largest things at once.

The smallest was Josie. Beryl came to rest at the range and looked into the great green pots and lifted the wooden spoon out of the nearest one as though extracting a splinter, and let a little of the soup run off it, and sniffed — or performed the sniff, for Beryl could no more smell that soup than she could smell the March morning; that was half the comedy and, though nobody yet knew it, the whole of the tragedy.

"Onions," she said, with contempt. "Bought onions. I can taste the bag they came in." She could taste nothing of the sort, but it did not matter; the assertion was the weapon. "This is a Mothering Sunday luncheon, girl, not a canteen. In my day a woman who couldn't grow her own onion had the decency not to make the soup." She dropped the spoon back with a clatter. "And what is this — this menu." She had it out of her coat pocket, Josie's careful typed card, folded small. "'Spring velouté.' Velouté. We had soup in this village before the French were let in, and we'll have it after. Who told you you could go changing things?"

The kitchen had gone quiet in the particular way a kitchen goes quiet when everyone is being scrupulously deaf. Josie stood with the colour coming up her neck and her jaw set and her eyes, already wet from the onions, gone brighter and higher. "The committee approved the menu," she said. "In February. You were —"

"I was nursing my chest in February, as you very well know, and things get slid through when I'm not by to see them." Beryl folded the card again, tidily, and put it in her pocket, taking it prisoner. "You made the soup last year and half the parish had the collywobbles. Don't think it wasn't noticed. Don't think anything isn't noticed." She turned away, which was worse than any blow, and Josie stood one heartbeat with the spoon in her hand and something wild in her face, and then went out fast through the yard door into the cold, and did not slam it, which cost her.

"Beryl," said Miriam, low.

"Somebody has to keep standards," said Beryl comfortably, and reached for her own net, and did not give Josie another thought, because Josie had ceased, for the morning, to exist.

The largest treason she saved for Marion, and she committed it in the open, on the hall floor, in front of the cake table, which made it a public execution. Marion had come sailing up with the clipboard and the toast still, apparently, hers — the little speech of welcome and the raising of glasses to motherhood that the WI chair gave every year and that Marion had been polishing, everyone knew, since Candlemas.

"I'll say the words at the top," Beryl told her, not asking, buttoning a housecoat over the good frock. "The toast. It wants a bit of gravitas this year, with everything, and no offence, Marion, but you do rather twitter." She patted the clipboard as one pats a dog off a chair. "As the senior mother-figure of the parish it falls to me. I've decided."

There was a silence you could have cut and buttered. Marion Kettleby, sixty-odd years old and armoured in a lifetime of committee, went white — not red, white, from the collarbones up, the blood going somewhere deep and cold — and her mouth opened and shut once, on nothing, and the clipboard shook very slightly in her two hands before she stilled it by main force. "Senior," she said at last, in a voice gone thin and awful. "Mother." She did not finish. There are humiliations too complete for a sentence. She turned, with the terrible dignity of the routed, and busied herself with the placement of the lemon drizzle, which did not need placing, and would be placed and replaced now for twenty minutes.

Dilys, watching over her watercress, felt for Marion a rush of something warmer than she usually let herself feel for that difficult woman. It was a cruel thing, and cleanly aimed, and — the botanist in her noted, filing it without knowing why — it had cost Beryl nothing at all.

And then there was the third thing, which was the quietest, and which Dilys would spend a great many days afterward wishing she had understood.

Beryl, sailing back toward her end of the table and her net, passed the little card table where Connie Alder stood over the primroses. She did not stop. She barely turned her head. She leaned, in passing, close to Connie's ear, and said something short and low, under the noise of the room — Dilys caught perhaps four words of it, and only because she had the trick of lip-reading a little, learned across forty years of glasshouses and machinery: your little visitor — and something after it, softer, that might have been put the record straight, and then, unmistakably, at lunch. And she straightened, and sailed on, and the whole thing had taken less time than it takes to tell.

Connie's hands stopped.

They stopped over the primroses, quite still, a pale flower held between two brown fingers, not placed and not withdrawn, and for the length of a slow breath Connie Alder did not move at all, and the colour went out of her face the way water goes out of a cloth. Then her hands started again, and she set the flower where it belonged, and reached for the wool, and Dilys, glancing away to save her the being-seen, thought — nothing. Thought only: Beryl frightens everyone. Thought: whatever it was, it was a cruelty, and Beryl deals them out like bread, and the day will be long enough without collecting them. She went back to her watercress and let the small ugly moment sink, and it sank, and closed over, and was gone.

At the range Beryl had begun on her own soup, and here the true religion of the morning declared itself. She had her net open on the board — small onions, brown-skinned, no bigger than a bantam's egg, pointed a little at the neck the way her own were and the shop ones never were — and she was chopping them with the ferocity of the righteous and dropping them into a knob of butter in the brown tureen's own pan, and she was not weeping. Not a tear. She chopped a whole netful of onions and her eyes stayed dry as August, and she said so, loudly, as a boast.

"You see?" she said, to Miriam, to Dilys, to anyone. "That's a proper onion. Grown hard, out of my own ground, none of your watery bought muck. A proper onion doesn't make a fuss." Nobody said, though several thought it, that a proper onion makes even the growers of it cry, and that the reason Beryl's did not was the same reason her stews came out like the Dead Sea and she had twice in living memory left the gas ring hissing unlit until Myrtle smelled it from the lane. Beryl had lost her nose years back — a sinus operation gone wide of the mark, the surgeon's knife or her own bad luck — and had not smelled a rose or a rasher or a gas leak since.

"Couldn't smell a kipper in her lap," Miriam murmured, laying knives, and Dilys smothered a laugh in the watercress, and did not think, either, that a woman who cannot smell her onions might not be able to tell, from a bin of little brown bulbs, an onion from something that was not one at all.

And Beryl tasted. She tasted the way she did everything, without shame and without stint — the spoon into the pan and up to her lips and back, over and over, and never wiped, so that she was seasoning the pot with her own approval as much as with salt; and she salted heavily, because she could not taste that either, not truly, and liked the bite of it on a tongue gone dull. "Wants salt," she said, and salted. "Still wants salt." She would take the largest bowl of this when it was done, everyone knew, and have it first and have it hot, and go back for a second while the tables were still on their first, and scrape the tureen at the end and lick the ladle, because it was hers and it was best and she had made it, and no power on earth had ever taught Beryl Verrall to leave a little on her plate for manners. She had her heart pills in a brown bottle by the salt, and she rattled two into her palm and swallowed them dry between tastings, the way she had for years, the digitalis and the rest of it, her weak chest and her bad heart being the one dominion in which even Beryl bowed to a higher authority, and complained of it.

"Mrs. Ashcroft?"

She had not heard him come up. PC Owen Fettiplace stood a pace off with his helmet under his arm and his ears going pink, having plainly slipped in the yard door past the departed Josie, and he had the look he got when he had a thing to say and no idea in the world how to begin it. Twenty-six and still, to Dilys, somehow twelve.

"Owen. Come to arrest the polenta? Marion would sign the warrant."

"No, I —" He turned the helmet a half-circle in his hands. "I wanted — you'll not say anything yet, only I had to tell someone, and Mum's no good, she'll only tell the shop." He drew a breath. "They've put me up for CID. Detective branch, over at Kingsbourne. DS Tolley put my name in. There's a board next month." The words came out in a rush and then he stood there holding them, looking at her, wanting her to tell him what he felt about it, because he plainly did not know. "It's a — it's a good move. Everyone says. Only it's Kingsbourne, isn't it. It's not here."

Dilys set down the knife. She looked at his open, hopeful, wretched face, and felt, under the ready gladness, the small selfish drop of a woman being told a thing she has come to lean on may be moving away; and put that where it belonged, which was out of sight. "It is a very good move," she said, "and you have earned it, and you are quite right that it is not here." She let that sit. "You needn't know today how you feel. Feelings about the right things nearly always come in late and untidy. Mine do." She picked the knife back up. "Come and tell me properly on Tuesday. And well done. Ray Tolley is not a man who puts in a name to be kind."

Owen went pink to the hairline and mumbled and looked, for a moment, precisely as though someone had handed him a posy, and put his helmet on, and went, lighter by half a stone.

Behind them, at the range, Beryl finished her chopping and gathered the last of the little brown bulbs back into their net and carried them across to the larder, past the primroses, past the cake table where Marion still would not look at her, to set the surplus on the cool shelf where they always went, above the flour and below the window.

"My own onions, out of my own ground, done my own way," said Beryl Verrall, setting her netted bulbs on the larder shelf where she had set them every Mothering Sunday for forty years, "because I am the only woman in this village who knows a decent onion from a bought one." And nobody laughed, and nobody argued, and nobody — least of all Beryl, who could not have smelled the difference to save her life — thought to wonder whether the little brown bulbs in her net were onions at all.