Devil's Trumpet

Remember, Remember

Two years ago the greenhouse light had burned all night because Dilys Ashcroft could not bear to turn it off; now it burned because half the village had left their cuttings in it, and she rather thought that was the whole of what she had learned about grief.

She stood in the doorway of Foxglove Cottage's little glasshouse with a mug going cold in her hand and let herself look at the crowded staging. Enid's pelargoniums, taken from the old plants against the frost. A tray of Marion's penstemon cuttings, labelled in Marion's schoolmistress capitals as though they might otherwise misbehave. Somebody's fig, sulking. The salvias she was overwintering for the Green Man's window boxes because Sadie had a black thumb and admitted it freely. Condensation stood in beads on the glass, and beyond the glass the afternoon was the hard, clean blue that only comes in November, when the sun has given up any pretence of warmth and shines instead for the pleasure of showing you every twig.

The light fell on all of it and made it green, and living, and none of it hers.

In the good armchair by the potting bench — because a lurcher who has decided a thing has decided it — Wellington lay with his chin on the arm and one eyebrow lifted, greyer about the muzzle than he had been, greyer every month, and no better behaved for any of it. Hugh's dog. Still, and always, the last of Hugh. He watched her drink her tea with the frank expectation of a creature who believes tea to be a preamble to biscuits, and when no biscuit came he sighed through his nose in a way that fogged a small patch of the window.

"Don't," said Dilys, to the dog. "You've had yours."

Wellington did not believe her, but he forgave her, which is a thing dogs are better at than people.

She tipped the cold tea into the bay by the door and set the mug down and looked at her hands. Ingrained. Two nails split. A scratch across one knuckle from the rose she and Reuben had wrestled off the south wall of the manor garden last week, the great old climber that had gone feral in the empty years and was only now being persuaded, thorn by thorn, back onto its wires. Sixty-five years old and her hands looked like the hands of a woman who did things, and she found — this was the shaming part, the part she turned over in the dark and did not much like — that she was proud of them.

You are enjoying yourself, she told herself, far too much, Dilys Ashcroft, and one of these days it will cost you.

But not today. Today there was the garden.

---

The walled garden at Hemlock Manor lay half a mile up the lane and four centuries back in time, and it was very nearly finished — which is to say it was very nearly begun, because a garden is never finished, only handed on.

When she had first walked into it, the autumn she had decided to be alive again, it had been a ruin: bindweed to the shoulder, the espaliers grown out into thickets, the dipping-pool a green soup, the glasshouses star-cracked and blind. Now the paths were clear and edged. The four quarters were dug and manured and put to bed under a quilt of leaf-mould. The pears were back against their warm brick in the old fan shapes, pruned so hard it had felt like cruelty, and along the top border the tulips were in, six hundred of them, sleeping, and nobody but Dilys and Reuben Mallow knew where or in what colours, which was a secret she hoarded like a miser hoards gold.

Reuben was there when she came through the door in the wall, of course. Reuben was always there. Seventy-two, gnarled as a medlar, forty-odd years on the estate and half made of its stone; he had been head gardener here under the last three of the family and had watched the garden die and had not, she thought, expected to watch it come back. He was on his knees at the far end, forking the last of the muck into the asparagus bed, and he did not look up.

"Frost tonight," he said, to the ground.

"Hard one," she agreed, and pulled on her gloves.

That was, more or less, their entire conversation most days, and it suited them both down to the roots. She had learned, working beside him this last year, that Reuben's silence was not empty. It was full — of forty winters, of every plant that had ever gone in and come out of this soil, of names of men dead before she was born who had trained these very pears. He knew things she would take a lifetime to learn and would tell her none of them unless she asked exactly the right question, and then he would tell her only what was true. She had come to value that more than she could have said. In a village that ran on gossip the way an engine runs on oil, Reuben Mallow was a stone that did not talk, and she loved him a little for it.

They worked. The light went gold and long across the beds. Somewhere over the wall a robin held forth about its territory with the shameless self-importance of its kind. Her back ached in the honest way, and she thought about nothing at all, which is the finest thing a garden gives you and the reason people who have never gardened cannot be made to understand it.

It was Reuben, in the end, who broke it — three whole sentences, a positive oration for him.

"They'll start on the field come spring, then." He straightened, one hand at the small of his back, and looked south and down, though the field was not visible from here. "My father cut hay off that ground. His father afore." He forked the last of the muck and stood the fork in the heap. "Ground remembers longer than people do."

"It does," said Dilys.

He said no more. But the afternoon had changed shape around the words, and she found she could no longer garden past the thing that was coming.

---

It had been two years, near enough, since Thornfield Homes first hung its board on the Glebe Field, and for most of those two years the village had told itself it would be all right. Green belt. The bat survey. The badger sett. The way the water-meadow flooded every February to the middle rail of the fence. Somebody would see sense. Somebody in an office in a town would look at the map and see that you could not put ninety houses on the green heart of Little Hemlock, and it would stop.

Nobody in any office had seen anything of the sort.

At midsummer they had thought they were saved for good, when the diggers cutting the exploratory trench had turned up bones — human bones, old ones — and the whole thing had jammed to a halt while men in white suits came out from Kingsbourne and roped it off. For six weeks the village had held its breath and half-enjoyed itself, and Gideon Larkcom had stood on the war-memorial steps and told the Kingsbourne Gazette that the dead of Little Hemlock had risen to defend their own, which had made a very fine photograph.

Then, quietly, in September, with no photograph at all, the coroner's office had ruled the remains "historic" — old enough to be nobody's grief and nobody's crime — and released the ground. And in the same fortnight, as if the two things had been timed to lean on one another, Councillor Cyril Rackham had whipped the planning vote through on the parish council with a haste that had turned Dilys's stomach even at second hand, and the last strip of access along Nursery Lane — the only way a lorry could ever reach the field — had changed hands to a company nobody had heard of, and the notice had gone up on the gate.

Diggers in the spring.

That was where they were. That was the plain shape of it, laid out on the frost-bright afternoon like a body on a table: they were going to lose the field, and there was, so far as anyone could see, not one single thing left to be done about it — except one.

They were going to burn the developer in effigy on the field itself, on Bonfire Night, in two days' time. The biggest fire in a hundred years, on the very ground he meant to build on. It solved nothing. It saved nothing. It was, Clemency Odell had said, with the tired honesty that made her the best vicar the parish had had in living memory, "the most magnificently pointless thing I have ever helped organise, and I will not hear a word against it."

Dilys agreed with every part of that, including the pointlessness, and meant to be there with bells on.

---

She walked down to see the fire before dusk, because Miriam had asked her to look at the food-stall pitches and pronounce them level, and because you cannot resist a thing that large being built.

Little Hemlock had, it seemed, decided to fight — at last, and probably too late — and the field showed it. Half the village was down there in the failing light. Sadie Bunce from the Green Man was directing the placement of the cider barrels with the authority of a field marshal, the pub being now, everyone understood, the actual headquarters of the resistance, its kitchen the committee room where the real decisions were made over tea and other people's business. Marion Kettleby of the Women's Institute stood at the centre of a diagram of trestle tables that existed only in her head, apportioning parkin frontage and treacle-toffee rights with the gravity of a woman redrawing a border. Enid Purslowe — Enid, of all people, who two autumns ago had barely spoken above a whisper and now laughed like a girl — sat on an upturned crate stuffing SAVE OUR FIELD leaflets into envelopes with a licked thumb and a rhythm like a machine.

And in the middle of the field, black against the low sun, stood the bonfire.

It was enormous. It was, Dilys thought, genuinely a little frightening — a leaning ziggurat of pallets and hedge-trimmings and old fencing and one entire condemned garden shed, twice the height of a man and still growing, and swarming over its lower slopes like an ant on a sugarloaf was Danny Endacott, twenty-five years old and lit up with a joy so total it was almost hard to look at.

"Mrs Ashcroft!" He came scrambling down, wiping his hands on his knees. "Mrs Ashcroft, have you seen it? Have you seen how big? It's the biggest one there's ever been, Mum says, she says there's never been one bigger, I built it, well, I built most of it, Clive helped with the bottom but I did all the top, and we're going to put Mister Thornfield right on the very top and burn him, and —" He ran out of breath and beamed at her, and the beam was so open and so entirely without shadow that she smiled back before she had decided to.

"I have seen it, Danny," she said. "It's a very fine fire. You've a real eye for it."

"An eye for it," Danny repeated, storing the phrase away like treasure. "Mister Gideon says I have. He says I'm the best fire-builder in the whole valley." His face did something complicated then, some small cloud she did not read and would, in the days to come, wish very much that she had. "Mum's making his parkin. She always does. For Bonfire Night."

"Is she now."

"The old way. With the currants." Danny nodded, very serious about it. "He likes it the old way. It's his mum's recipe, from when he was little. Nobody else has any, only him, out of his own tin with his name on. It's a — " he reached for the word Rose must have given him — "a tradition."

"Traditions are important," Dilys said gravely, and Danny nodded, satisfied that she had understood, and went back up his mountain.

The woman herself was thirty yards off, at the edge of the throng where the light was already going, with a basket over her arm and her collar up. Rose Endacott. Fifty-four, plain, capable, entirely overlookable — the sort of woman a village files under a possessive and forgets, Gideon's Mrs Endacott, as though she came with the house. She had a bunch of something in her free hand, and as Dilys came near she saw it was rosemary and bay, cut for the kitchen, and a few sprays of the old sloe from the hedge, black-blue with fruit.

"For the gin," said Rose, seeing her look, and almost smiled. "Sloes. There's a good crop this year, on the low ground." She had the quiet, exact way of speaking that Dilys recognised because she had it herself — the speech of someone who has spent a life among growing things and learned to call them by their right names. "The blackthorn always fruits heavy the year before a hard one, my mother used to say. I don't know if it's true, but it's been true so far."

"It usually has been," Dilys agreed, and looked at her with a little more attention than the village generally troubled to. "You keep Gideon's garden as well as his house, don't you."

"Somebody has to." It came out drier than Rose seemed to have intended; she softened it at once. "He's no time for it, with all — " a small tilt of the head took in the field, the fire, the whole enormous fight — "all this. And Danny loves it. It keeps him steady, the garden. He knows where he is in a garden." She shifted the basket. "I'd best get on. There's the parkin to see to. He does like it the old way, with currants." And she went, unhurried, back toward Nursery Lane and the cold smart house called The Larches, a plain woman with a basket, and not one soul on that field turned to watch her go.

The man himself, of course, drew every eye that Rose did not.

Gideon Larkcom stood on the war-memorial side of the field with the light behind him — he had a genius for the light behind him — holding forth to a knot of villagers and to a slim dark woman with a professional camera who circled him, crouching and rising, filming. Nadia Vane, the consultant he'd brought in from somewhere expensive to run what he called the message. Gideon was sixty-three and looked ten years less, silver-maned, big-chested, his voice carrying across the frozen grass like a bell: "...and let them come with their diggers in the spring, and they'll find this whole village standing on this field, and by God they'll have to build over us —" and the knot of villagers made the low warm growl of a crowd that has found its champion, and Nadia's camera drank it in, and off at the field's edge, apart from all of it, a still, elegant, weary-looking woman in a good coat — his wife, Hester — watched her husband perform, and drew on a cigarette, and looked, Dilys thought, like a woman waiting for a train.

So many people. So bright a picture. Every one of them exactly where the story wanted them, and none of them knowing it yet, least of all Dilys.

---

"There you are." Clive Sowerby came stumping across the tussocks toward her, red-faced, delighted, a coil of firework touchpaper looped over one shoulder like a bandolier. "Come and look at the battery. Twelve mortars, Dilys. Twelve. I've buried the tubes and everything, proper. It'll be a display the like of which this valley — "

"Clive, the last time you buried a mortar tube you set fire to Marion's marquee."

"That," said Clive, with enormous dignity, "was a manufacturing fault in the shell and has no bearing whatsoever," and led her off along the churned edge of the field where the exploratory trenching had been, and where the ground was worst.

And it was there, in the last of the gold, that she saw the weed.

It had come up thick along the spoil — the raw churned earth the diggers had thrown out at midsummer and never made good — a great sprawling stand of it, waist-high, coarse-leaved, gone leggy and lax now with the frosts. In summer it would have been handsome in its rank way, big trumpet flowers, white going to violet at the throat, a smell you did not forget. Now the flowers were long gone and in their place stood the pods: green ripening to buff-brown, each one armoured all over in stiff spines, splitting at the crown into four to shed their freight of flat black seed onto the broken ground.

Datura stramonium, said the cold clean cataloguing part of her mind, the part that had never in forty years stopped naming things. Thornapple. Jimsonweed. Devil's snare. She had not seen so fine a stand of it in years. It wanted disturbed ground and it had been given a whole field of it.

Clive kicked one of the pods and it rattled its seeds like a spiteful little rattle. "Them things," he said, with a gardener's disgust for another gardener's problem. "All over the diggings, these. Come up out of nowhere in the summer. Great trumpet flowers on 'em — showy beggars — and now look. Prickly as sin. What are they?"

"Thornapple," said Dilys. "Datura. You don't want it near stock, or children — it's every bit as poisonous as it looks, root to seed. Same family as your potatoes, believe it or not, and as belladonna." She bent and turned one dry pod in her fingers, feeling the spines, and let it go. "It's a weed of broken ground, Clive. Waste places, ash-tips, anywhere the earth's been opened and left. The seed can lie fifty years and wait." She straightened, brushing her hands. "You'll not be rid of it by pulling now — the seed's already down. You want to have got it before it set, in the summer, and burned the lot."

"Fifty years," said Clive, appalled and rather impressed.

"Fifty years," said Dilys.

The sun was on the rim of the hill now, and the frost was already whitening the shadows, and up the lane behind them came a slow, unhurried tread she knew, and turned to. Ambrose Cardew, retired and rumpled and unhurried in all things, with his hat in his hand as he always carried it when the light was worth looking at, come to walk her home. The warmth between them needed no arranging any more and made no announcement of itself; it was simply there, easy as the fit of an old glove, and neither of them said a word about it because there was nothing yet that wanted saying and both of them, in their way, were content to let it ripen. He fell in at her shoulder. Wellington, materialising from wherever he had been disgracing himself, fell in on the other side.

"Devil's-trumpets, all over the diggings," said Clive, kicking a spiny pod, "never seen the like."

"Disturbed ground," said Dilys, who knew her weeds, "they love a wound in the earth" — and she walked home through the low gold light with Ambrose at her shoulder, and did not think of it again for two days, which was exactly two days too long.

The Fire on the Glebe

There is no fire on earth so loud as an English village that has decided, at last and too late, to fight — and Little Hemlock had built the biggest one in a hundred years, on the very ground it was about to lose.

It stood in the middle of the Glebe Field, black against the dark, higher than the churchyard yews: a great ziggurat of old pallets and orchard prunings and the whole of somebody's dismantled shed, and, crowning it, the effigy of Thornfield Homes in a hard hat and a hi-vis tabard with a rolled newspaper for a clipboard, lolling drunk on the top of its own pyre. Danny Endacott had built the fire. He had been building it for a week, coming back cold and glowing from the field each evening, and it showed: it burned clean and true from the heart out, the way a fire only burns when someone has thought about the air.

Dilys stood a little back from the worst of the heat and let it wash over her face until her cheeks were tight and her eyes ran, and did not wipe them. Around the fire the torches had been driven into the frozen ground in a wide ring — real torches, rag and paraffin, Sadie's idea and Sadie's paraffin — so that the whole of the crowd stood inside a circle of small flames with the one huge flame at its centre, and the effect was not festive. It was old. It was the field defending itself with the only fire it had left.

Sparks went up in their thousands. They rose fast and orange and then slowed, high up, and hung, and drifted sideways on the smoke, and went out one by one against a sky that had no moon in it, so that for a moment before each died it looked exactly like a star that had come loose and was falling to the wrong place. Dilys watched them and thought, as she was not able to help thinking these days, of frost coming, of the way ground looked when the machines had been over it, of what a field was worth once it stopped being a field.

The whole village had come. That was the thing that undid her a little, moving through it — not the fire, but the numbers. She had not seen so many of them together since the flood. Old Mrs Pettifer had been wheeled down the lane in her chair with a tartan rug and a hot-water bottle and a look of ferocious enjoyment. The Cudlip children ran shrieking between people's legs with sparklers held out at arm's length like small furious wands. Enid Purslowe, who two autumns ago would not have come to a bonfire to save her life, was manning the toffee-apple end of the trestle in a scarlet bobble hat and laughing at something Clive had said, and Clive was going red, which was as near as Clive came to happiness. There was grief in the crowd, and there was rage in it — you could feel both, banked, under the singing — but over the top of both, lit orange from below, there was love, plain village love, for a green field and for each other, and it was the love that made the whole thing so nearly unbearable. You do not fight this hard for a thing you can afford to lose.

Marion Kettleby's stall groaned. The WI had done themselves proud and then done themselves prouder: trays of parkin cut in dark sticky squares, treacle toffee broken with a little hammer that Marion wielded like a magistrate, toffee apples glistening on their sticks, a great tea-urn breathing steam, and at the far end, doing the real business of the night, the cider — Gideon's own, brought down in barrels from The Larches, cloudy and gold and strong as sin, ladled into whatever anyone held out. Dilys took a cup of tea because she was sixty-five and knew her own head, and stood by the urn where the warmth was, and watched the cider go round and round the crowd and thought, without any particular alarm, only as a botanist notices a habit, how a whole village will drink a dead orchard's worth of cider on a cold night and call it keeping the cold out.

"Parkin, Dilys?" Marion had a square already on a paper napkin, held out over the trestle. "It's the treacle one, not the oaty. Go on. You've walked down."

"I've walked forty yards, Marion." But she took it, because you did not refuse Marion at her own stall, and it was very good — black and wet and gingery, catching at the back of the throat the way good parkin should, and studded through with fat dark currants that had been soaked in something. She ate it standing, and licked her thumb, and felt better for it, and thought no more of parkin than any woman thinks of a cake she is eating at a party.

The platform was a hay-trailer with bunting on it and a microphone that squealed. And on the platform, of course, was Gideon.

He was magnificent. There was no other word, and Dilys, who did not care for the man and had never once been able to say quite why, gave him the word honestly, watching. He stood without a coat in the cold with his shirt open at the throat and the firelight on him, a big handsome ruined-looking man of sixty-three with a full head of iron-grey hair blown about, and he had the crowd the way a conductor has an orchestra — he had only to lift a hand and they went quiet, and only to drop his voice and they leaned in.

"They think," said Gideon, and let it hang, "that because they have the vote, and the paper, and the money — they think that means they have the field."

A growl went through the crowd. Somewhere near the gate a bottle broke.

"They have never," said Gideon, "stood where you are standing. On the ground. In the dark. With the fire lit." He let that hang too. He was very good. "This is the Glebe. Your grandfathers had their sports on it and your children learned to walk on it and every soul in this parish that's gone before us went across it to the church, feet first, one last time. And they think we'll let the diggers have it in the spring for a car park." He said car park the way another man would have said a filthy word, and the crowd roared, and he stood in the roar and drank it, visibly, the way the rest of them were drinking the cider — you could see it going into him and doing him good.

Then he lifted his own cup, and drank the cider too, deep, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and grinned down at them like a boy, and they loved him for that most of all: that he was one of them, drinking the same barrel, on the same ground.

Over at the end of Marion's trestle, a little apart from the WI's communal trays, sat a dented tin that plainly was not the WI's, and Dilys saw one of the Cudlip boys put out a hopeful hand toward it, taking it for fair game like all the rest. Rose was there before he reached it — gentle, quick, a hand turning his shoulder back toward the open plates. "Not that one, love — that's his, that's the currant, that's for Gideon," she said, light as anything, the way you'd head off a spill. The boy took a square off the WI plate instead and forgot it in a breath, and so, then, did Dilys.

Rose Endacott came to the side of the trailer with the tin.

Dilys only noticed because she had been half-watching Rose all evening without meaning to, the way you watch the one still thing in a moving room. Rose had been everywhere and nowhere for two hours — mending the urn tap, finding a plaster for a Cudlip child, steadying old Mrs Pettifer's chair on the rough ground, and never once in the middle of anything, always at the edge of it, doing the thing that needed doing before anyone else had seen it needed doing. Now she reached up to the trailer and Gideon, without breaking his stride, without looking down, put out his hand, and she put the tin into it.

It was an old tin, dented, its paint worn to a ghost of red, and it had his name on it in white enamel gone yellow — G. LARKCOM — in a child's-primer capital that some hand had painted a long time ago. He held it against his chest with one arm the way you hold a thing that is yours, and prised the lid with his thumb, and took out a square of parkin — darker than Marion's, denser, no oats in it, black with treacle and thick with currants — and ate it there on the platform in three bites while the crowd sang.

"His mother's," said Marion comfortably, at Dilys's elbow. "The currant one. Rose does it every Bonfire, the old way, in his own tin. He'll not eat anyone else's — I offered him mine and you'd think I'd offered him poison." She laughed at her own joke and hammered a slab of toffee. "Funny about a man and his childhood, isn't it. Great big fellow like that."

"Funny," Dilys agreed.

And it was, in its way, touching: the one soft place in a hard glossy man, the one thing he wanted made the old way by the one hand that made it, kept apart in a tin with his name on that nobody else's fingers went into. Rose had already turned away and was steadying Mrs Pettifer's rug again. Nobody thanked her. Nobody looked. The great man on the platform ate his mother's parkin in the firelight and did not, Dilys noticed, glance once at the woman who had baked it — and the crowd sang louder, and the thing was over in a moment, and forgotten, and Dilys forgot it too.

She moved on round the fire, because you did, at a thing like this; you circulated; you were seen. And going round, in the ring of torchlight and the shifting dark between the torches, she saw the whole of the village's trouble laid out for her like specimens on a bench, if she had only been the sort to read it that way, which tonight she was not.

She saw Hester Larkcom.

Gideon's wife stood apart, in a good coat, holding no cider, watching her husband on the trailer with an expression that Dilys, casting about for a word, could only call patience — the patience of someone waiting for a train that is very late and that they are no longer entirely sure they mean to catch. Gideon came down off the trailer to a wall of hands and worked his way through it, and at the near end of it he came to Hester, and for a moment the two of them stood close together in the firelight and spoke, and it was not a quarrel — that was what caught the eye, that it was so quiet. He said something short. She said something shorter. He put his hand on her arm, the public hand, the hand for the crowd, and she looked down at it on her sleeve as though it were a leaf that had fallen on her, and then she took her arm back, without haste, and said one thing more, and turned and walked off towards the gate and the lane. People saw her go. "Cold for her, poor soul," said someone. "Never one for a crowd, Mrs Larkcom." She went out through the gate and into the dark of Nursery Lane and was gone, early, and half the field marked it without marking it, the way a village files everything.

She saw, on the far bank of the stream where the ground rose and the fire lit it thinly, a slim figure with a phone or a small camera held up steady on the crowd, and knew it for the Vane woman, the one Gideon had brought in from Kingsbourne to "handle the message" — young, glossy, out of place, filming the fire and the man in front of it with a fixed adoring attention that had, to Dilys's eye, rather more of the account-book in it than of the heart. She held the camera very still. She had been holding it up, on and off, all evening, from the same bank. Getting it all down.

She saw, at the gate, kept back by the width of the crowd's contempt, two men who had not been invited and had come anyway: Damian Prosser, Thornfield's land-agent, square and pink and furious in a waxed jacket, and beside him, hanging back, Councillor Cyril Rackham, who had whipped the vote that released the field and now could not, it seemed, stay away from the wound. The crowd had noticed them. A slow jeering had started near the gate, good-humoured and ugly at once, and someone lobbed a half-eaten toffee apple that went wide, and Prosser stood in it with his jaw set and did not go, because going would have been a rout, and Rackham stood beside him and plainly wished the ground would open — the very ground he had sold. Between the two camps, agonised, went poor Freddie Quennell from the Manor, shaking Prosser's hand and then, seeing who watched, shaking three village hands very hard indeed, belonging to nobody, wanted by nobody, sweating in the cold.

And she saw Gideon slip away.

It was neat. It was the neatness that snagged her, the same way the quiet of the quarrel had — a man that size, that lit-up, does not usually move without the crowd moving with him, and Gideon knew it, and used it. He came down off his tide of hands, and let it carry him towards the dark edge of the field beyond the last torch, and there — with a hand going to his breast pocket where something buzzed against his heart — he simply stepped out of the light. She saw the blue small glow of the phone come up under his chin, unlovely, and saw him bend over it and turn his back to the fire, to the field, to all of them, and put a finger to his other ear against the singing. He was not making a speech now. His head was down and his shoulders were up. Whatever he said into it, he said it low, and fast, and once he looked back over his shoulder at the crowd he had just been drinking, quickly, the way a man looks who is standing somewhere he ought not to be. Then he ended the call and put the light away and turned round and was, again, in one movement, the lion — and came back into the torchlight with his arms wide, and the crowd took him back without ever having noticed he was gone.

Dilys noticed. She noticed it the way she noticed a plant flowering out of its season — as a small wrongness, filed, not understood — and then Clive was at her elbow wanting her to come and see where the Catherine wheels were going to go, and she let herself be led, and did not think about it. It was Bonfire Night. Everyone had somewhere to be that they weren't; everyone was half a secret.

Rose was at the WI stall now, refilling the parkin trays from a flat basket, moving Marion's toffee-hammer six inches to the left so it stopped clipping the cups. Dilys came and stood by her a moment in the steam and the warmth, glad of a still person after so much motion.

"You've done us proud, all of you," Dilys said.

"Oh, it's Marion." Rose had a low, level voice you had to lean towards; she gave the credit away as easily as breathing. "I only fetch and carry." She tucked a strand of grey hair back under her headscarf and, glancing past Dilys at the dark hedge along the field's edge, added, in the same level way, the way another woman might have remarked on the weather: "That's the last of the Datura gone over, by the diggings. Went to pod a fortnight since. Great spiny things now, poor devils, in all this cold — they'll not manage another." And then, catching herself, a small laugh, an apology: "Listen to me. Danny has me at the flower books of an evening, he does love a long name. I only potter, really. I'd not know a good one from a weed if you sat me an examination."

But she had said Datura correctly, and gone over correctly, and had known it went to pod a fortnight since, and Dilys — who had said almost the same thing to Clive in the low gold light two days ago and thought no more of it — felt only the small warm pleasure of one gardener recognising another, and none of the thing she should have felt, which was cold.

"You'd know a good deal more than you let on, I think," Dilys said, kindly, and Rose laughed again and let it go, and went back to the trays.

Danny came past just then, breathless, soot to the eyebrows, his big gentle face split with a grin, and stopped to say to Dilys — because Danny said the true thing every time, without ornament — "It's burning right, Mrs Ashcroft. Look at it. It's burning right the whole way through. I built the middle open so it would." And he looked up at his fire, at the great clean roar of it and the effigy going at last with a whoosh and a cheer, and his whole self shone with it, the honest pride of a boy who had made one true thing and knew it was true, and it was the best face on the whole field, better than the lion's.

His mother watched him say it. And here was the thing that Dilys did not see, because nobody sees the one thing worth seeing at a party: that when Danny looked up at his fire, Rose looked at Danny, and her face — for the length of one long breath, in the steam, with her hands still full of parkin — went entirely still. Not sad. Not soft. Still, the way water goes still that has something underneath it. Then Marion wanted the toffee-hammer and the moment closed over like water does, and Rose was fetching and carrying again, and everyone in the whole loud field was watching the great man come back into the light with his arms wide, and not one of them was watching her.

Rose Endacott handed Gideon Larkcom his own tin of parkin, made the old way with currants as she made it every year, and watched him eat it in the firelight with a face so mild and so complete that Dilys, had she been looking, might have thought what a lucky man he was to have one person who asked for nothing and gave him everything — but Dilys, like everyone else, was watching the great man, and not the woman who fed him.