and sweaters. There were a couple of suitcases on top of the wardrobe and she stood on a chair to reach one down. She dusted the case and took the opportunity to run her duster over the other and also over the top of the wardrobe, then she moved the chair a couple of feet and gave a thorough dusting to the lampshade hanging from the middle of the ceiling. She stepped down again and glanced at her watch – time she was getting back to school. She returned the chair precisely to its place, shook the duster out of the window and went downstairs.
At twenty past one Janet came out of the front door of Rose Cottage and locked it behind her. The voices of the children in the school playground drifted towards her on the slight breeze as she went down the path into the lane.
The lane was very narrow, little used by traffic, barely wide enough for a single vehicle to pass along. The gateway of Rose Cottage offered no access for a car but this didn’t bother her; she neither owned a car nor wished to own one.
She went off up the lane at a steady pace. On her left was a pair of semi-detached dwellings, Mayfield Cottages, set close down beside the lane. They were farm cottages, also belonging to Oswald Slater.
There was no one visible in either dwelling but through the open windows she could hear the sound of radios and the clatter of pans and crockery. She walked briskly on to where the lane met the Hayford road.
On the other side of the lane, in the comer made by the lane and the road, stood a small bungalow, Brookside, built between the wars. Over the top of the trim hedge she glimpsed the silvery head of George Pickthorn, the owner of the bungalow, as he stooped over a bed of delphiniums.
At the sound of her step he raised his head and gave her a friendly wave. He was a short, wiry man, fit and active for his years. His face was deeply tanned, with a long pointed nose and a sharp chin; his expression was alert and cheerful.
She exchanged a casual word with him as she turned left into the Hayford road. A few more yards brought her to the gates of the school, a handsome Victorian building of local grey stone, standing on the left of the road.
As she walked up to the front door several children ran up to greet her, bursting with items of news, displaying treasures acquired in the dinner-hour, a curious stone picked up in the playground, a dead butterfly unusually marked. She smiled and answered but kept on her way into the building.
In the front hall the headmaster, Henry Lloyd, was standing beside a little exhibition of international arts and crafts that he’d arranged a few weeks back. He had brought a number of items from home himself and others had been lent by parents and villagers. He was fond of setting up displays of various kinds designed to bring a breath of the wider world into the children’s lives.
He was in his middle fifties, very tall and thin with an aureole of fluffy salt-and-pepper hair round a bald crown. He had a quiet manner and his habitual expression was of controlled calm.
On this warm day in late July he wore a tweed suit with a waistcoat, a watch chain draped across the front. His face, his hair, his clothes, were all in shades of sepia, brown and grey; he looked like an engraving in the front of a volume of Victorian sermons.
A boy was standing beside him, asking questions about a piece of jade-green pottery that the headmaster held in both hands, turning it so that the boy could study the elaborate design. The piece was fairly valuable; it had been lent by a parent whose father had brought it back years ago from army service in Malaya.
Lloyd turned and spoke a few words to Janet as she went by to her classroom. He never went home at midday but always took the school dinner-duty himself. His wife was an energetic woman involved in a great many local activities and she had no wish to chop her busy day in two simply in order to cook a meal for her husband. In any case it would have been a problem for him to get home and back in the time. The Lloyds lived at Parkwood, a large late-Georgian house a mile and a half from the school and they had only one car between them which Mrs Lloyd always used to shoot about on her various errands. So all in all it suited Henry very well to eat the school dinner and get on afterwards with paperwork or preparation of lessons.
Janet went on into her classroom. There were only two classes now at Longmead school and she taught the lower. Three or four children were already in the room, reading, drawing, chattering.
There were still some minutes to go before the bell would ring for afternoon school. The first lesson was Nature Study, very popular with the children and one Janet particularly liked herself. She went to a cupboard and took out a box of coloured chalks. She crossed to the blackboard and wrote on it in a beautiful flowing script: British Birds of the Garden and Woodland. The children fell silent, watching in absorbed fascination as she began to draw.
After Janet walked on into the school playground George Pickthorn stood for a moment looking after her. The first time he’d seen her was a few months ago on a bright spring morning as he was coming out of his front door to start work as usual in his garden.
‘We’re going to have a new teacher,’ the children had told him as they stopped to chat over his fence. ‘She’s going to live at Rose Cottage.’ He had heard from other village sources that the new teacher was a good-looking young woman who seemed disposed to keep to herself. But nothing had prepared him for the impact of her appearance as she advanced along the lane towards him on that first morning.
He had lifted his eyes from a rosebush he was pruning and caught sight of that finely moulded face framed by tight classical curls, that proud head and beautiful neck, that tall, marvellous figure. Like the figurehead of a sailing ship, he had thought, and that was how he had seen her ever since.
Now he gave his head a little shake and returned to his gardening. In a day or two he must start painting the neat white fence again, he liked to keep it shiningly immaculate. Tomorrow or the day after he would go into Cannonbridge on the bus – he kept no car – to buy the paint.
He ran a hand along the top of the yew hedge that stood inside the white fence. It felt crisply resilient, thick and springing under his touch; it was greening up nicely after last year’s careful trimming.
Brookside was a small bungalow but big enough for George, who was a widower. The bungalow was bounded at the rear by a field, and on its fourth side by a meadow that stretched as far as the Cannonbridge road at the top of the lane. The meadow had not been cut and the green-gold grass stood tall and plumy in the early afternoon sunshine.
The brook from which the bungalow took its name was a sizable stream some four or five feet wide and fairly deep, murmuring and rippling by, full of trailing weeds and darting minnows. It ran along the edge of the meadow beside the lane, through a culvert in the Brookside garden, and reappeared at the other side of the Hayford road.
George Pickthorn was sixty-seven years old. He was not a native of Longmead but had lived in Cannonbridge until he retired five years ago from his job as a storekeeper for a firm of electrical wholesalers in the town. He and his wife had many plans for the years ahead. They had never had any children; this was always a grief to them but the marriage was otherwise happy and contented.
Then quite suddenly, without warning, his wife died. He went up one morning with her cup of tea and found she was still not awake. She never did wake up. The hæmorrhage of some microscopic blood vessel in her brain, the doctor said; it would have been quite peaceful.
That was four years ago. It took him some time to recover to any extent at all from the shock, the days slipped by in a grey dream. Then one morning several weeks later when George opened
