Bonjour, Sophie E-Book

Elizabeth Buchan

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 497

Beschreibung

'Vividly conjures the excitement of Paris' RUTH HOGAN, bestselling author of THE KEEPER OF LOST THINGS 'Beguiling' Times Can she escape the darkness of her past in the City of Light? It's 1959 and time for eighteen-year-old Sophie's real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father, the Reverend Osbert Knox, and his frustrated wife Alice, is stultifying. She finds diversion and excitement in a love affair, but soon realizes that if she wants to live life on a bigger canvas she must take matters into her own hands. She dreams of escape to Paris, the wartime home her French mother fled before her birth. Getting there will take spirit and ingenuity, but it will be her chance to discover more about her family background, and, perhaps, to find a place where she can finally belong. When Sophie eventually arrives in the Paris arising from the ashes of the war, it's both everything she imagined, and not at all what she expected... 'Original, page turning, wonderful. I loved it.' KATIE FFORDE 'A delightful, funny, poignant story suffused with the atmosphere of Paris on the cusp of the Sixties' RACHEL HORE

Leseprobe

Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prizewinning Consider the Lily, international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, The New Mrs Clifton, The Museum of Broken Promises and Two Women in Rome. Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She is a patron of the Guildford

Book Festival and co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival.

elizabethbuchan.com

Also by Elizabeth Buchan

The New Mrs Clifton

I Can’t Begin to Tell You

Daughters

Separate Beds

The Second Wife

That Certain Age

The Good Wife

Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Secrets of the Heart

Perfect Love

Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit

Against Her Nature

Consider the Lily

Light of the Moon

Daughters of the Storm

The Museum of Broken Promises

Two Women in Rome

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan, 2024

The moral right of Elizabeth Buchan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 527 4

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 528 1

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 529 8

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Annie, Belinda and Margot, maids of Kent

PROLOGUE

The dying Camille talked to her seven-year-old daughter.

‘We had to fight but I never imagined that I would relish being a warrior. Your father was one too, and a hero. One day you will go to Paris and find out what happened to him.’

She was silent for a while. ‘Fighting for your country is important. Very. I believed in it. Not everyone did. But there’s something even more important.’

Sophie held hard onto Camille’s hand.

‘I was at liberty as a woman to risk my life for my country if I chose to do so.’

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The times she had peered through the window of the school library at the rain lashing the trees and silvering the drive, counting the terms until she left.

‘This isn’t life.’ Spreading her fingers across a pane, deliberately leaving smudges. ‘But where do I find it?’

Life. The great enterprise as she had decided to call it. She had no idea of the answers. Had no one to consult. Or rather, no one she wished to consult.

What she did understand from her reading (and many books left her baffled) was that to be alive was complicated. Also, life was often shatteringly cruel and unfair, especially if you were female, and it almost always presented an enigma.

The years of boarding at Digbys School had been spent wrapped in perpetual cold. A chill that conquered soul and body and scythed merrily through regulation liberty bodices and navy knickers and specialised in torturing chilblains. Years of a regime driven by a belief that girls were intrinsically weak and easy to tempt. Governors and teachers were clear on this point.

Sophie was sceptical.

Why, she wished to know, was it that walking down the street in an unbuttoned coat was to invite a fate worse than death? Why would the novels of D. H. Lawrence result in abject corruption?

Years of being told that every sentence must have a subject, an object and a verb, and subordinate clauses that must agree.

Sophie was not going to obey that one. Words were for play, for tossing into the air. Words equalled liberty.

Years of a school ordinance that denied life was a gift – allied with the danger, the mortal danger, of beginning to believe in it all.

She would also contend (until Hettie, her beloved Hettie Knight, insisted it was rubbish) that most pupils left Digbys, the frightful school hats still welded to their heads, with minds as fresh and untouched as the day they’d entered the place.

‘You’ve learnt something,’ said Hettie. ‘Be honest.’

Her final day at Digbys had dawned. A bas les profs. A bas school games. (Especially lacrosse. And gym. And cross-country running.) Sophie took refuge in the library, where Miss Chambers, headmistress, American Civil War obsessive and doughty adversary, cornered her.

A spare figure in the dark green crêpe dress – exhumed from the wardrobe whenever she had to see parents. Glasses dangling around her neck.

‘I wanted to have a word, Sophie Morel. You’re a moody child. Very moody. I’m here to tell you that being moody is not at all interesting, just tedious.’ She touched the hair coiled at her nape. ‘There’s no need to look at me like that. I’ve observed you often and I wanted to make sure that you understand where your duty lies.’

‘Where does it lie, Miss Chambers?’

‘In working hard for your adoptive father’s parish. He’s relying on you.’

Sophie almost choked.

‘Self-indulgence is a sin.’

Her need for solitude. Anxiety about the future. Sadness that arrived at the wrong times … all wrapped up into an insecure bundle. It could, she supposed, be termed self-indulgence.

‘A life of service …’ Miss Chambers warmed to her theme, ‘is the best we can wish for.’ She gestured with both hands, revealing that the elbows of the crêpe dress had been patched. ‘It is a gift not given to every girl.’ The zealot’s light in her eye imitated a car’s headlamps. ‘Our generation accepted it. So must yours.’

The school library would never be called inclusive. Yet its scope was sufficient (here Hettie was correct) for Sophie to have discovered from its volumes that there were levels of understanding of any one thing. That beauty was relative, and many perils ringed humanity.

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

‘Not perhaps,’ countered Miss Chambers.

Sympathy … well, a sliver … for the older woman watered down Sophie’s indignation. Miss Chambers had a top tragic story. She had waved a fiancé off to the war from which he had never returned, leaving her to become another statistic. Drama. Heartbreak. Love … each year a new set of girls feasted on it, embellished it, including the tear-inducing (almost certainly mendacious) detail of Miss Chambers searching for his remains on an Italian battlefield. ‘Obviously,’ said Hettie, ‘she had to find some way of making her life mean something. There’s a limit as to how many times she can read the Gettysburg Address.’

Hettie was of the belief that the state of matrimony was the Alpha and Omega.

Sophie was not.

Her views on marriage derived from observing her adoptive parents, the Knoxes. ‘Do husbands and wives,’ she consulted Hettie, ‘always sleep at opposite ends of the house? Osbert and Alice do.’

Hettie was unsure, offering up only that her father was particular in his habits and had a separate bathroom. Did that make things clear?

‘All the same,’ said Hettie, who, as the time to leave Digbys grew closer, was increasingly preoccupied with romantic love (the bliss) and marriage (settled status, a house, a porcelain dinner service). ‘It must be awful to have no love.’

Sophie thought she would settle for someone who greeted her in the mornings.

‘The Reverend Knox,’ Miss Chambers was saying, ‘may not be your father but he and Mrs Knox have spared no effort and expense to give you a good, solid foundation. You will be working alongside them to help out in the parish.’

Sophie possessed no solid qualifications, partly because of the paucity of Digbys’ academic ambition for its girls, partly because she had been either too angry, too sad or too contrarian to extract anything that might have been useful from the dull lessons. Yet, as she wrote in her private notebook, this did not mean she was stupid. It did not mean the emptiness she so often experienced would not be filled.

Miss Chambers was growing impatient.

Digbys had been founded with the best of intentions, which was to give girls of good families, but slender means, an education. The staff strove to provide it, and no one doubted the governors, but without a substantial endowment it was always going to be an uphill battle. Equipment and resources were limited. Many of the staff appeared to suffer from low spirits.

‘We did our best for you, you know,’ said Miss Chambers.

Now or never.

‘But girls don’t get the best. What you teach us is less … strong, less ambitious, than what boys are taught.’

Miss Chambers flushed painfully but did not disagree.

‘What about science and logic and proper mathematics? Learning to argue.’

‘Sophie Morel, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Isn’t that the point, Miss Chambers?’

‘What you’ve had here is better than thousands of children in this country have had. You would do well to remember that.’ The fob watch pinned on her bosom rose and fell. ‘Time to go.’ A raised, expectant eyebrow.

Rebellion now ignited.

After all, and after everything, Miss Chambers was expecting to be thanked. But six years of rage and despair had blunted finer feelings, softer feelings, and Sophie had no thanks to offer.

A final glance at the window where she had dreamed and yearned. For what? She was never sure.

Turning to look back at the door, she saw her ingratitude had found its mark on Miss Chambers’ unpowdered, disappointed features. At the last minute, not so much pity but manners triumphed. ‘Thank you, Miss Chambers.’

Hettie was waiting on the steps leading up to the school entrance when Sophie emerged through the doors, carrying her suitcase. ‘You’re late.’

Younger girls clattered past down the steps and ran to greet waiting parents. Dazed, perhaps, at the prospect of their adult lives now upon them, some of the leavers took the steps more slowly. Some of them, Sophie noted with incredulity, wept.

Hettie had changed into what Hettie’s mother called a costume. Light grey flannel skirt and matching jacket, the lapel of which sported Digbys’ leavers badge, plus a virginally modest string of grey river pearls. Stockings and lace-up shoes replaced the regulation sandals and long socks.

But for the perm, Hettie had turned into her mother.

‘You look nice,’ said Sophie, adjusting to this new version of her friend.

‘I’m sorry you don’t have anything new.’ Hettie was embarrassed. ‘I wish I could buy you a frock.’

This was Hettie all over. Generous, and wishing things to be well and plentiful but without the means to achieve these goals. Neither of them had any money. The well-off Maurice Knight had promised an allowance to his daughter when she left school, but not quite yet, so there was no help there. Sophie had no money at all. Dommage, as she had learnt from Camille, her French mother.

‘I’ll send you a frock. Then a rich man will see you. Fall in love. Marry you and take you to Paris.’

Sophie was eighteen, would be nineteen in September – ‘Autumn babies are the best,’ said Camille. ‘Harvest babies.’ Hettie was about to be eighteen. Both knew they were infants in worldly experience. Talking, talking endlessly about the next big step, they had not the least idea how to take it.

Sophie made the usual answer. ‘I won’t be needing clothes, remember?’

The joke was that, on leaving, Sophie would join a nunnery, thereby solving the conundrum of her future.

‘Think of your knees,’ said Hettie. ‘All that praying will turn them into soup plates.’

The Knight parents, having greatly economised on their daughter’s education, were planning to launch Hettie into the London season and to spare no expense in finding her a suitable husband. ‘You will need frocks. Lots of ’em,’ said Sophie.

Hettie bit her lip. ‘It’s so unfair.’

Sophie would give much not to distress Hettie. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said, heroically cheerful. ‘I’ll try and get a job. Or, I’ll write poetry and develop into a mathematical genius.’ She sobered. ‘Don’t dread the future, Het.’

‘I do and I don’t,’ said Hettie. ‘I want to get married and have children.’ Uncertain note. ‘It’s just the process of getting there.’

This was to skirt the unmentionable subject of men and the details of what they did to you in bedrooms. However, their combined knowledge of the opposite sex barely covering a postcard, this was not going to be a productive conversation.

‘We must closely observe men,’ said Sophie. ‘They can’t be that different.’

‘Yes, yes, we must. And compare notes.’

Liddy Barnes passed them with the laurelled expression of the top-form bully (worn for all her school career) still in situ on her plump, rather spiteful, features and called out, ‘Byeeee.’

Sophie looked away. Once … no, twice … she had stolen chocolate from Liddy’s tuck box. Liddy, she reasoned, had an overabundance, which, as communists believed, cried out for redistribution.

She never owned up. Never admitted it to herself during the day. Only at night when the voice whispered in her inner ear: you stole.

‘I’m not saying anything to her,’ said Hettie.

I love you, Hettie, she thought. Always will.

After her mother, Hettie was the only person who elicited deep feelings from Sophie. And it had to be love because she very often put Hettie’s happiness before her own.

Days into their first term, thunder had broken over Digbys. The rain torrented and two small, drenched figures took refuge in the chapel porch and edged together for shelter. Both were still tiny. Very thin.

They looked at each other, flinching.

‘You’re not wet, you’re crying,’ accused Hettie, hair plastered to her cheeks and her teeth, which had not yet been dealt with by the orthodontist, overbiting her soft underlip.

‘So are you,’ said Sophie. And the exchange communicated to each their respective sorrows. Grief (Sophie) and homesickness (Hettie).

‘I won’t tell.’ Sophie had already worked out that to admit weakness was dangerous.

‘Nor I.’

Shivering juniors, the equivalent of pond life. Even though Sophie was older than most of her class, having come late because of her mother’s illness, she remained ‘the new girl’ for a long time.

The term was yet young but Hettie’s tears were already a frequent occurrence – Liddy’s bullying, no doubt – and there in that wet porch they decided: We are not afraid of the others. They were pleased with the statement. Determined to believe in that bravely voiced myth. (Myths were supremely useful.) Hettie’s brimming brown eyes had emitted a more hopeful, let’s-do-it glint. As the years wore on, she got a brace on her teeth and rose effortlessly to be a school prefect. She had done well in the GCE exams and had spent a peaceable year in the lower sixth as Head Girl.

Sophie had not.

One of the tortures was the practice of the elder girls sharing dormitories with the younger ones. Hettie had been unfailingly kind and had a soothing knack and was loved by the girls who were small and frightened (much as she and Sophie had once been) but Sophie had found their tears, their despair, their homesickness too sharp a reminder of her unformed self.

The day before their farewell to Digbys, they had packed their trunks, snapped the lids shut in unison and grabbed each other’s hands. Done. All will be well. She wrote in the notebook: My psyche … Then ground to a halt. What was the psyche, exactly? A term she had come across in a book. Anyway, whatever it was, apparently it could be pulled into order and made to cooperate. She wondered about that. Years of rigid routine, semi-hunger, chilblains and ice on the inside of the dormitory windows, spent in an institution founded on the principle of ‘no’, did not make for joyousness.

Towards the end, Sophie had grown bolder.

Miss Chambers, did you ever want to do anything else when you were younger?

When I was young, Sophie Morel, I was helping to fight a war.

Hettie was incredulous. ‘Sophie, you never asked her that.’

The war was over and Hitler dead. It was early June 1959. No FANY uniforms and rationing for these leavers. Yet one or two of the younger staff clearly thought that war had shifted into another theatre. Bright, brisk Miss Leila, who had a mind of her own, had been known to declare: I’m a feminist. This electrified the staff room – so it was reported – and puzzled many of the girls, who wondered if feminism was a tricky disease.

Sophie heard it, though. Pondered it in her heart – as per Religious Studies. Thought: oh, yes.

‘I’m sorry you don’t have parents here.’ Hettie gazed down the drive at the queue of cars easing out of the main gate. ‘Your proper French parents, I mean.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘No need to lie to me, Sophs.’

‘It’s better to be on your own.’

‘You’re so brave,’ said Hettie, deep-diving into the well of well-thumbed references. ‘Like Sydney Carton giving his life for love.’

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (one big plod for the fifth form) had been a rare instance of differing opinions between them. Hettie thrilled to the idea of total sacrifice for love. Sophie thought: um, would she have agreed to have her head cut off for the wet Lucie Manette?

Odd to see Hettie gussied up as her mother. Unsettling. Distancing.

Sophie picked up her suitcase. The real Hettie was in socks and Viyella school blouse with fuzzy blonde hair escaping from its hairband.

‘We need to go,’ said Hettie. ‘If we’re to catch the London train.’

Neither of them moved.

In the drive, girls swarmed around their parents, who issued orders and admonishments. Liddy and her best friend, Roz, leant on hockey and lacrosse sticks while their parents loaded school trunks into identical Ford Prefects. Roz’s mother handed out sandwiches from a tin with an enamel lid and the two girls fell on them. Liddy’s father strolled around the bonnet and took a snorter from a hip flask.

As Osbert Knox would preach: to those that are given, is very often given more, and that was not a good thing. ‘Your parents,’ said Miss Chambers, ‘expect that their daughters’ education at Digbys will produce girls with manners, deportment and deep gratitude for what has been given to them. Manners ensure that everyone understands each other and behaves rationally,’ she added. ‘Provided there isn’t another conflict.’ Then, to hammer home the point: ‘War is a terrible thing, girls.’

Sophie observed the sleek, bossy, fussing parents – the women looked older than she expected – and their excited daughters. Goslings racing for the water.

Hettie nipped Sophie’s arm. ‘Try to look a tiny bit tragic.’

‘Why?’ The future seemed far away and terrifyingly close and her bravado was thin because she was … she was afraid.

‘You think this place was cruel …’ Hettie summoned up wisdom for the moment. ‘It wasn’t. Merely unimaginative and unloving. We shouldn’t mix them up.’

Still, they lingered on the steps.

‘Here we are then,’ said Sophie, with an unfamiliar note in her voice. ‘Ready to go.’

CHAPTER TWO

From the outside, so ran the consensus, Poynsdean’s rectory was perfectly lovely.

The principles of harmony and elegance had powered its construction. Very successfully too. Large sash windows and weathered stone implied that only serene and orderly spirits would inhabit it. However, if the rumours were correct, this had not been the case. During the swash and buckle of the smuggler era, or so Fred Pankridge informed Sophie, contraband had been stacked in the cellars, pistols in the storeroom and a bloodstain had disfigured the library for decades.

Facing south, it mounted vigilance over lush, sweet grass, tussocky marshland and, beyond that, the sea. (The sea that had cast her mother forth during the war.)

Trudging down Church Lane on a June day, cool and with a hint of rain, like so many summer days. English summer days.

Suitcase weighing her down. The future weighing her down. The Rectory up ahead.

‘Hello, Miss …’ She was passing the allotments and Fred Pankridge looked up from tying up the bean supports. Her friend? Loyal acquaintance would be more accurate. ‘You’ve left school, I hear.’

‘I have.’

‘I’ll be seeing you then for the vegetables.’

‘You will, Fred.’

To step across the Rectory threshold was to be stripped of that initial joyous appreciation. It was to enter an arena where neglect co-existed with total apathy when it came to restoring and mending. Lintels sagged, doors were incapable of shutting, floors sloped, fresh paint was a foreign concept. So, too, was comfortable living. Chairs required repair. The kitchen was sparsely stocked and the few still-operational curtains were in shreds.

Osbert did not concern himself with household matters. Alice, who in her parish work preached cleanliness and godliness, rarely, if ever, lifted a bucket or wielded soap. Trusting, perhaps, that the Almighty would get around to scrubbing out the lavatory bowl?

The Knoxes made a virtue of their domestic disorder. Out of the decrepitude, Osbert teased out his philosophy. It never does to be too comfortable. Tried and tested rhetoric to cover up difficulties. We have a roof over our heads and aren’t we all jolly lucky?

He said these things with all the authority of a man with a mission.

To be fair … did she wish to be fair? … Osbert Knox’s stipend could only just stretch to fuel and food and not much else, leaving only that authority, plus his convictions, on which to live. ‘It’s our conduct that matters,’ Osbert lectured his parishioners. ‘Truth. Transparency. Unforced worship. Humility in the face of the Almighty. Calm in the presence of your betters. Above all, never lie.’

In the main, his parishioners believed him. They wanted to believe him because he wanted the best for them. In a curious way, Sophie did too. It would make life so much more negotiable.

Stepping into the hall, she put down her case, breathing hard to counter dread.

Dust coated the hall table. The windows needed a wash. The floor tiles were chipped and grubby. The door to the sitting room (rarely used) was ajar. She knew it intimately. Inside would be: two chairs and a sofa sagging so maliciously that it was possible only to perch. A small occasional table – the showcase for Osbert’s smarter, morocco-bound Bible (cheaper versions roosted elsewhere). A piano at the far end of the room, open lid exposing yellow keys like untended teeth.

Ah, the piano.

Alice Knox’s heart may have been unknowable to Sophie, but, my God, she loved that piano. It was like a lover. Or the ideal husband she didn’t have.

From it she drew a music, sometimes sweetly seductive, sometimes skewed by wincing anger and angst, brutal and off-key, depending on her mood. ‘Für Elise’, a Chopin étude. All the obvious pieces. But above and always, Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses.

‘Listen well …’ Sophie remembered Camille saying when Alice was disembowelling it one afternoon. Her mother, her darling mother, who was already growing short of breath. ‘Les Barricades is by a Frenchman. One of us. If you listen, he will tell you who you are. You’ll begin to understand.’

She added, ‘She can’t be all bad, Sophie. There is so much yearning.’

Oh, Les Barricades. Camille died and Alice played it. Osbert raged in his den and Alice played it. Returning from her visits to Pitt House, Alice played it. At those times, magically mining its beauty and enigma. A shimmer of kaleidoscopic melody, harmony weaving and interlapping. Listening, Sophie wept. I am French and in the wrong place. I should be in Paris. Then she was comforted and intrigued. What were those mysterious barricades exactly? What did they shield?

The answers were not to be found in the Rectory.

Instead, she thought of her mother’s love. The miracle of it.

‘When your mother was alive, the house worked,’ said Osbert. Often. ‘We felt blessed.’

Sophie remembered the cleaning, the cooking, the laundering. Thankless and exhausting.

The Knoxes are stupid pigs was a regular internal monologue for Sophie in the early years. The Rectory was a bad place. Later, she corrected herself: that was cruel to pigs, who were interesting creatures. And, yes, Osbert and Alice were horrible, but not through and through. They tried to be good people. They strove to keep the parish ticking along on godly lines. They put charity before their comfort. Except in Camille’s case when they successfully married the two.

What Osbert said was true: while her mother oversaw the Rectory’s domestic arrangements, the place had been orderly and fragrant.

‘We’re fortunate that, unlike the inn at Bethlehem, we have plenty of space,’ Osbert said when he plucked the obviously pregnant Camille out of the group of exhausted French refugees being paraded in Winchelford’s town hall, before bearing her away to Poynsdean.

‘We escaped from the Nazis over the mountains. Fought for a place on the boat. Kept going. Only to be herded into a hall where people came and looked at us as if we were cattle. The English …’ Camille paused. ‘The English are bossy.’

Sophie had not understood fully her mother’s reflections. Now, she inched towards understanding. The humiliation of defeat. The weariness at the prospect of having to survive.

After Camille’s death, Sophie was left with memories of being held close. Of whispered words. Sophie, I wish, I wish we were not living here.

She looked down at her feet. School sandals rooted in the dust. Rebellion now firmly rooted. She had a goal and a mission and would not stay here. Anyway, there were things she needed to understand. The world. How it worked. Herself, and how she worked.

The door to Osbert’s study was open and the room was empty. She took a gamble and in she went.

Always she was struck by its beauty: waist-high panelling in English oak, a large paned window, gracious dimensions – an impression wrecked by Osbert’s crudely built bookshelves along one wall and the chaos of books and papers.

‘The Reverend Knox is an excellent scholar,’ Alice maintained. ‘Very respected and principled. Very deep in his thought.’

Her tone was one of perfected docility. Which, Sophie reckoned, she employed instead of a scream.

Yes, the Reverend Osbert Knox was a scholar. His edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales had academic notations, for goodness’ sake. (The story of Bluebeard and his ‘disobedient’ wife being lengthily analysed.)

The road to spiritual erudition was long and toilsome. Osbert was only part of the way down it – or so he humbly maintained – and the temptation to swerve aside to sample other delights was sharp.

Giving in, he might cast aside a treatise on, say, the consideration of transubstantiation in relation to the Anglican faith in favour of a thumping yarn. Preferably with a love story at its heart.

Sited between the sections of abstruse theology and history were shelves of historical fiction that gave the Winchelford library stiff competition. ‘It’s as well to know what the parishioners enjoy,’ he said when Sophie enquired about them. ‘These books are a gateway into their minds.’ He raised a finger. ‘But they’re not for you, Sophie.’

Osbert must have known of her book raids. The greedy reading. The stealthy replacing.

‘Ask me, Het, anything you like about the madness of Valois kings.’

‘For Lordy sake, why would I do that?’

‘Go on. Ask me about the butchery of the Wars of the Roses, the hideous infamy of Joan of Arc, the foolishness of Mary, Queen of Scots, the brilliance of Elizabeth I and the pigheadedness of Charles 1.’

‘If I must,’ said Hettie, who liked to please.

Yes, that greedy reading. In bed. At the kitchen table. Even on a walk.

Sophie encountered ‘whirling passions’, ‘helplessness in the face of overpowering feelings’, ‘melting desires’ and the supreme joy of sacrificing your life to save the one you loved the Sydney Carton finale and the hero’s option, frequently employed. For Sophie, whose own experience was limited and who was conscious of her lack of intellect, some of the more torturous entwinings of love, politics and battle could well have been written in Greek. But to be enfolded into the thrum and hum of the prose, the unpeeled emotions, offered escape. From grieving for her mother. From the push-pull, deadly tiring emotions of having to face her situation.

By her late teens, she could give Osbert a run for his money on matters textual.

(Hettie defended Osbert, arguing that he sounded rather lovely and soft-hearted. ‘Perhaps,’ she offered, ‘he has more female in him than most men?’ Sophie said she thought it might be that Osbert could only cope with love and passion in a historical context.)

‘The Good Lord be thanked.’

Berengaria’s Dilemma in hand, Sophie turned around. Osbert was framed in the doorway.

‘You’re here.’

So it began. Berengaria and her dilemma went back onto the shelf.

‘When the reverend first came, we thought him an odd fish. So tall and mighty skinny and couldn’t take the sun. But he meant well.’ So said Fred Pankridge, loyal acquaintance and king of the allotments. (The Fred who had sheltered the small, orphaned Sophie under the wing of his tomatoes and sweet peas. Gossip and Poynsdean’s history came with the service.)

At fifty-five, Osbert’s skin still went raw in the sun, and he remained skeletal, but his height was telescoping. His cassock hung in folds in the wrong places. That cassock. Always flapping. It flapped in and out of Sophie’s dreams in which Osbert Knox metamorphosed into a pterodactyl, a moulting, failing, winged raptor running full tilt but getting nowhere.

Osbert sat down at his desk, which was stacked with books and covered in papers, including several copies of The Racing Times. The mess was deceptive, as Sophie well knew. Within the chaos was encoded a paper trail which led Osbert to the exact document he wished in seconds.

‘A milestone,’ he said, still in Sunday sermon mode.

She took this to mean that he recognised she was no longer a schoolgirl.

‘A happy milestone.’ He rammed the point home.

In church, he press-ganged attention and worked to dominate his audience. His repertoire included the Dramatic Gesture, the Rhetorical Flourish, the Crackling Utterance, plus the habit of draping himself across the pulpit.

He raised a hand. ‘Time to put aside childish things and to buckle down. Mrs Knox and I have need of you here.’

She glanced at the bookshelves, the key to Osbert’s … to the thing she did not understand called the psyche?

He noted the direction of her gaze and tapped the book on his desk. ‘The King Must Die, my latest. Mary Renault. Very good, I must say. Very good.’ There was a tiny, satisfied pause. ‘Quite racy.’

His diary lay open on the desk. ‘9 a.m. prayers. 10 a.m. council meeting. Midday exorcism. 2 p.m. AGM Sunday school …’

In and out of the church, the hall, the Rectory and people’s homes. Black-clad, bustling, raptorish … He and Alice were endlessly busy about God’s plan for the world, determined to maintain a stranglehold on the lifestyle and conduct of the parish. Their energy for this work was phenomenal, their nose for sin unerring, their demands for repentance ceaseless.

‘A big change for you,’ Osbert was saying, switching to the tone he used for his confirmation classes. ‘Thanks to the foresight of your parents and the money your mother managed to bring over, you’ve been given a proper grounding.’

She thought of Poynsdean. The village green, the doctor’s surgery, Mr Seely selling groceries from the back of his wheezy van. Would it have been easier to accept living here if she had stayed in the village?

‘I should have gone to the local school.’

‘Maybe. But it was easier for Mrs Knox if you went away, especially when you were younger.’

So that was it. The casual cruelty of the remark took her breath away. ‘But this was the only home I had.’

His spread hands emphasised the point. ‘Digbys was a good school. Many will envy you. But now it’s time to acknowledge your good fortune and to repay your debt.’

‘My debt?’ For a second, Sophie took it literally.

Osbert clarified: ‘A roof over your head. Food. A bed. You could have ended up in an institution, you know. I’m sure you wish to repay us in kind.’

Summarising Sophie’s indebtedness, his gaze travelled over the let-down hem on the school dress, her unravelling plait of hair, her slenderness. The appraisal appeared to puzzle him.

‘You know, you could almost be pretty.’ Pointing to the bookshelf, he added, ‘Like one of those heroines who are rescued by a handsome hero.’

She wondered which one he had in mind. Edith with the flaxen plaits from Alfred and the Maiden, who brought a king to his knees, or Daniela in Endless Horizon, a waif working in a Victorian iron foundry who meets an escaped convict (imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread), runs away with him to Australia and ends up running a stock farm.

Osbert steepled his hands. ‘Sophie, if you are ever in trouble, or troubled, I hope you will confide in me. Yes?’

No.

‘I have a lot of experience, you know.’ Pause. ‘In listening.’

Silence.

‘I want to be of help. Children are different now. Less easy. It’s our duty to help you into adult life and we’ll do our best to understand how you feel.’ He raised a whiskered, prawn-like eyebrow. ‘You haven’t lived here all these years without Mrs Knox and I becoming fond of you, you know.’

He picked up a copy of Girl magazine that was lying on his desk. ‘I don’t approve of these things but Mrs Mead thought you might like it. Her granddaughter left it behind.’ He held it out. ‘I took a look and it surprised me. It shows girls performing good, useful tasks. I recommend “Susan Cooks up a Storm”.’

Osbert’s right shoe was done up with string, a combination that pretty much summed up this mad household. ‘I’m too old for a comic,’ she said.

‘We’re looking forward to you taking over the running of the house. If you are anything like your dear mother, then our future together will be good. When she was in charge, all was orderly. Like God’s kingdom. And fragrant. My goodness, how the Rectory smelt of polish and fresh bread. And it shall be again.’ He addressed the string shoelace. ‘Well, well. You’re here and we’ll get on famously. Go and say hello to Mrs Knox. She’s waiting for you.’

CHAPTER THREE

When not consumed by her parish duties or playing the piano, Alice retreated to the command centre of her bedroom, which Osbert did not frequent. The ousting had happened early in what they persisted in terming ‘their union’, news of which quickly leaked into the village, providing excellent gossip. If anyone was daring enough to ask why, Alice cited a list of maladies, which included insomnia and neuralgia. Only cope-able with if she slept alone.

Osbert had never been heard to comment.

From the bedroom, Alice issued directives to do this or that but did not appear to notice – or perhaps care – if they fell on deaf ears. It was an open secret that anything achieved domestically in the Rectory happened in spite and not because of her.

The younger Sophie had thought Alice dead lazy. The older Sophie came to admire her fieldcraft. Alice was brilliant at doing exactly what she wished and masking it. Her inadequacies as a housekeeper were mulled over in detail in the village. Never lifts a finger. The state of the place. But Alice easily ducked the critical arrows, never, ever referencing the muddle in the Rectory or her lack of culinary skill. If a cupboard door could shut on her failed attempts to keep supplies replenished, then there was nothing to discuss. As a cook who believed green vegetables should be boiled for an entire morning, there was nothing to discuss there either.

Resembling small, exhausted creatures, two scuffed, well-worn pairs of shoes had been abandoned outside Alice’s bedroom, waiting for someone to deal with them. Sophie, in fact.

She knocked.

‘Come.’

Reluctant, filled with dread, she obeyed.

The double bed, complete with sagging mattress, dominated the room. (In the days Osbert had been in occupation, bodies must have rolled together.) A handle on the chest of drawers was broken. Skimpy green curtains barely deflected the draughts from the sash windows.

All was as it ever was.

Except for – and this was a huge difference – a mirror. In the entire rectory there was only a single small shaving mirror in the bathroom. Alice disapproved of them. ‘Vanity and worldliness, Sophie Morel. Sins that corrode.’

But now a handsome one with a gilt frame colonised the chest of drawers. Foursquare in front of it was Alice, adjusting a confection on her head resembling a dead animal.

The kinder Hettie said that Alice hated looking at her reflection because she was in despair at her lack of pretty things. Unkind Sophie said it was because Alice’s skin was the colour of semolina.

Loathing someone demanded time and energy. Those were not always to hand and the younger Sophie wrote ‘I hate Alice Knox’ ten times on a piece of paper, cut it into strips and hid them in her clothes and her books. The exercise kept up momentum.

‘You’re ugly, ugly,’ ran one of the playlets written and enacted in her head. (The playlets helped her to sleep.) This was directed at the fictional Alice, who then shed copious tears. Sophie refused to lend her a handkerchief. Victory achieved, Sophie was free to drift off.

The older, wilier, teenager fashioned sharper verbal missiles – you’re not my mother. I will never call you Mother, designed to be spat out in a cold, cold voice. Escalation of warfare culminated in even more savage invective: You are barren like the woman in the Bible …

All unvoiced, of course.

‘I thought you would never get here,’ Alice was saying. ‘You must be in the church by three o’clock. The six-year-olds require supervising for Bible class.’ She poked at the thing on her head. ‘Should I say welcome home?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Sophie.

Alice swung around. ‘Well, here you are.’

The frown lines in the pale face had deepened and there was a suggestion that the stick-thin Alice had put on weight around her middle. She was wearing her blue-flowered blouse, her one concession to colour and pattern, exhumed on special occasions from the chaos of her cupboard.

Sophie knew enough to realise that the blouse was not to celebrate her return to the fold. Neither was the dead animal, which turned out to be a brown felt pillbox hat.

‘New hat?’

‘Not exactly.’ The reply was sharp.

Almost certainly this meant it came from Dilly Harlip’s second-hand clothes shop in Winchelford. Poynsdean’s women talked of its proprietor’s taste and resourcefulness but there was an unspoken agreement never to mention that the merchandise was pre-worn.

‘The reverend gave me a pound and instructed me to buy something new.’

A defensive edge.

‘Ah.’

‘I’m lunching at Lady Pitt’s.’ She waited for Sophie’s response; when it did not materialise, she added, ‘I’m owed a little light enjoyment, you know.’

Sophie waited for the backlash from Alice’s conscience which inevitably followed.

‘You think I should not take hospitality from those who live on the toil of others.’

‘I don’t think anything,’ said Sophie.

Untrue. In a few minutes, the newly be-hatted Alice would mount her bicycle and pedal away into a terrain that did not come under Osbert’s jurisdiction, and Sophie thought the better of her for it.

The outings to Pitt House nourished Alice for months. Sometimes years. There would be wistful references to dazzling linen tablecloths, cake stands and marquetry tables, plus lengthy descriptions of the flower arrangements. All of which suggested that Alice’s pursuit of spiritual strength and social equality was cast aside the second she stepped across the Pitt threshold.

Sophie puzzled it over. Was it possible that beneath the dogged egalitarianism lay an elitist? Did Alice suspect this of herself?

At the very least, to expose Enid Pitt’s indirect sway over the Rectory would be pleasurable, if only to take revenge on her dictate that boiled cabbage was good for the bowels and should be eaten at least four times a week.

The less critical, kinder bit of Sophie understood. Pitt House was an escape. An elegant one with many seductions. Alice, she wrote in her notebook, was a woman whose fate was to be nailed to the door of parish duties, which meant she must never admit to the yearnings seething within her awkward bosom.

‘Lady Enid was having the maids’ quarters refurbished and said I should take this mirror. It was going to be thrown out, would you credit it? She believes a woman should have a good mirror.’ She patted her hair. ‘She also agrees that it’s time you took over some of my duties.’ Another pat. ‘She has a saying, “start as you mean to go on”.’

Sophie leant back against the door. ‘If Lady Pitt says so.’

Alice sent her one of her looks. ‘Did that school of yours teach you to be cheeky?’

No answer was required.

Alice’s balding hairbrush rested beside the nail scissors that had been deployed against Sophie many times. Brutally.

Alice picked them up. ‘Show me your hands. I don’t want you going to church with those long nails of yours.’

Sophie kept her hands at her sides. The days of inspection were over. Yes, they were. Definitely. ‘My nails are fine. No need.’

For once, Alice did not go into battle. ‘I see.’

Sophie’s mood hitched up a notch.

‘Bread and Spam in the kitchen,’ said Alice. ‘Make yourself a sandwich and don’t be late.’

She caught up a balding powder puff. Glared in the mirror. Made a pass across her nose, the resultant coating of pale orange on her pallor giving it a waxy bloom. She tilted her head to get a better look at her unfamiliar reflection and the dead animal was re-sited at the back of her head. ‘You don’t wish to be here, I daresay. The reverend imagines you do, but that doesn’t fool me for a second.’

‘I’ll have to leave,’ said Sophie.

‘And how would you do that? Girls don’t just wander off. Not unless they’re no better than they should be.’ She blew a trail of orange powder onto the floor. ‘It was your mother, I suppose. Talking about Paris.’ Her gaze raked over Sophie. ‘We had to remind her that where she came from was of no interest to us.’

Twenty-five years previously, Alice had been perilously close to thirty with no obvious future when Osbert rode into town and claimed her for his wife.

‘This is 1959,’ said Sophie. ‘Things have changed. Girls can get jobs and pay rent.’

‘Respectable girls? Sophie, sort out the wheat from the chaff in this matter. Or try to.’ Soft but incisive. Intending to wound. ‘Do any of your smart schoolfriends plan to live independently? No, I thought not.’ Alice folded and refolded a handkerchief. ‘Most of them will stay at home until they marry.’

‘Aren’t we free to choose what we do with our lives?’

Alice flicked a glance at the mirror.

‘Don’t you think, Mrs Knox? Don’t you think that’s right?’ Sophie persisted.

‘And does freedom buy bread?’ Alice stowed the handkerchief up her sleeve. ‘We’re not free. God has a plan and it’s useless to try and avoid it. And the plan is for you to help us here, in the parish. That’s why we took you in.’

‘But I’m not a slave. Any more than you are, Mrs Knox.’

‘You’re very foolish, Sophie Morel.’

And yet Sophie knew that Alice knew that, if the truth was made flesh and spoken, she would agree they occupied the same trap.

‘You’re not yet twenty-one and the reverend still has authority over you.’

After Camille had died, social services had arrived with papers to be signed. Sophie was seven years old – actually, nearly eight and as well versed in grief as any adult, but there hadn’t been any question of objecting.

Sometimes, and as part of a mental exercise that she considered useful for sharpening her mind, Sophie urged herself to adopt a different perspective. The Knoxes had been kind to a grieving, pregnant refugee on the run. ‘They didn’t object when I told them I was having you.’ Camille held Sophie close and spoke in French. ‘They said if I worked at the Rectory they would keep us both. You see, they needed us. It was … dégueulasse … disgusting here. They wanted … how to say it? They yearned to be clean.’

‘Why can’t we be with Father?’

An ever-present grief surfaced. ‘Your father is in Heaven.’

‘Did he want to go to Heaven?’

‘Not then. Later, when he was old maybe. But he and I and the others knew we had to fight for France.’

‘Do you like living here?’ she asked Camille.

‘It’s a place of safety. No more than that.’

Camille told her how every drawer and cupboard in the Rectory had been filled with discarded items when she first arrived. In the kitchen were scraps, rusting pans, broken buttons. A teapot with no lid. A cup minus a handle. It was the mess of two people who understood the spiritual life but had not got the hang of the temporal one.

‘When I was growing up in Poitiers with your grandparents, we were comfortable.’ Camille did not often refer to her childhood because it was upsetting. ‘We had Marie, who did the cooking, and Agnes, who looked after our clothes. On Sundays Marie made me hot chocolate in a special cup and I drank it at the kitchen table with a lace napkin. I think about that chocolate a great deal. Everything was tidy and clean. But you mustn’t ever say that we talk about how messy they are here. It would hurt their feelings.’

In the rare interludes when Camille felt better, she talked about Pierre. ‘He was tall, like you are going to be. He had an interesting face. I teased him that his mouth was too big. He was a serious person who thought about what was going on in the world. He loved paintings. He had a temper. But I never minded. He said he was lucky to be married to someone who had turned out to be a warrior.’

She told stories of Paris. ‘By the time I escaped Paris, most people knew someone who had been arrested. We lived in a city of secrets. We had to devise new routes through it. Keep to the back streets, the darkest alleys, we instructed each other. Nowhere was safe …’ She drifted off. ‘The Nazis burnt paintings. By Picasso and Ernst … they thought them degenerate. That made your father so angry.’

Sophie memorised the word. Degenerate.

Her seven-year-old imagination built a Paris of tall towers, a shining river and lots of dogs. She wanted to include magic swans and horse-drawn chariots but her mother never mentioned those.

Towards the end, Sophie clutched her mother’s skeletal hand.

‘Do you think Father is in Heaven?’

Longing was etched on her mother’s face. ‘If you believe in Heaven, he’s there.’

‘Did bad men kill him?’

‘You must find out.’

‘Where is Heaven?’

‘That’s for you to discover. That will be your adventure.’

‘How?’

But Camille was slipping towards the perilous boundary between life and death and did not answer.

Her mother died.

Sophie had to continue breathing. She had to eat, walk, speak. Looking back, she was not sure how she managed any of those things.

Osbert and Alice informed Sophie that Time Healed. ‘My dear …’ To his credit, Osbert was genuinely grieving. ‘It is a great loss. But I am here to tell you the Lord ensures that we get over our losses.’

The Lord did nothing of the sort.

Her mother had been an exile. Homeless. Widowed. Struggling. Without her French family.

She had loved Sophie. ‘My adorable, beautiful daughter. I must kiss you all the time.’

However, there was no denying that life did go on. Memories of sheltering against her mother’s flank – Camille the warm, silky doe. Memories of her hand being held. Of the piercing cry Sophie had uttered when Alice crept into her bedroom to inform Sophie her mother had gone. These remained, but much else faded.

The missing metamorphosed into the conviction, almost religious in its intensity, that Camille was still with Sophie. Close closeted. Watchful. Loving.

At school, Sophie added what information she could glean to her scanty stock of war knowledge. France invaded. Paris occupied. Paris liberated. Why had Camille chosen to talk about hot chocolate rather than the events that had washed her up at the Rectory? Older and wiser Sophie understood that it was precisely the recollection of small, domestic details that made it possible for exiles to survive.

Camille also said, ‘I fought for liberty. So must you.’

‘You must clear up her things, you know,’ said Alice, a few weeks after Camille died, shuddering at the thought of doing anything so practical. ‘My strength is limited and I have to keep what energy I possess for the parish.’

Camille’s bedroom had been at the top of the stairs that led to what had been the servants’ quarters and her presence lingered in it. In the folded blouse, the mended skirt on a hanger, lisle stockings rolled up into nests. Then there was the letter, containing a second letter, that she discovered in the linen nightdress case.

The first letter was to Sophie from her father, carried by Camille into exile.

You are not yet born but I think of you all the time. Who and what you are is still a mystery. But I love you and your mother, which is why I sent both of you away. This is my message to you if I do not survive.

The second was from her mother.

I had hoped that you would never read this but the time has come. My experiences have taught me that the unexpected and disastrous can happen, and they have. This is written with great love, Sophie. Always remember that.

How did we end up in Poynsdean?

I fought in the Paris streets with your father until it became too dangerous. You were on the way and he wanted me to go. I didn’t. In the end, I arranged to be smuggled out of France and ended up here in Sussex.

Your father was killed when Paris was liberated. He had survived the war but I will never know if it had changed him. But I imagined him thinking that we would all be together and we would be a normal family.

But I had you and I was becoming ill. I decided to stay here where I had work and a roof over our heads. I also concluded I might as well be miserable in this strange English village as in Paris. It gave you a home and I couldn’t be sure of that if I returned to France.

Sophie, there is the money that I brought over with me. It was your father’s – he made it selling paintings. I told the Knoxes it was to be spent on educating you.

Take what is left and use it to give yourself opportunities. You will have to be cunning because the men like to take charge, they like to dictate. But I have learnt you can depend on no one except yourself. You must be independent of spirit.

Faith, any kind of faith, has been hard to keep. Who knows what happens after death. Somehow, somehow, my beloved daughter, I know I shall be with you throughout your life. Watching over you, I suppose. When in good time you die, I will be there. Waiting. And your father, too.

I am writing in French, which means there’s every chance it will remain private. The English are terrible at languages – they are islanders, and islanders are peculiar.

These letters were the most precious things Sophie possessed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kitchens. Arenas of torment and torture. Designed to bury women.

‘Don’t be so extreme,’ said Hettie. ‘Some women love their kitchens.’

This one was in a hideous state. Smelling of mould.

Hand on hip, Sophie assessed the field of battle.

Unwashed pans in the sink. Food droppings. Drying-up cloths so stiff with dirt they begged Sophie to burn them. The walls needed washing, the chair seats were tacky and silverfish partied by the Rayburn.

After Camille’s death, the Rectory’s interior travelled further down the road of disgusting and continued to do so. Childhood innocence being a wonderful thing, it didn’t bother Sophie – until she arrived at Digbys, a universe of clean skin, laundered clothes and shampooed hair, and learnt that dirt and neglect were the devil’s work.

Sophie swept the floor, scrubbed the table and made inroads into the washing-up, shuddering as scummy suds seeped between her fingers. To escape, she would need money. Her money. But how to lay her hands on it? And how did one arrange travel? Book tickets? Find lodgings?

Clearing a space by the bread bin, she made the Spam sandwich and sat down to eat it. It was horrible. Horrible. She was almost nostalgic for the school buns (which tasted of bicarbonate of soda) and the fried bread (cooked to brittleness) that she and Hettie used to eat with marmalade.

Worse, much worse, than the state of the kitchen was the situation she faced. She had barely been back at the Rectory a few hours, and already she was enmeshed in the dissonance of Osbert and Alice’s marriage.

Religion, charity, grime and prohibitions.

The Spam lingered on her tongue and, if such a thing was possible, it tasted pink and was repellingly moist.

Hettie said that she was strong and brave, a judgement based on Sophie’s efficiency at fending off Liddy who didn’t care who she hurt. Until Sophie tumbled to the solution. This was to point out to Liddy that her breasts were very obviously different sizes. How they had howled with laughter. Unkind, cleansing laughter.

The smell of mould intensified. It took a minute or two to locate its source before she ducked her head under the table. Sure enough, there was a lump of bacon so infested by spores that not even the mice would tackle it. Making a long arm, she wrapped it up in newspaper and dropped it in the dustbin.

Avoiding the coal-tar soap which made the skin on her hands crack and peel, she ran cold water into the sink and stared through the window above it. To the west, clouds hinted at rain.

What would be the best life?

‘It must be filled with love,’ she had told Het. Not for boys, but for living itself. Everything in life. Food, lovely clothes, painting. Wonderful people. Doughnuts.

Hettie looked as though she had been a witness to the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Who do you love, Sophie?’

‘You don’t have to ask, Het. I love you. Very much.’

Loving deeply had to be, must be, a condition of existence but, at this precise moment, she was damned if she knew anyone else on whom she could lavish this bounty.

Time to leave for the church.

Grabbing the remains of the Spam and, rain threatening, her school gaberdine mac, she headed for the bird table.

This overlooked the lane leading to the church. A satisfactory siting which allowed both birds and parishioners to observe each other.

Fred had built it for ten-year-old Sophie from wood and an old tyre to withstand whatever the weather threw at it.

A temple for birds. Her temple. On the days when all was black and seeping in her head, she watched for the flurries of arrival and departure. Listened to the bird gabble. Allowed the bustle of wing and feather to heal her.

In the lined notebook won at a parish tombola, she recorded closely observed bird manoeuvres. Spats and feints and retreats. Dunnock first in, she recorded with the stub of an HB pencil. Coal tit hovering.

Who got first dibs was decided by the weight of the bird. This meant the house sparrows and greenfinches won out, and the blue tits and coal tits were kept waiting in the laurel bush. The goldfinches and dunnocks provided a coalition of the middle.

There were lessons here. Fractious ones. About life, about bullies, about those to whom much had been given in the first place.

Overall, the birds appeared to thrive on the Rectory’s detritus – fish pie, the remains of the oxtail stew, herring – food that can’t have been good for them. It was possible (probable?) they were poisoned by it in droves and were replaced by myriad cousins. Sophie would never know.

She stood back. ‘Sorry about the Spam.’

But joy … the birds arrowed in, tiny, bright-eyed, rapacious and noisy. Welcome, Sophie. And no, they weren’t picky about what they ate.

The tits had taken refuge under the ugly laurel. Always protective towards them, she dribbled final crumbs within their reach.

She felt a rush of thankfulness for their existence, for their seeming trust, for their efficient hoovering up of the hateful Spam. Tiny hearts beating beneath the feathers, fragile and short-lived.

That moment, she was washed clean of troubled thought. There was nothing else but earth and sky, a hint of rain, and the interplay of wings and feathers as the hierarchies of the bird table got sorted.

Turning, she faced the sea. The afternoon light, more luminous from this direction, bleached the darker line of the horizon.

Where was she?

In a village. Of the type she had drawn and described in geography projects. Population: approximately fifteen hundred. A crossroads, around which clustered the older buildings. Houses straggling northwards towards the Downs. Begging, said Camille, to be lifted up.