Lily stared in bewilderment. ‘Well, I … I can’t say as I know. There was a time I was thirty-something. That was some years ago. I – suppose I must be forty-something now.’
‘Hm. And how old would you say the little girl from the Swan is?’
‘Four.’
‘You sound very sure of that.’
‘Because that is her age.’
The parson winced. ‘Let us suppose that you are forty-four, Mrs White. We cannot be sure, but you know you are in your forties and so forty-four is likely enough. Do you agree? For the sake of the argument?’
She nodded, not seeing why it mattered.
‘The gap between four and forty-four is forty years, Mrs White.’
She frowned.
‘How old was your mother, when you were born?’
Lily flinched.
‘Is she living, your mother?’
Lily trembled.
‘Let’s try another way – when did you last see your mother? Recently? Or long ago?’
‘Long ago,’ she whispered.
The parson, divining another dead end, decided to take another route.
‘Suppose your mother had you when she was sixteen. She would have had this little girl forty years later, when she was fifty-six. A dozen years older than you are now.’
Lily blinked, trying and failing to see what all these numbers were about.
‘Do you see what I am trying to explain with these calculations, Mrs White? The little girl cannot be your sister. The chances of your mother having two daughters so far apart in age is – well, it is so unlikely as to be impossible.’
Lily stared at her shoes.
‘What about your father? How old is he?’
Lily shuddered. ‘Dead. A long time ago.’
‘Well, then. Let us see how things stand. Your mother cannot have brought this little girl into the world. She would have been too old. And your father died a long time ago, so he could not have given life to her either. Therefore she cannot be your sister.’
Lily looked at the splodges on her felt shoes.
‘She is my sister.’
The parson sighed and looked around the room for something that would inspire him. He saw only the unfinished work on his desk.
‘You know that the child has gone to Buscot Lodge to live with Mr and Mrs Vaughan?’
‘I know.’
‘It cannot help anyone to say the child is your sister, Mrs White. Least of all the girl herself. Think about that.’
Lily remembered the red blankets and the yellow-and-white-striped sugar canes. She lifted her head at last. ‘I know that. I am glad she is there. The Vaughans can look after Ann better than I can.’
‘Amelia,’ he corrected her very gently. ‘She is the daughter they lost two years ago.’
Lily blinked. ‘I don’t mind what they call her,’ she said. ‘And I won’t make any trouble. Not for them and not for her.’
‘Good,’ the parson said, still frowning. ‘Good.’
The conversation seemed to be at an end.
‘Am I to be dismissed, Parson?’
‘Dismissed? Gracious, no!’
She clasped her hands at her heart and bobbed her head, for her knees were too stiff for a curtsey. ‘Thank you, Parson. I’ll start the laundry then, shall I?’
He sat down at his desk and took up the page he had been writing.
‘Laundry? … Yes, Mrs White.’
When she had done the laundry (and ironed the sheets and made the bed and mopped the floors and beaten the rugs and scrubbed the tiles and filled the log baskets and got the soot off the hearth and polished the furniture and shaken the curtains and knocked air into the cushions and gone round all the picture and mirror frames with a feather duster and put a shine on all the taps with vinegar and cooked the parson’s dinner and set it ready on the table under a cloth, and washed up and cleaned the stove and left everything in the kitchen neat and tidy), Lily went and knocked again at the study door.
The parson counted her wages into her hand and she took some of the coins and returned the rest to him as usual. He opened his desk drawer and took out the tin in which he kept her savings, opened it and unfolded the piece of paper inside. On it he wrote numbers, which he had explained to her at the beginning: today’s date and the amount she was giving him for safekeeping, then the new total of her savings.
‘Quite a nice little sum now, Mrs White.’
She nodded and smiled a brief, nervous smile.
‘Wouldn’t you think of spending some? A pair of gloves? It is so bitter out of doors.’
She shook her head.
‘Well then, let me find you something …’ He left the room briefly and when he came back, held something out to her. ‘These still have some use in them. No point them going unused when your hands are cold. Have them.’
She took the gloves and handled them. They were knitted in thick green wool, with only very few holes. It would not be hard to mend them. She could tell from their soft touch how warm they would be on cold mornings along the riverbank.
‘Thank you, Parson. It’s very kind of you. But I should only lose them.’
She placed the gloves on a corner of his desk, bid the parson farewell and left.
The walk back along the river felt longer than usual. She had to stop at so many places to collect scraps for the pigs, and her bunions complained every step of the way. Her hands were frozen. She had had gloves when she was young. Her mother had knitted them in scarlet yarn and plaited a long string to thread through her sleeves so she couldn’t lose them. They had disappeared all the same. She hadn’t lost them – they had been taken from her.
By the time she arrived at the cottage it was getting dark, she was cold to her bone marrow and every part of her that could ache was aching. She eyed the lower post as she went by. The river was up compared to this morning. At her feet, its edge had crept a few malevolent inches closer to the house in her absence.
She fed the pigs, and she felt the ginger pig’s eye on her, but she did not return the look. She was too tired to wonder about the moods of pigs this evening. Nor did she scratch the pig behind the ears, though the creature snuffled and grunted for her attention.
The crates in the woodshed that had been empty this morning now contained a dozen bottles.
She approached the cottage nervously, opened the door and peered in, before stepping inside. There was nobody there. She checked the cavity behind the loose brick. It was empty. He had been, then. And gone.
She thought she might light a candle for company, but when she went for her candlestick, the candle was gone. So was the bit of cheese she had planned to eat, and the bread, all but the hard crust.
She sat on the steps to take her boots off. It was a struggle. She sat there in her coat and stockinged feet, looking at the damp shape on the floor where the river had dripped endlessly from the chemise of the nightmare sister, and thought.
Lily was slow at thinking; it had always been so, since she was a little thing. She was a woman who let life happen to her without troubling her mind about things more than was necessary. The events of her life, its alterations and meanders, had not been in any way the result of any decisive action on her part, but only accidents of fortune, the hand dealt by an inscrutable God, impositions by other people. She panicked at change, and submitted to it without question. Her only hope for many years had been that things would not get any worse – though generally they had. Contemplation of experience did not come naturally to her. But now that the first shock of Ann’s arrival had subsided, she sat on the steps and felt a question struggling to surface.