The Years Between

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At fifty-three, when nostalgia could be borne no longer, Morgan Lightly turned his back on the sheep-farming land of his adoption and returned to Cressley, sick for the sight of his native county, which he had not seen for thirty years, and of the woman who had jilted him all that long time ago. With no more announcement than a brief letter to his brother Thomas, his only surviving relative, with whom he had corresponded spasmodically over the years, he came back.

He came in winter and for several days he curbed the impatience that would have hid him rush off it once to find her whom he hid loved and lost, and wandered the dark town and the countryside, drinking in the sight and sound and smell of all that which, though changed, still held the savour of his youth. And then, when nearly a week had passed, he decided that if he were not to allow the prosaic reporting of the weekly Argus to rob his reappearance of its drama it was time for him to appease his other yearning.

Driving up out of the town he felt as nervous as a boy on his first date and on the crest of the hill he stopped the hired Ford and relit his dead pipe. He sat there for a little while, with the window down, enjoying the tobacco in the keen air. Before him the road fell into the narrow valley of the stream, then twisted upwards to the village which, not much more than a double row of stone-built cottages in his youth, now carried a pale fringe of new corporation houses and several architect-designed bungalows and villas sited in such a way that, through a deep cleft in the hillside, they commanded a view of the town. Above the village was the winter-brown sweep of the moors and beyond, in the west, pale sunlight touched the thin snow on the Pennine tops.

Morgan got out of the car and walked across the road to look back the way he had come, at the town. His town. How often had memory conjured it up thus when he was thousands of miles away! There were changes visible – the twin cooling towers of the power station by the river were strange to him – but the hard core of it was the same. And it satisfied him to note that most of the changes were for the better. ‘Muck and brass’, they had said in his youth; ‘they go together’. But not everyone accepted that now. Light and space and clean untrammelled lines were what they went in for nowadays. The new estates, covering the playing fields of his youth on the fringes of the town, with their wide streets and well-spaced houses; and the lawns and gardens in the public squares and streets that had known no colours but grey and soot-black. The smoke was still there, fuming from a thousand chimneys, but when you planted grass it came up fresh and green every spring. He liked that. It was good. It was good too to see well-dressed people thronging the streets, and the market and to notice the profusion of goods behind the plate-glass windows of the new shops: for he had left the town at a time when men hung about on street corners, their self-respect as worn and shabby as their clothing, idle, eating their hearts out for want of work to keep them occupied and feed and clothe their families decently.

He returned to the car, the feeling of nervousness and apprehension returning to him as he reached the floor of the valley and changed gear for the climb into the village. He turned the green Consul into the steep main street where the windows of the parallel terraces of cottages winked and glinted at other across the narrow cobbles, and he noticed lace curtains flutter in some of them as the car moved along, taking up almost the entire width of the roadway and darkening the downstairs room of each house in turn. An elderly woman, standing in a doorway with a shawl over her shoulders, stooped and stared with frank curiosity into the car. He stopped and lowered the window.

‘I wonder if you can tell me where Mrs Taplow lives – Mrs Sarah Taplow.’

The woman directed him farther up the hill, still gazing intently at him as he thanked her and moved on. He had a feeling of knowing the woman and he wondered if she had recognised him. Down in Cressley he could walk about largely unknown but here in the village some of the older people were sure to recall him – and the details of long ago. And standing on the pavement outside Sarah Taplow’s house he hoped that no one had stolen his thunder and deprived him of the pleasure of surprising her as he had looked forward to doing. But when she opened the door to his knock and faced him, gaping at him with all the astonishment he could have wished for in her blue eyes, he could only shuffle his feet like a bashful boy and say sheepishly, ‘Well, Sarah?’

Without speaking she ran her eyes over him and he felt them take note of every detail of his appearance: his tanned cheeks, his hair – greying fast now and cropped shorter than when he was young – and the good thick tweeds on his heavy, solid frame. And when at last it seemed there could be no doubt left in her mind, her eyes returned to and rested on his face and she said, ‘It is you, then, Morgan Lightly?’

Morgan chuckled, but a little uneasily, ‘It is indeed, Sarah. I didn’t think I’d startle you quite as much as that; but you’d not be expecting me to pop up at your door after all this time, eh?’

‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ she said. She took a deep breath as if to take control of her startled self, and turned to go into the house. ‘You’d better come on inside,’ she said. ‘No need to fill the neighbours their mouths.’

‘You’ve given me a turn,’ she went on as they entered the living-room through the in-door. ‘I never thought to see you again,’ she said once more. She turned and faced him, standing by the square table which was laid for a solitary dinner, and her eyes, still disbelieving, roved ceaselessly over his face.

‘You’ve come back, then,’ she said. ‘After all this time.’ The words were spoken half-aloud and seemed more of a statement to herself than a question addressed to him.

‘Thirty years, Sarah,’ Morgan said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

She nodded and echoed him softly. ‘A long time.’

He noted the changes of that time in her, but saw with approval her smooth, clear complexion, the soft, still-dark hair, the full mature curve of her bosom, and the proud straight line of her back. He knew her: she was Sarah. He felt warmth and hope move in him, as though only now had he reached the end of his journey, and for a moment he forgot his earlier doubt and uncertainty.

She stirred, seeming to come to, and motioned him to one of the armchairs by the fireside. ‘Well, sit you down, Morgan. I was just getting my dinner onto the table. You’ll join me in a bite, I suppose?’

In this swift transition from astonishment to what seemed like a calm acceptance of his presence it seemed to Morgan that the years fell away almost as though they had never been, and he was relieved. The reopening of their acquaintanceship had been easier than he had expected.

‘Don’t put yourself out for me, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I can get lunch at my hotel.’

But it was a token protest, for it had been comparison of hotel meals with his memory of Sarah’s cooking that inspired him in his choice of this rather odd hour for visiting her.

‘It’s no trouble,’ she assured him. ‘It’s all ready.’

She went off into the kitchen and Morgan looked round the little room: at the well-worn but neatly kept furnishings and the open treadle sewing machine against one wall, with a half-finished frock over a chair beside it. They told their own story. His eyes fell on two photographs in stained wood frames on the sideboard and he left his chair to look more closely at them. One of them, a portrait of a thin-faced balding man, he recognised as being of Sarah’s dead husband. And the other, a young army officer, remarkably like Sarah, could only be her son. He turned to her, the photograph in his hand, as she came back into the room with cutlery for him.

‘Is this your boy, Sarah?’

There seemed to be something of reserve, a barrier, in her glance, then it was lost in pride as she looked it the photograph.

‘Aye, that’s my boy, John. He’s in Malaya with the Army.’

‘He’s a fine-looking young chap, Sarah. How old is he?’

Again that unfathomable flash of something in her eyes. ‘Going on thirty. He’s a doctor, y’know. He wanted to be a doctor and he wanted to travel, so he joined the Army and got a commission.’

‘A doctor, eh?’ Morgan replaced the picture, impressed. ‘You must be very proud of him.’

‘Aye, he’s a grand lad and a good son. He wanted to resign his commission when Mark died but I wouldn’t let him.’ She shot him an inquisitive look. ‘Have you no children, then?’

Morgan shook his head. ‘No, I’ve none.’

‘But you did marry, I expect?’

‘Aye, when I’d got settled a bit, I married.’

He returned to his seat in the armchair and looked into the fire. Strange, but even after all this time he did not find it easy to look at her and speak of marriage.

‘She was a fine lass, Mary was,’ he said at length. ‘But not one of the strongest, you know. The hard times seemed to take all the strength she had and she didn’t live to enjoy many of the better years.’ He looked up at her now. ‘And you lost your man, Sarah.’

She looked away and he sensed in her a similar discomfort to his own. ‘I’ve been a widow this past five years,’ she said briefly, then left him to return to the kitchen, reappearing in a few moments with two plates of steaming food.

‘Here it is, then. There isn’t a lot because you caught me unawares. Just as well I had the stew as well. It’ll stretch it a bit further.’

‘A mite o’ your cooking was always worth a deal of anybody else’s, Sarah,’ Morgan said as he took a seat at the table. A faint flush coloured Sarah’s cheeks and he looked down at his plate.

They ate in comparative silence. There seemed so much to say and at the same time so much to be wary of speaking of. At length Morgan laid down his knife and fork and sat back. Sarah had already finished for she had given him by far the bigger portion of the pudding and stew. Now she watched him and smiled faintly.

‘You haven’t lost your fondness for Yorkshire pudding, I see,’ she said dryly. ‘Nor all your Yorkshire talk, for that matter.’

‘Do you know how long it is since I tasted a pudding like that?’ he asked her. ‘It’s half a lifetime, Sarah. I’m still a Yorkshireman, y’know, even if I have been away all that time. I always had an idea I’d come back one day.’

‘It seems like no time at all, seeing you sitting there,’ said Sarah, watching him as he felt for pipe and tobacco. ‘Though I’m sure I never expected to see you again.’

He glanced at her as he fiddled with his pipe, trying vainly to read her thoughts. He became aware that no matter how quickly now the time might seem to both of them to have passed there still was thirty years of unshared experience between them; and those years could not be bridged by the sharing of a meal and a few scraps of conversation.

He felt suddenly slightly ill-at-ease and he pretended to sigh, laying one hand flat on the front of his waistcoat in what, considering the amount of food they had shared, was an exaggerated gesture of repletion.

‘It was worth coming home just to taste that meal,’ he said. ‘You were always the best cook for miles around, even as a lass.’

Her expression darkened without warning. ‘And as I remember you always had the smoothest tongue.’

He pressed tobacco into his pipe, frowning, dismayed at this sudden antagonism. Surely, after all this time, she could forget, if he could?

She brought in the pot and poured tea. ‘How long have you come for?’

‘For good, Sarah.’ He put a match to his pipe. ‘I’ve sold up and come home to stay. Australia’s a fine country, but this is my home. I want to settle where I can see the hills and feel the wind and the rain come down off the moors.’

‘You didn’t talk like that thirty years ago,’ she reminded him, and he shook his head.

‘No, but times change, and a man changes in some ways.’ He looked into her face. ‘In some ways he never changes though.’

She did not hold his look but sipped tea from her cup, looking past him through the lace-curtained window into the narrow street. He wished once again for the power to read her mind.

‘So you must have made that fortune you were always talking about?’ she said abruptly and Morgan smiled at her bluntness.

‘Hardly that, lass,’ he said. ‘But enough to live on quietly for the rest of me days.’

They talked on in a desultory manner for another hour, until Morgan became aware that she could not work properly with him there. He left her then, promising to call again soon, and he went away still uneasily aware of the undercurrent of antagonism which had showed itself in that one remark of Sarah’s. He visited her several times in the next few weeks and took her for drives in the country and once to dinner and a theatre in repayment for her hospitality. But always he was conscious of the barrier of reserve through which he could not seem to break.

At last he could stand it no longer. He was sure now of what he wanted. He had known it before starting for home and it had needed only the sight of her to confirm it. She was still the same lass he had courted all those years ago, and he was still the same chap in his feelings for her. This thrusting and parrying which continued through their every meeting was getting them nowhere. If memories of thirty years ago still rankled they must be brought out into the open and examined and given the importance due to them and no more. And he knew the way to bring that about.

Yet when he came to broach the subject he did not find it easy. After all, he thought, she had preferred someone else before, and why should she feel differently now?

Sitting by her fireside, he made a great show of cleaning his pipe, screwing himself all the while to the point where he could say what he wanted to say. Abruptly, but with a studied casualness, he said, ‘I’ve bought Greystone Cottage, Sarah. You remember the place. We used to fancy it in the old days when old Phillips lived there. Well his son’s been occupying it apparently and now he’s dead – he wasn’t married – and the place was put up for auction. I bought it yesterday... gave ’em their price...’

He waited for her to say something now that the first direct reference to their past relationship had been made. But she looked into the fire as though she had not heard him and made no reply.

‘It’s in pretty bad shape,’ he went on. ‘It’ll want a bit of brass spending on it to make it comfortable. I had a good look around. I fancy extending it a bit besides modernising. I reckon I’d as soon live there as anywhere... I can’t stop in a hotel for the rest of my life…’

She had resumed her hand-sewing and she went on with her work, not looking at him and not speaking. He was suddenly seized with the idea that she knew exactly what he was leading to and was only waiting for him to get to the point. But what would her reaction be? He glanced at her, uncertainly. Should he, so quickly? Perhaps he should wait until she had grown more used to having him about again? But time was slipping by. Neither of them was young and each of them was avoiding talking about the important things that concerned them both.

‘Of course,’ he said carefully, ‘I shall need somebody to look after it for me... keep it tidy and cook…’ He stopped for a moment, then went doggedly on. ‘I know it’ll seem a bit sudden-like after all this time, Sarah, but you know there’s nobody I –’

He stopped again, alarmed this time, as Sarah stiffened in her chair, then stood up her eyes flashing and all the smouldering antagonism he had felt flaring openly.

‘So it’s housekeeping you’re offering me after all these years, Morgan Lightly. Well if that’s what’s in your mind I’ll tell you now that I need neither you nor your money. I wonder how you can find the face to come here as you do and expect me to fall in with your plans. I managed very well without you thirty years ago, and I can do the same now!’

‘But, Sarah,’ Morgan said, getting to his feet. ‘You don’t understand –’

‘I understand well enough,’ she said in a low, furious voice; ‘and I want no part of it.’ She turned her back on him and picked up the blouse she was sewing. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’

Morgan stood there for a moment, frowning helplessly. He could not make her out at all; and when she took no further notice of his presence he said good-bye and left.

Driving back to town he cursed himself for being a hasty fool and shook his head in wonder at the ways of women.

 

‘I made a mess of it, Thomas,’ he confided later, when sitting in the living-room over his brother’s grocery shop in one of Cressley’s dingy back streets. ‘I should have bided my time. You can’t step over thirty years as easy as all that.’ He pulled thoughtfully at his pipe. ‘But I can’t understand why she flared up like that. I think she nearly hated me just then; as though I’d done her a wrong.’

‘You touched her conscience, turning up like you did,’ Thomas said. ‘And I’m surprised at you, I must say, running to her of all people as soon as you get home. After what she did to you... Running off and marrying that chap the minute your back was turned, and you with it all fixed up for her to join you as soon as you got settled down a bit.’

Morgan sighed. ‘Aye, but she was a grand lass, Thomas – and still is! A fine, proud woman. That’s what’s wrong with her – pride. If I could get round that I might do it yet. A fine woman... Just the comfort for a chap like me in the twilight of his days.’

‘Twilight of your days!’ Thomas scoffed. ‘You want to go talking like that it your age! How old are you – fifty-two-three? And a fine upstanding chap with a bit of brass behind you. You shouldn’t go short of comfort. There’ll be plenty ready to see ’at you’re comfortable. And a fat lot o’ comfort she was to you. I never knew her well but I heard tell ’at you never knew which way she’d jump next.’

Morgan shook his head and smiled reflectively. ‘I thought I knew, Thomas,’ he said. ‘I thought I knew, lad.’

Christmas came, and then the new year, bringing with it weeks of dry, biting winds; until February arrived, ferocious with driving snow and ice: a month when it did not rise above freezing point for days together. And at last, when it seemed that the long grim winter was without end, the earth softened to the coming of spring. Catkins flickered like green light in the dark winter woods and crocuses appeared, white and mauve and yellow, in the public gardens of the town.

Morgan filled his days with the leisurely pleasures of looking up old friends and renewing old acquaintanceships, and with his plans for making Greystone Cottage his home. His solitary home, it seemed now. For in all this time he had not seen Sarah once; but she was never far from his thoughts.

On a bright Sunday morning early in May he went as usual to Thomas’s house for Sunday dinner. He found Meg, Thomas’s wife, preparing the meal in the kitchen over the shop.

‘Thomas is up in the attic, Morgan,’ she told him. ‘He’s taken it into his head to sort out some of his old belongings.’

Morgan climbed up into the top of the house and found his brother bending over a tin chest, looking through a collection of dusty books. He paused for a moment in the doorway and watched him. In the crouching attitude of that slight figure he saw for an instant the dreamy, bookish lad of long ago. Then, almost immediately, the spell was broken as Thomas straightened up and looked round.

‘Oh, it’s you, Morgan. Come in, come in. The sunshine shafted down through the skylight and Thomas screwed up his eyes behind his glasses. ‘I just bethought me to look at some of these old things of mine.’

Morgan sat down on a rickety chair and Thomas resumed his inspection of the dusty books, lifting them out one by one from the trunk, dusting them over, and peering at the titles. Occasionally he would stop and flip over the pages, reading a passage at random.

‘I had a look at some of these the other week,’ he said. ‘First time I’d touched ’em in years.’ He sat down on a box facing Morgan, a heavy, well-bound volume in his hands. ‘Remember how I scraped and saved to buy these, Morgan? I did all manner of jobs.’ He read out the title on the spine: ‘A History of England and its People, in ten volumes. I reckoned there couldn’t be much history I wouldn’t know if I read these.’

Morgan nodded. ‘You were a rare lad for learning, Thomas.’

Thomas weighed the book in his hand. ‘And now these books are a history in themselves, Morgan. My history: the history of a failure.’

He removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses on his handkerchief. ‘It’s funny the tricks life plays on you. When we were lads I was the one who was going to set the world on fire – me – Thomas, the scholar. Instead, I wind up keeping a backstreet grocery shop, while you, the rough and ready lad, come back from the other side of the world with your fortune made, just like somebody in a book.’

In their youth the brothers had felt their dissimilarity too keenly for real closeness, but now Morgan felt a surge of affection for Thomas. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, lad,’ he said gently. ‘There’s all kinds of failure and all kinds of success. You’ve been happy, haven’t you? You’ve made Meg happy, I can see that. All I have to show for everything is a few quid in the bank. I’d be a liar and a hypocrite if I said that didn’t matter. It’s a great comfort, Thomas. But there are things I’d rather have had.’

Thomas smiled and touched Morgan’s knee. ‘I’m all right, Morgan. It’s just you coming home that started me off thinking back. I’d not have had it any different – not if it had meant not having Meg.’ He put the book aside and bent over the trunk.’ She’d skin me alive if she heard me talking like that.’

In a few minutes Meg came to the foot of the attic stairs and called them to lunch. Morgan put his pipe away and stood up to go.

‘Just a minute, Morgan, before you go.’

Morgan turned and looked at his brother. Thomas, with a strange half-embarrassed expression on his thin face, was fumbling in his pocket. ‘I’ve got something belonging to you that I think you should have.’ He produced an envelope. ‘It’s been lying up here for years. I thought it was no good posting it on to you after all that time; but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.’

He handed the envelope to Morgan, who took it and turned it over to look at the writing on it. There was no stamp, just his name in dried and faded ink.

‘Well, what on earth is it?’ he said.

‘It’s probably nothing much at all,’ said Thomas. ‘But it is yours and I think you should have it. Don’t you know whose writing that is?’

‘No.’

‘It’s hers – Sarah’s. I reckon it was to tell you she wouldn’t be coming out to you after all.’

Morgan made no move to open the envelope. ‘Tell me, Thomas, just how you came by it.’

Thomas sat down again on the box.

‘It was after you’d gone down to Southampton to see about your passage. I was coming down to see you off and visit Uncle Horace, remember? Well, you’d been gone a few days and Sarah gave me this to give to you. She was hanging about one night at the end of the street, waiting for me. I reckon she didn’t know your address.’ He shook his head and looked penitently at the floor. ‘I don’t know how it happened, Morgan, but what with one thing and another, I clean forgot it. I remember I wasn’t too fit about that time. It was the year I cracked up and had to go into the sanatorium. Anyway, it wasn’t till months later that I came across it again in a book. I reckoned if it had been all that important Sarah would have surely seen me to ask if you’d got it. As it was, by that time she was married to Mark what’s his name and had a kiddy too. I saw no good reason for bothering any more. I know I’d no right to keep it back, but I reckoned you were well out of it.’

Morgan’s eyes were fixed on his brother’s face. ‘And you mean you’ve hung on to it for thirty years?’

‘Well, not exactly. I couldn’t bring meself to burn somebody else’s letter, you see, so I shoved it in a book again and I didn’t come across it again till a week or two ago when I was rummaging about up here. I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since whether to give it to you and own up or destroy it and let sleeping dogs lie.’

Morgan ripped open the envelope and read the letter inside. Thomas stared at him as the colour drained from his face.

‘For God’s sake, Morgan, what is it, man?’

Morgan shook his head. ‘Nothing, Thomas, nothing. It just brought it all back for a minute, that’s all.’

He refolded the letter and returned it to the envelope which he put carefully away in an inside pocket. Of what use was it to rant and foam at Thomas now? As he had said, he was ill at the time, seriously ill and not to be held responsible for a careless mistake. And nothing would be gained by telling him now that this letter, delivered at the right time, could have changed the course of two people’s lives.

‘I... I am sorry, Morgan,’ said Thomas, peering anxiously at his brother.

Morgan turned abruptly to the door. ‘Forget it, Thomas,’ he said. ‘It was all a long time ago.’

They went downstairs as Meg called again. Throughout the meal Morgan was withdrawn and silent and it was not long after when he took his leave. Back at his hotel he sat down and wrote a note to Sarah. He thought for some time before putting pen to paper, and at length he wrote:

‘My dear Sarah, the enclosed letter has only just come into my hands. It has explained many things to me and the fact that owing to a series of mischances my brother Thomas delivered it thirty years too late may help to ease what must have embittered you for so long…’

He put the note and Sarah’s letter to him together in an envelope, and walking along to the corner by the hotel, he posted them in the pillar box there.

 

In the fine warm afternoon of the following Sunday Morgan visited Sarah for the first time in several months. There was a short pause before she answered his knock, and they regarded each other in silence for a long moment as she stood in her doorway.

‘Well, Sarah,’ Morgan said at last. ‘I thought it was a nice day for a drive out.’

Her eyes were unfathomable as she said, ‘I’ll get a coat.’

He followed her into the house and was instantly drawn to the sideboard and the photograph of the young officer, Sarah’s son. She returned suddenly to the room and her glance flickered briefly on his face as he stood there with the photograph in his hand.

‘I’m ready.’

‘Righto.’ He replaced the picture on the sideboard and preceded her out of the house. Once clear of the narrow main street of the village, Morgan put on speed, heading straight for Greystone Cottage on which the work of conversion was now progressing. The hillside here was drenched in fresh green that was still untouched by the grimy smoke-fingers of industry which curled up out of the valley. In the orchard behind the house blossom sprang pink and white among the neglected trees. They walked in silence up the path and Morgan unlocked the door and stood aside for Sarah to enter. There was a new strangeness in their manner together now and they had spoken little in the car. From the cardboard tube he carried Morgan took out a copy of the architect’s plan for the conversion. As they walked from room to room, striding over rubble and builders’ materials, he explained to her all that was being done. She listened to him, nodding now and then, but making little comment. They came to the kitchen last of all and Morgan pointed to the tall cast-iron range and fireplace.

‘That’s going, Sarah. I’m knocking this wall right out and extending four feet back. There’ll be all built-in units along that wall there. It’s wonderful the things they make for kitchens nowadays.’ He talked on, flourishing catalogues with shiny illustrations of gleaming kitchen equipment. ‘It’ll be fair dinkum when it’s done.’

‘Fair dinkum?’

‘Australian for proper champion.’

‘Oh.’ She looked about her. ‘Well, it sounds very nice.’

He watched her face with eagerness. ‘Aye, it’ll be labour-saving; and I reckon just enough for one woman to manage – with a bit of help for the heavy work, y’know.’

Sarah did not meet his eyes. ‘You’ve got somebody in mind to look after it all for you, then?’

He gazed steadily at her. ‘I think so, Sarah,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m thinking of getting married again. I know just the lass. She needs somebody to look after her.’

‘Well, don’t you think you should talk it over with her before you get it all settled? Especially the kitchen. Every woman has her ideas about kitchens.’

‘Well, Sarah,’ he said, ‘let’s have your ideas, then.’

‘My ideas?’

‘Whose ideas do you think they should be?’

She turned away from him, hiding her face and walking to the window which looked out on to the unkempt stretch of orchard.

‘You know – you don’t owe me anything, Morgan.’

‘But look, Sarah –’

‘He isn’t yours, y’know.’

He was baffled now. He looked back at her with puzzlement in his eyes. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘John, I mean,’ Sarah said. She stood quite still, looking out of the window, both hands clasping her bag. ‘He’s not your boy, Morgan.’

‘I... I don’t understand, Sarah,’ he said again. ‘The letter…’

‘Oh, that was true enough.’ She turned and walked aimlessly across the gritty floorboards, not looking at him. He watched her, his eyes never leaving her as she said, ‘It never came to anything. I was mistaken. John is Mark’s boy, Morgan, not yours.’ She looked at him now, watching for his reaction as he lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

‘I don’t know what to think now, Sarah. For a week I’ve believed I had a son.’ He smiled wanly. ‘It wasn’t a bad feeling.’

‘And what about Mark? You married him just the same.

‘I was panic-stricken,’ Sarah said. She gazed past his shoulder with the look of one who sees not great distances but over the long passage of years. ‘I didn’t know which way to turn. I thought you’d let me down. I told Mark. He’d always wanted me.’

Morgan nodded. ‘I know.’

‘And he still wanted me after I’d told him. I was afraid and lost. I didn’t know what to do. Mark seemed the only way out.’

‘But you found you were mistaken?’

‘Yes, soon enough. But I couldn’t give Mark up then, not after he’d stood by me. So we were married. I didn’t love him – not the way I’d loved you – but I respected him. He was such a good man, such a kind and gentle man that I couldn’t help but come to love him in time. We had a good life together: a good marriage. And we had John.’

‘And all these years you’ve been thinking that I’d let you down?’ Morgan said.

She smiled dryly. ‘And you’ve been thinking the same of me.’

‘Oh, what a waste,’ he burst out. ‘What a wicked, wicked waste!’

‘No, Morgan, not a waste. We both brought happiness to someone else. It wasn’t a waste.’

He rolled the plans in his hands. ‘No, you’re right.’

She straightened her back and strolled across the room again. ‘So you’re not obliged to me after all, Morgan. You don’t owe me anything.’

‘No, we’re quits,’ Morgan said. ‘We’re back where we started.’

‘Except we’re both thirty years older,’ Sarah pointed out; and we’ve both been married.’

‘Which is no reason for not having another go.’

‘It’s not everybody that wants another go,’ she said. ‘Some people are satisfied with what they’ve had.’ She turned to face him. ‘I don’t have to get married. I’m quite comfortable as I am. I have my pension and my sewing and John sends me money. I’m self-sufficient, y’know.’

Morgan nodded. ‘Aye, it’d take more than being widowed to get you down.’

‘But it’s not that nobody wants me. I’m young enough, y’know, and not bad looking. I’ve had my chances.’

Morgan began to smile. ‘I don’t doubt it lass. But don’t you think it was a happy providence that kept you till I’d come right round the world for you?’

‘Right round the world for me? To your old Yorkshire, you mean!’

‘But only a Yorkshire with you in it, Sarah. If I hadn’t known you were a widow I don’t think I’d have come at all.’

She tossed her head suddenly and in the coquettish gesture he saw quite clearly the girl he had loved and lost so long ago.

‘Nay,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to convince me of that.’

He slapped the cardboard tube down in his hands, laughing out loud. His heart sang. ‘I will, lass,’ he said. ‘By God, but I will!’

And he did.