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He saw himself walking home one morning, Alice at the door of a cottage in a dip of the hills, the scent of the blue woodsmoke rising above the trees – and he saw the children that would walk with them along the country lanes.

And they'd never look back.

CHAPTER 22

Gairloch, 1981

Sarah's room looked out over the gardens, and beyond them the sea. A door at one end opened out onto the set of stone steps leading down to the garden, an area of heathland that had been cultivated into some kind of order, blending at the edges with the wild grasses and heather, only a wire fence round it to keep the sheep from eating the tufts of flowers between the rocky outcrops. Placed on a cliff promontory the garden seemed to open directly onto the sea and the sky.

Her room had a sloping roof, the upper part of a converted byre, where the breath of cows had once collected under the rafters, the smell of hay and of ammonia and dung. The old walls were whitewashed in chalky lime, cool and damp to the touch, thickly built of rocks and mortar. When there was no wind, when the sea was calm, the room she was in held a profound silence that soaked into her body, relaxing nerves and sinews, unknotting the twists in her stomach. She could feel her breathing slow, her throat loosening. The grief was still there. Nicky's absence was a constant; but the rest of her life would continue now, cold and under rain.

The sister had recognised her, by a miracle, as the child who had visited the retreat all those years ago, holding the hand of her father. She and her parents had stayed there for a few days one summer, attending the twice-daily services of the convent matins and vespers, then walking along the long, empty beaches.

She'd written down her request to stay. She asked the sisters to tell Nicky and her family that she was safe, but no other details. After a couple of days something clasped at the base of her throat started to uncoil, and she had begun to talk, a few words. But she couldn't pick up the phone. Talk into it and tell them. That was too hard.

It would always be too hard.

She worked outside most days, weeding the vegetable beds placed on the slope out of the wind. Or she worked in the small poly tunnels set in a crook of the bay where the sisters grew kale and parsley and other crops that wouldn't survive in the open, not this far north.

She didn't join the sisters in the chilly stone chapel, though she could hear their trebles and contraltos as she worked, their slow harmonies that breathed in and out through the offices of the day, one body respiring slowly in sleep. Then she would stop digging and let the sounds reach her, plaintive and regretful. Even at night she might wake and catch their fluting chants, a vigil like the waves.

Sometimes, standing in the garden looking out over the shifting light on the water, she thought of the chaos of wedding things that had been abandoned at Fourwinds and she twisted inside with the guilt that she'd let it all go on for so long.

And her parents?

Too much white noise. She picked up the spade again and worked until she was too tired to think any more.

She was short of clothes. Short of money. She went into the nearby market town and bought shoes from a charity shop, a woollen jumper; it was cold this far north. As she walked over the pebbles by the sea the shoes slipped, hard and a little too loose, each faintly worn into the shape of someone else's foot, her clothes failing to keep out the evening wind rising from a sea metalled with the last light.

It was part of the routine of the order that you talked with a sister once a week, no set topic. The nun had very soft cheeks, like a faded
peach, bad teeth and a kindness that could make Sarah feel weepy if she didn't check herself. One day, on some mad impulse – the courage of sharing secrets with strangers – Sarah had ruined the nun's day by letting it all spill out. Why had she done that?

A few days later she came to Sarah. ‘Will you think about telling them?' she'd asked her, upset, teary-eyed.

Sarah had stared at the nun. Shook her head. She realised then that she couldn't stay for ever. She would have to leave sooner or later. Nowhere that she belonged.

If she let herself think of home then she saw her father, his clear certainty that the world was new and resurrected, and she was its brave inheritor, receiving this better world.

But she knew other things.

CHAPTER 23

RAF Kirkham, Blackpool, 1948

Peter and Duncan sat over cups of dark brown tea in the NAAFI canteen.

‘Wouldn't you know it. I bet the buggers aren't going to let us go till midnight. I'll be all night getting back to Glasgow at this rate.'

Duncan took a cigarette from a packet of Woodbines and offered Peter one. He struck a match, a faint whiff of brimstone, and passed the box to Peter. ‘And I've got my Doreen waiting for me back home. You finally going to tell me who you've got waiting for you just now, eh Peter? I ken you're holding a candle for someone.'

Peter shook his head. ‘I'm going to be concentrating on my studies. No girlfriends for me.'

The canteen was warm and steamy from the tea urn on the side table, a smell of boiled cabbage and potatoes lingering from the six o'clock supper. Everyone had left except for the group of thirty men in civvies waiting to get the all-clear for demob. Peter had felt inside his new suit jacket two or three times to check his ticket from Kirkham station was safely there. New shoes and a new raincoat folded over the back of the canvas chair, new trilby on the canteen table. Peter moved it away from the tea spills.

‘You going to come up to Glasgow to see us then, Peter?'

‘Aye, maybe. I'd like that. And you come and see London. We're allowed guests at the students' lodgings.'

‘Maybe I should – come down and check up on what you're up to. And remember, when you're done with that fairy story book of yours, I've always a spare copy of
Das Kapital
ready, for when you see the light.'

Peter smiled. They'd argued long and heatedly about the way to a better world, and could now recite each other's points of view verbatim. Now there was only the living to do, Duncan off to the shipyards in Glasgow and a passion for the trade unions, Peter leaving to study for a parish and the good news of salvation. Behind them the skills acquired in two years at RAF Kirkham; how to buff the steel blade of a 1914-issue bayonet with wire wool and spit; how to drill in snow for three hours with the wet soaking up to their knees; how to spruce up the army base for a visit from top brass, whitewashing every single thing in sight including the coal pile.

The double doors swung open. Commander Webb came striding in holding a sheaf of papers. ‘Here we are, and it's thank you and goodbye to MacDonald, Donoghue, Needham, Maynard . . .' Not waiting for him to finish the list Duncan took the peak of his trilby in his forefinger and thumb and settled it on his head. He winked at Peter and cocked his head to the door. Minutes later they were walking out of the base towards Kirkham station.

As Peter sat in the train compartment, the smell of the new cloth from his suit sharp in his nostrils, he had a persistent thought in the back of his mind: Maudey had said Alice might have moved to London. He gazed out at the early light reeling off the flat Midland fields. Shards of brilliance scattered over an expanse of water. He shut his eyes and saw Alice descending through the banks of asters and summer daisies.

Maudey had only heard indirectly how the Hanburys had sold the house and moved to London, through an old friend in the village. The
Hanburys had not given her any forwarding address. When Maudey had told him that, it had given Peter a horrible feeling, as if he and Maudey were a contamination to be sealed off. He placed a cheek against the windowpane and closed his eyes. He wondered what Alice would have to say if she heard he'd got into university; he pictured her face opening up with surprise. She'd grasp his arms in that way of hers. ‘I knew you'd do it, Peter.' Well, there was no way to tell her that now.

The day he got the letter of acceptance to the university he'd sent a telegram to Maudey. Gave her the fright of her life, she told him. To her mind the only reason to send a telegram was because someone had died. But she was unspeakably proud of him, Peter training to be a vicar like Father Marston at the church she and Albert had attended since their baptism.

It was Maudey's brother, Albert, with his dour but kind ways, who had shown Peter a framework for the feeling that had come to him of something inexplicable and numinous. On the night Peter heard Ma had died the world had dipped and the ground given way. And yet someone, or something, had stayed near, comforting him. He was sure of it.

He'd put it away as a child's fancy; but later, as he was picking potatoes at threepence a bucket in an empty field on a hilltop near Baxendale, smarting from being dismissed from the Hanburys' house, bitter and lonely and with all hopes of the grammar gone, the tractor ahead had stopped for a moment, the farmer wiping his neck. The day was silent except for the faint beating of the wind on his ears. Across the miles of hard mud the sky was wide and white, oppressively vacant; but here was the strange thing, it was no longer empty. He stood by his bucket for a long time, attentive and puzzled, seeing the same place, yet a different place.

He'd wondered if other people knew about this – something
beyond the sky and the mud. Then the tractor had started up again, the engine choking, and he had bent to carry on picking up the potatoes in its wake.

In Albert's gruff and home-hewn faith, Peter had recognised a language for such things: Albert's mornings began with the Bible open on the table; the old miner's head bent before the evening meals in the tiny cottage parlour with the clock chiming on the mantelpiece and the smell of boiled cauliflower and coal smoke. His father had left him abandoned, but Peter began to understand that there was another Father who had stayed with him, a presence glimpsed and not glimpsed, but there, beyond the surface shimmer of things:
Our Father in heaven
.

On Sundays, wrapped in the faded spice of communion incense, Peter would watch Father Marston spread his arms like a white bird and lead the prayer of dedication. He wondered if he should tell the priest that he'd been called to serve in the same way, but he knew Father Marston would laugh.

In the mining offices – lucky to get a job in the offices and not have to go down the pit, a boy like him – he'd sat all day adding up long columns of figures. He spent the evenings at night school, studying English and history. And he wasn't sure how it would happen, but so long as he kept educating himself, so long as he kept learning, then one day he would apply for university, like Alice had said.

He thought that two years stuck in the army for National Service would scupper any chance of studying further. He'd smoked and sworn and dated girls at dances, and the privileges of being a man seemed a fair exchange for a child's fancies about being a man of God. Anyway, the truth was, for someone like him, choices were small in number, pruned off as the years closed in. Peeling a mountain of spuds for taking an unauthorised leave to slip out to a dance in Blackpool, he'd looked down at his tobacco-stained fingers, the skin crinkled
and swollen by the potato water. He'd thought of a dream where he sat in a university library surrounded by books and wrote essays on poetry and God. He could feel the smooth fountain pen moving in his fingers, the flow of words unfurling on the paper. He'd shaken his head and laughed at himself.

Sometimes, standing at the bar waiting for his dark pint of bitter in Kirkham town, he'd seen shadows of Dad by his side, tipsy and bragging, a small man who was made for bigger things, ridiculous and pitiful in his delusions. He'd been too weak to stand up to Ivy, who had made it clear to Peter that he shouldn't bother coming back to visit now she was running the house.

One evening, sitting in the Nissen hut chapel for compline prayers, a vigil he kept up like a visit to an ailing friend, he'd sat on after the service in the gloomy barrel-roofed hut for a long time. The padre started to snap out the lights. One candle in a red glass lamp left hanging above the altar. The spiced smell of incense recalled the lad who had seen something more beyond the flat earth of the potato field, seen the light beyond the white sky. Now he felt his chest closing in, the smallness of the air he was allowed to breathe. The padre, a bloke with a thin moustache and a cut-glass voice, sat alongside him, making the bench creak, and asked him if there was anything he wanted to talk about.

So he had told the padre about his laughable idea that he had a calling to be a minister. He waited for the padre's condescending reply. The padre nodded slowly, as if agreeing. Peter's heart sealed over a little more with something hard, like scar tissue. Then the padre told him about a London university where they had a degree course, for men like him with a cobbled-together education. It wouldn't be a full degree as such, but he could study theology and train for the Church. If he was willing to work hard and cram for the exams in any spare time, then there might be a way.