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‘What did she mean, she'll get a good rate?' Mum asked Dad after Mrs Stewart had left. Dad followed them through to the kitchen, looking pleased with himself.

‘It's the Jamaican christenings; they do like to celebrate with a big party afterwards. She says I haven't been charging nearly enough for the church hall and she's going to manage all the bookings for me from now on. Isn't that kind of her? She wants us to drop in on
Saturday and try a piece of the christening cake. And she's promised to make sure that from now on it all stops by eleven thirty.'

‘I don't know, Peter. There's something, well, rather pushy about her.'

‘Mrs Stewart? She's very good-hearted.'

‘I don't have a good feeling.'

‘People will live up to what you expect from them.'

But Mum shook her head.

A shaft of sunlight was making a bright line on the orange Formica of the kitchen table, warming the knobbly crimplene of Sarah's dress. Mum carefully poured the gloopy liquid into the bottom of a glass, added water and stirred. She handed the glass to Sarah proudly and watched as Sarah sipped the special vitamin juice – which they'd never had before when Mum was growing up.

The clinic's orange juice had a funny rubbery taste. Not nearly as nice as old-fashioned oranges. She pulled a face and held out the glass for Mum to take back.

‘Honestly, Sarah. It's to make children grow up strong. Fancy wasting vitamins.'

Dad, big and shambly in the sweater that Mum had knitted, went over and took a big sip. He nodded. ‘Quite pleasant really. If you drink it quickly.' He put it back down.

Sarah trailed him back to the study. ‘I can walk to school by myself, can't I, next week, Daddy?'

‘I'm sure you can,' he said absent-mindedly.

The next Saturday Aunty May, who did the cleaning, came to sit with the baby, and Sarah was allowed to go down to the church hall to see the party. Just for a while. Mum had been sitting under her electric hair dryer and had fresh new curls, and her face was pretty with dusty
powder on her cheeks, a white top in daisy lace and a swing-out skirt. She held Sarah's hand as they walked down. Generally there was something interesting going on at the hall; jumble sales where Sarah was allowed to sell from behind stalls piled with old trousers and dresses; or Christmas fêtes with knitted toys and musty jewellery and cakes for a penny; or bingo games for the old folks who would slip her Rich Tea biscuits between their gnarled fingers; or harvest fish and chip suppers followed by sing-songs and flickering reels of Mickey Mouse films.

The scuffed church hall with its empty stage and blue velvet curtains always smelled of stewed tea and dust. Today there was a band crowded onto the stage. With the curtains drawn against the evening light the hall was a cave of darkness pulsating with a happy, trotting beat and trumpets. In the gloom Sarah could make out people dancing, stepping side to side, bending back and forth like they were hard at work. Sweetie appeared from between the forest of arms, in a white dress with white ankle socks. She was hopping and dancing to the beat and showed Sarah the right way to move her arms, stiff and in and out, like shooing cats away. Sarah caught sight of old Mrs Stewart through the dancers, stepping back and forth, her handbag still over her arm. And there was Sweetie's mum in a green satin dress that moved and shone with her. Later she saw Mum and Dad smiling and doing a little waltzy dance like the prince and the princess in a story. At that moment Sarah's chest was full up and bubbly and she was there and she was Sarah, and everything was as right and as happy as a round new egg.

The baby had finally fallen asleep. It had come away with a popping sound, its head weighted against Patricia's arm. What was the matter with him that he had wanted to feed on and off almost all day?
Inside her cardigan Patricia could feel the dress, and the bra beneath, crackling from a wet patch that had dried out. She smelled of soured milk. More washing. There were nappies soaking in a bucket in the scullery. Washing still out on the line that should be fetched in. And what time was it? The clock on the kitchen mantelpiece said almost four thirty. Sarah should be back by now. A flutter like a passing shadow in her chest – that she quickly quelled because it was silly to worry.

For the past week Sarah had been allowed to walk to school by herself; after all, at eight she was certainly old enough and it was a very straightforward little walk, down the road of tall red bricks of once grand families where the old vicarage was placed, across a road and along the recreation ground with its iron swings and then through the modern council estate along the lines of new terraces, their doors painted in batches of primary colours.

Carrying Charlie carefully out into the hall, almost holding her breath against waking him, Patricia laid him down in the navy coach pram, sliding her arm from underneath him as if she were laying down a doughy layer of pastry on a pie. Quietly she opened the front door and stood on the top step, looking along the street, but there was no small figure walking slowly towards the house, dawdling as Sarah always did, no Sarah stopping to talk to the cat that slept on the front wall a few houses down. Patricia closed the door and the sound of traffic in the distance faded.

She would never have chosen to live in this house, in this area. The move into the new vicarage couldn't come soon enough. The woman who lived in the other half of their tall Edwardian semi was decidedly strange; she had dark red lips painted bigger than their edges and black glasses elongated at the ends like joke eyebrows. Late each afternoon she scuttled out of the front door, her shopping bag held defensively in front with both hands. If Patricia said hello she would
startle and greet her back like a denial. It was Peter's theory that the poor soul drank.

The bottom half of next door was let out to a busy Sikh dentist. You could hear the high-pitched whine of the drill through the wall when the house was quiet. Patricia had popped round to say hello when they first moved in. His turban regal and his whiskers majestic, he was standing next to the dentist's chair that had been bolted down in the middle of a sea of faded blue linoleum. The smell of rubber and antiseptic cloves made her keen to leave. It took a while to explain that there was nothing wrong with her teeth; she had merely come to introduce herself and say hello.

They had visited other prospective parishes. In a wind-ruffled garden somewhere near Oxford the vicar's wife had served tea on a rug on the lawn, next to curving beds filled with flowers she tended herself. A red setter sat close by and she fed him biscuits as she answered vaguely about what she did in the parish; in fact it seemed a novel idea that she should do anything but exist in a dream of flowers in her garden. Her children were boarders at a good school somewhere.

But Peter had decided that he should take the most challenging parish he was offered and so here they were, and she was proud of him for that. She couldn't yet share the fullness of his vision – she did feel tempted by free places for clergy children at little boarding schools – but she loved the man and she loved his faith that all would be well, and all manner of things would be well – in the end. Seen through Peter's eyes no one was past redemption; seen through his eyes, the scarred industrial townscape around them was already passing away, changing to a place that was better and new.

She put her hands round the tops of her arms. The tall hallway felt chilly even at the end of a late summer's afternoon. Under the line of coats she could see Sarah's discarded summer sandals, worn into the shape of small feet. Patricia glanced down at her watch:
twenty to five. She decided to straighten the sitting room, but found herself standing in the bay window overlooking the street. Anyway, whatever you did to the room, it was still a depressing place, high and cold. A draught from the marble fireplace. The previous vicar had been elderly and single, with poor eyesight. He'd spent his last years camping out in the sitting room. Now, with his furniture moved out, ghostly outlines of his missing pictures stained the flowered wallpaper. The parquet floors were so unpolished and ingrained with dust that they were almost beyond repair. In the new house she wanted fitted carpets, lawny expanses of swirling designs that she'd seen in
Homes & Gardens
. A teak sideboard.

They were supposed to be there for just a few months while the new house was being built on a site near the church, a house that would be compact and sensible and modern. But there had been a problem with the foundations and the date for moving had receded further and further away into the future.

Along with the house they had also inherited Cyril, the curate. He lodged up in the attic rooms on the fourth floor, with a bathroom that should have been condemned and a small cooker where he made his own meals – cans of soup mostly, a loaf of white bread. It was quite awkward not knowing when he would quietly slip through the house on his way out, pausing with an expression of forbearance if she crossed him on the landing in her dressing gown or, once or twice, an old nightgown.

She felt sorry for him. Such a lonely life he'd constructed for himself. She encouraged him to come down and share a family meal each week, though she had to practically lay a trail of breadcrumbs at first to get him to come out of his room. Last time she'd walked all the way up to the top of the house to fetch him down, making sure the smell of the casserole with dumplings was wafting up the stairwell as she held the door to his room open.

She went back into the kitchen. Ten to five. What could Sarah be doing that would take her so long to walk home? And then with a burst of relief she realised what must have happened: Sarah would have wandered in to play with Denise. She ran lightly up to the top floor. Cyril came to his door with that dazed air of someone being called back to the world. Yes, yes, he could keep an ear out for the baby. But if it woke? He looked helpless with panic. She was already down on the landing below, whispering up to him, ‘I'll be no time, ten minutes.'

She ran quickly down to the recreation ground and the council estate on the other side. Denise's mum asked her into the long shared passageway between the houses. She gestured at the twin-tub washer thumping and a cage of mice on top of a rabbit hutch mixing smells of soap and damp bedding straw. Sarah wasn't there.

Feeling hollow Patricia walked rapidly back towards the house, trying to think where else Sarah might have gone. She stopped and looked up at one of the houses that had been divided into flats, and then she ran up the steps and pressed long and hard on one of the doorbells. After a while Sweetie answered. Yes, Sarah was there, she said in her liquorice-flavoured Jamaican accent. Patricia felt herself sag with relief.

It was a small, thin flat, three dark rooms set like a corridor. There was a blanket pinned up across the middle room to curtain off where someone slept. She had to push through, the blanket catching on her shoulder with a surprising heaviness. There was a nylon underslip on a chair, the thick smell of spices and cooking oil as Sweetie led her into the back room with a small kitchen area.

By the open window a man was sitting and smoking a homemade cigarette. There was music on the record player, something with an urgent, running beat. He took off his hat to Patricia and nodded. The curls of his hair were tight and oiled like machine parts. Sweetie had gone. No sign of Sarah.

‘She been playing here no trouble,' he told Patricia. ‘Sweetie, you wan fetch her?' he yelled.

There was the sound of someone coming in through the front door and Sweetie's mother appeared, still in her nurse's uniform.

‘How come you are here, Mrs Donoghue?' she said, sounding happy and a little anxious. ‘Sweetie aks your little girl round to play, then?'

‘I'm so sorry. She shouldn't bother you like this. Sarah knows she should come home straight away.'

‘It's no bother,' said Sweetie's mother, her speech slow and sunny, filled with a dignity that she kept somewhere high up where no one could get at it. She was tall and beautiful, with long, full cheeks. ‘Him always here to look after these kids till I get home.'