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‘A book!'

Maddy was scornful but I told her to shut up, knowing that we couldn't really have afforded anything more. Not the way money was in the house right now. It was a mean gesture to her, but not to me. I loved reading and revelled in the library van, the torch-lit smell of books smuggled under sheets at night. I wondered if the boy read like that too, his bandaged head tottering above the page as he lay propped up against his pillows, following Ratty and Mole into the Wild Wood.

 
Our mother took us round to the big house, through the iron gate to the front door with its brass knocker in the shape of a wolf's head. Our knock was answered by a maid in a neat black skirt and a pinafore with lace at the hem. She said, ‘Well, come in Maria, they're about ready.' I thought it was odd that the woman knew my mother's name. I didn't want to go into the house, but a jab in the small of the back sent me over the threshold. Maddy followed, holding tightly to mother's hand. The entrance-hall of the house wasn't covered in linoleum like ours, but had a thick beige carpet, soft and tricky underfoot. The maid led us to a large room with striped wallpaper and Indian rugs and complicated plaster mouldings at the corners of the ceiling. She took the wrapped-up book and placed it on a little pile that the boy would struggle to open later and regard with no interest.

The boy's mother wore a blue silk dress with a Chinese collar. Her brown hair was coiled and glossy, held in place with a silver feather pin. She met us in front of a table piled with dainties. Sausage rolls and pastries, tarts and buns, and a large cake set on a silver platter in the middle. On the cake were twelve candles and the words
Happy Birthday Terence
written in blue icing sugar. It was the first time I'd heard or seen the boy's name. It was an odd feeling, a sinking feeling. His name had somehow brought him far too close.

There were a few of the more respectable kids from the village in the room, some of them already stuffing their faces and dropping crumbs onto the floor. The Holliday twins, the Edmondson girls and the Strongs from Israel Farm were there. Terence sat in a padded armchair near the window, a plaid rug over his knees, the bandage swathing his head. He looked towards us as we entered, then his dark eyes turned away. He seemed to recognise us, nodding slightly, as if satisfied that we'd come. But he didn't speak and for most of that excruciating afternoon he just sat and gazed ahead. His mother fed him a piece of cake from a china plate and his head came forward for the morsels like a tortoise. He was begging us to ignore him, and so we did.

When, after games of hide and seek and pin the tail on the donkey, we were rounded up to sing ‘Happy Birthday' I was the only one who knew his name. His eyes moved in my direction as I sang it out, loud and clear. They seemed to flicker with sudden hatred: a look I'll never forgot. For the rest of the time the boy stared into a corner of the ceiling, his face pale, that arrogant or sensitive mouth tilted against the light. His mother talked to us children in a brittle, animated voice, glancing towards her son from every point in the room, letting odd tinkles of laughter spill out from her long throat. Then my own mother was at the door to collect us and it was raining again as we stepped onto the path that led to our house.

 
The weather cleared again and a flawlessly hot summer began. The boy must have been made stronger by his visit to the hospital, because he appeared in the garden again, wandering at the edges of the flower beds, watching the gardener at work as he cut grass and tipped cuttings in the field beyond. Once I saw him with a brass spray gun, squirting soapy water onto the roses to keep down the greenfly. In that moment of normality I realised that he couldn't always have been ill, that he must once have had another life, a child's existence.

I turned that thought over and over in my head. Then I tackled my mother again as she was clearing the table after tea.

‘Where was he before he was ill?'

‘Who?'

‘Terence?'

‘The lad next door?'

I followed her from the room. She was washing up at the stone sink, sliding plates into the hot water so that they wouldn't crack.

‘Yes, where?'

‘Oh, away. He was at school.'

I couldn't remember ever seeing the boy in our village school where we were taught in two big classes.

‘Why away?'

‘His parents are quite… well off… rich, you know? They had him at a private school. He was a boarder.'

‘Did he stay there all the time?'

‘Yes – apart from his holidays. It was at Richmond, I think.'

She said
Richer Mond
, making it drip on her tongue.

‘You mean he slept there?'

‘Well, it be too far to come home at night!'

‘Why?'

‘Why what?'

She was getting impatient at my questions, throwing me the tea towel, indicating that I should help her.

‘Why send him away when he's ill?'

‘He wasn't ill then, he
got
ill. That thing inside him, it just start to grow. It's just their way, sending their kids away to school. Getting up over on people like us who jus' have to make to do.'

She slotted a plate into the rack on the dresser.

‘They sorry now.'

They would be. Sorry for getting one over on us. Sorry for all the days and nights that their son had been away from them. And now he might slip away for ever. They'd left him alone. Left him where the shadows at the edge of the world could reach out and take him.

 
By mid-August the Yorkshire countryside was parched, burnt golden brown where the hay and silage had been taken off. It looked like the Australian outback. The newsmen on the radio and television kept talking about the water shortage and we were asked to be careful when we cleaned our teeth and flushed the toilet.
Waste not want not
. It was as if the climate was conspiring with my father's often-repeated advice to
Just
make do
. What it really meant was that we'd do without, make the best of what we'd got. He'd grown up in hard times and was used to drawing his belt in. It reassured him to know we were up against it, fighting the drought. Hardly a drop of water was wasted in our house.

Parched leaves began to turn autumnal red and brown. The water in the beck fell steadily and when we leaned from the crooked bridge there were no trout or sticklebacks. The water trickled in stagnant scum. Terence was confined to a wheelchair now, and every day his mother pushed him through the village, his head lolling under the huge bandage, his eyes exhausted and vacant. The boy's father had stopped going to work and his black Rover stood in the gravel driveway of their house. On fine evenings they brought the wheelchair into the garden and sat with their son, talking to him in voices so low that we never heard the words. I guessed that they were saying all that they had never said when he was away from them. Making up for lost love. Making do in their own way.

August was the hottest for years and the drought went on, searing the land. Even the vicar prayed for rain, but God turned a deaf ear and sent the sun to bake us in biblical heat. At night, a hollow yellow moon hung low over the village, rising in the east and then drifting to the west. The young martins flew the nest, leaving our cottage walls and windows spattered with their droppings. The spring lambs were sturdy now with short, tight fleeces and thickened legs. Foals had grown into young colts, calves into skew-eyed bullocks that dipped their heads and pawed the ground and snorted at our approach. The plague of slugs and snails had dried up. Every evening the blackbird returned to the garden to sing a descending minor scale; the same cadence over and over, like a lament. At dusk moths blundered against the cottage windows, drawn by the blue light of our television set where it shone out from the village, connecting us to a world beyond this world.

My own birthday was on August the eighth and for a treat my mother made a lemon sponge cake, which she covered with whipped cream. My father came home from work early and changed out of his overalls. His face wore a secret smile of triumph. After the singing and cake-cutting I was led into the hallway where a brand new girl's bicycle lay propped against the panelling. My first bicycle. A Raleigh. Royal blue, with three derailleur gears operated by a lever on the handle-bars. It was the most perfect surprise after months of feeling that the family were almost too hard up to eat. I remembered my father stumbling home after working overtime, my mother putting her own food onto our plates, scraping back her hair as she sat down to the table.

My parents' happiness was the saddest thing. I stood in front of them and to my sister's amazement, I began to cry. Maddy hadn't been let into the secret. She was only seven, not old enough to know what that bicycle had cost. I loved the cold feeling of the brake levers against my hands, the smell of gear oil and brake blocks and the sprung leather saddle. My father showed me how to pump up the tyres and then press them with my thumb to check the pressure. But for me that bicycle would always be tainted with his sweat, with my mother's burden of care.

 
That night I woke to a bright light shining through the gap in our bedroom curtains, throwing shadows on the lime-washed walls. The casement window was half open and a faint draft came into the room. Maddy lay fast asleep, her face turned aside on the pillow. I got out of bed to sit at the window. I pushed the curtains aside to look at the night, to read its faint glitter of stars that the moon had pressed back. My bicycle stood downstairs in the hallway, the tyres hardly scuffed by its one ride through the village when I'd shown it off like a scar. The bloated moon was the colour of old urine. It hung low over the gardens. It looked down onto my father's bean canes, his rows of cabbages, the bent-over stems of onions that were almost ready for lifting. I watched for a long time, hearing the hesitation of my sister's breath.

The world outside the window was distorted by blebs and impurities in the glass, as if I was viewing it through ice or water. The cypress trees in the garden of the big house seemed huge and dark with the moon still rising behind them. Sometimes a pair of little owls called to each other from those trees and Maddy and I would lie awake, imagining their intimacies. But tonight all was quiet. The air was scented and cool. My father's snores from the next room had dragged him into deeper sleep.

Then I saw a movement at the edge of vision. There, in their own garden, Terence's mother was pushing him in the wheelchair to the centre of the lawn. His bandaged head was tilted up towards the moon and rested on a white pillow. His mother wore a long dark dress, cut low at the neck, exposing her slender throat. She bent to tuck a rug across the boy's knees, stooped to stroke and kiss his forehead. Her hair was drawn up and pinned back. Even in that half-light she seemed beautiful. The boy was so sick now that he hardly seemed aware of her.

Terence's mother stood very still for a long time. Then she unpinned her hair in deft, abrupt movements, as if it was annoying her. She shook it loose then drew it over her shoulders. The boy was motionless. His mother began to sway her body, her pale face and throat floating above his turbaned head. When I first heard her singing I couldn't make out any words. It was years later that I realised that she must have been singing in Italian. And the boy was beyond words now. Her voice came without apparent effort or passion. The notes seemed to rise and drift, as if she was exhaling bubbles of air. I thought I heard the cadence of the blackbird in what she sang. Now I can't remember the melody of those notes, only the scent of that summer evening, half honeysuckle, half rosemary at my opened window. Though the music is lost, I know what she sang for. For everything that was slipping out of reach, as if a chain of notes, a string of baubles could ever hold it back. She sang for lost life and for lost love.

When she fell silent, she glanced up towards my window. A little jerk of the head, as if she knew I was watching, sensed I was listening. I never moved, never gave a sign that I was there or that I'd heard anything. And when she began to push the wheelchair back towards the house across the moon-drenched lawn, it seemed to me that the prince was asleep at last.