A boy was standing beside him, asking questions about a piece of jade-green pottery that the headmaster held in both hands, turning it so that the boy could study the elaborate design. The piece was fairly valuable; it had been lent by a parent whose father had brought it back years ago from army service in Malaya.
Lloyd turned and spoke a few words to Janet as she went by to her classroom. He never went home at midday but always took the school dinner-duty himself. His wife was an energetic woman involved in a great many local activities and she had no wish to chop her busy day in two simply in order to cook a meal for her husband. In any case it would have been a problem for him to get home and back in the time. The Lloyds lived at Parkwood, a large late-Georgian house a mile and a half from the school and they had only one car between them which Mrs Lloyd always used to shoot about on her various errands. So all in all it suited Henry very well to eat the school dinner and get on afterwards with paperwork or preparation of lessons.
Janet went on into her classroom. There were only two classes now at Longmead school and she taught the lower. Three or four children were already in the room, reading, drawing, chattering.
There were still some minutes to go before the bell would ring for afternoon school. The first lesson was Nature Study, very popular with the children and one Janet particularly liked herself. She went to a cupboard and took out a box of coloured chalks. She crossed to the blackboard and wrote on it in a beautiful flowing script: British Birds of the Garden and Woodland. The children fell silent, watching in absorbed fascination as she began to draw.
After Janet walked on into the school playground George Pickthorn stood for a moment looking after her. The first time he’d seen her was a few months ago on a bright spring morning as he was coming out of his front door to start work as usual in his garden.
‘We’re going to have a new teacher,’ the children had told him as they stopped to chat over his fence. ‘She’s going to live at Rose Cottage.’ He had heard from other village sources that the new teacher was a good-looking young woman who seemed disposed to keep to herself. But nothing had prepared him for the impact of her appearance as she advanced along the lane towards him on that first morning.
He had lifted his eyes from a rosebush he was pruning and caught sight of that finely moulded face framed by tight classical curls, that proud head and beautiful neck, that tall, marvellous figure. Like the figurehead of a sailing ship, he had thought, and that was how he had seen her ever since.
Now he gave his head a little shake and returned to his gardening. In a day or two he must start painting the neat white fence again, he liked to keep it shiningly immaculate. Tomorrow or the day after he would go into Cannonbridge on the bus – he kept no car – to buy the paint.
He ran a hand along the top of the yew hedge that stood inside the white fence. It felt crisply resilient, thick and springing under his touch; it was greening up nicely after last year’s careful trimming.
Brookside was a small bungalow but big enough for George, who was a widower. The bungalow was bounded at the rear by a field, and on its fourth side by a meadow that stretched as far as the Cannonbridge road at the top of the lane. The meadow had not been cut and the green-gold grass stood tall and plumy in the early afternoon sunshine.
The brook from which the bungalow took its name was a sizable stream some four or five feet wide and fairly deep, murmuring and rippling by, full of trailing weeds and darting minnows. It ran along the edge of the meadow beside the lane, through a culvert in the Brookside garden, and reappeared at the other side of the Hayford road.
George Pickthorn was sixty-seven years old. He was not a native of Longmead but had lived in Cannonbridge until he retired five years ago from his job as a storekeeper for a firm of electrical wholesalers in the town. He and his wife had many plans for the years ahead. They had never had any children; this was always a grief to them but the marriage was otherwise happy and contented.
Then quite suddenly, without warning, his wife died. He went up one morning with her cup of tea and found she was still not awake. She never did wake up. The hæmorrhage of some microscopic blood vessel in her brain, the doctor said; it would have been quite peaceful.
That was four years ago. It took him some time to recover to any extent at all from the shock, the days slipped by in a grey dream. Then one morning several weeks later when George opened his eyes, an intention sprang fully formed into his brain; he would leave Cannonbridge and go to live in the country.
As soon as he saw Brookside he knew the bungalow would suit him. ‘You’re quite sure?’ the agent said; imagining the screeches and caterwauling drifting over from the school, the brickbats and thievings, the general uproar. But George had made up his mind.
Now, on this glorious summer day he was deadheading the roses when the bell rang at the end of afternoon school. The two little girls from Mayfield Cottages stopped as usual to chat to him. Pretty little girls, ten, rising eleven. Jill Bryant with her wide smile and long blonde hair tied back with blue ribbon, and her inseparable friend, Heather Abell from the cottage next door, with her gentle look, soft brown eyes in a heart-shaped face, short black hair cut in a fringe. They were both in the top class, taught by Mr Lloyd.
‘My Dad’s going to bring me home a kitten soon,’ Jill told Mr Pickthorn. Her father worked at Mayfield Farm and Mrs Slater, the farmer’s wife, had promised him the pick of the latest litter.
‘My mother won’t let me have a kitten,’ Heather said with stoic acceptance. She was the only child of a widow and accustomed to a certain amount of domestic austerity. He father had worked at the farm until his death a few years ago and her mother still did occasional domestic work in the farmhouse, as well as helping with fruit-picking in the season.
The cottage the Abells lived in was tied, and in the ordinary way Mrs Abell would have had to vacate it when her husband died. But Mrs Slater thought this a harsh practice and pressed her husband to find some alternative. After careful thought Oswald Slater decided that as a replacement for Abell he would in future engage a single man, who could be accommodated in the farmhouse. This would allow Abell’s widow and daughter – Heather was at that time five years old – together with Mrs Abell’s mother, who lived with them, to stay on in the cottage.
The arrangement worked well. The man who replaced Abell was a quiet, middle-aged bachelor. He stayed a good four years at Mayfield and gave excellent service; his presence in the farm household was never obtrusive. He left when one of his nephews bought a smallholding twenty miles from Longmead and asked him to go into partnership. Slater had taken on a younger man as his successor.
‘I’m going to let Heather share my kitten,’ Jill told Mr Pickthorn.
‘That’s right,’ he said approvingly. ‘It’s good to share.’ He took a bag of sweets from his pocket and all three of them dug into the bag with pleasure.
The girls went off a few minutes later with their arms round each other’s shoulders. The curve of the lane took them out of George’s vision before they reached the cottages.
There was the sound of a vehicle approaching along the Hayford road and George glanced towards the school. Prompt as always at half past four Rachel Lloyd, the headmaster’s wife, drove up in her old blue station wagon to collect her husband. As she turned into the playground George gave her his usual wave and Rachel waved back at him in friendly fashion.
This was George’s customary signal for tea. He went round to the rear of the bungalow and put down his secateurs and gardening gloves on the seat in the back porch. In this fine sunny weather he liked to come out again for an hour or two in the evening, after he’d cleared away his tea-things and listened to the news.
Inside the school Henry Lloyd heard the station wagon and at once began to lock up. In the classroom next door Janet Marshall also heard the car. She had already finished her own locking up and she came out of her classroom and handed her