Mill Row was six cottages leaning on one another at the bottom of the village, each door painted a different colour as if they'd agreed to disagree. Number four was the blue one. The garden in front was all herbs, rosemary and sage and thyme run wild over the path, and the step had been scrubbed white.
I knocked, and stood there with the yellow rose in my coat pocket, feeling like a bailiff.
The woman who opened the door was small and straight-backed, nearer seventy than sixty but with the kind of face that had been sharp all its life and saw no reason to stop. She had flour on her hands and a tea towel over one shoulder.
She looked at me. Then she put one floury hand on the doorframe and held it, hard, as if the step had moved under her.
"Mrs. Hollis?" I said. "I'm Iris Calloway. I think my grandmother sent you money every month for fifty years, and I'd very much like to know why."
"I know who you are." Her voice was dry and quiet. "I knew you'd come eventually. I told her you would."
"Told who?"
"Evelyn." Her mouth went thin. "Years ago, when you were still in school. I said, one day that girl will turn up on my step wanting to know about the money. And Evelyn said, then you'll tell her it was for the cat."
"Was it for the cat?"
"I haven't decided yet," said Mrs. Hollis.
"Then what did you spend it on?"
"Not one penny." She said it fast, as if she'd been waiting fifty years for somebody to ask. "Every pound is in the post office, and it isn't in my name. Evelyn knew that. She sent it anyway. That's all you'll get on a doorstep."
Behind her, the hall was narrow and dim, with a rag rug and a row of hooks. A grey raincoat hung on one hook, a shopping bag on another. On the third hung a long green coat, still dark at the shoulders from rain.
On the kitchen table at the end of the hall I could see two cups, and a plate with two slices of cake.
Mrs. Hollis saw me looking. She moved six inches to her left, so that her body filled the doorway.
"Who's here?" I said.
"My cat."
"Your cat wears a green coat?"
Something that might have been a smile went over her face and was gone. She looked at me for a long time. At my forehead, my mouth, the brown hair I'd never managed to keep tidy. Then she looked into my eyes and her own went wet.
"You have her eyes," she whispered.
"My grandmother's?"
"No. Not Evelyn's." She drew a breath that shook. "Sylvie's."
And she shut the door in my face.
I heard the bolt go across. I heard her footsteps on the rug, and then, very faintly, a second voice in the kitchen, low and urgent. "Margaret?" it said. "Was that her?" Mrs. Hollis answered with one word I couldn't catch.
I knocked again. Nobody came. After a while the curtain in the front window moved an inch and settled.
I walked without deciding where I was going and found myself at the churchyard gate.
It was the obvious place, I suppose. If you want the names in a village, you go where they're carved.
Calloways were easy to find. They lay in a row near the yew hedge, under slate that had worn soft at the edges. Thomas Calloway, 1881. Mary Ann, his wife. An infant, Edward, who had lived eleven days. And Arthur James Calloway, 1924 to 1960, beloved husband of Evelyn. The grandfather I'd never heard my mother mention.
No Sylvie.
The grass around the Calloway stones had been clipped close by hand, and the slate wiped clean of lichen. Somebody had looked after them for a long time. Walter Finch, I supposed, paid by the month like everything else in my grandmother's life.
I went round twice. Then the rain started again, and I went inside the church to wait it out.
It was dim in there and smelled of damp hymn books and candle smoke. Someone had been doing the flowers and left a bucket of leaves by the font. My footsteps went up into the roof and came back to me late.
The vicar wasn't there. I was glad of that. I sat in the back pew with my wet hair dripping onto my collar and read the hymn numbers on the board, which nobody had changed since some Sunday in Lent.
On the north wall, among the brass plaques for squires and soldiers, there was a small one of plain stone. It was set low, at the height where a child could have read it, and it had been polished so many times the letters had gone shallow.
I crouched to read it.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF SYLVIE ROSE CALLOWAY. BORN 3RD MAY 1951. LOST IN THE STORM OF 26TH OCTOBER 1968. STILL WAITED FOR.
The twenty-sixth of October. The day my grandmother had written Forgive me in the margin of her accounts.
Below the plaque, on the cold stone floor, someone had laid a bunch of yellow roses. The stems were wrapped in blue thread. The petals were still wet.
I read the plaque again, because the line I needed hadn't been there the first time and I was sure I had missed it. It was there. Smaller, at the bottom, almost worn away.
BELOVED DAUGHTER OF ARTHUR AND EVELYN.
I stayed crouched on the church floor until my knees hurt.
My mother had always told me she was an only child. She'd said it so often it had become a sort of joke between us, the two of us, only children of only children. She'd said it in the kitchen in Leeds on the night my grandmother came to visit, after the front door had closed and the car had gone. She'd said it into her tea, very quietly, as though answering a question nobody had asked.
"Just me," she'd said. "There was only ever me."