Foster

‘Now?’

‘Does now not suit you?’

Something about the way she says this makes me wonder if it’s something we are not supposed to do.

‘Is this a secret?’

‘What?’

‘I mean, am I not supposed to tell?’

She turns me round, to face her. I have not really looked into her eyes, until now. Her eyes are dark blue pebbled with other blues. In this light she has a moustache.

‘There are no secrets in this house, do you hear?’

I don’t want to answer back but feel she wants an answer.

‘Do you hear me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s not “yeah”.

It’s “yes”. What is it?’

‘It’s yes.’

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, there are no secrets in this house.’

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame, and shame is something we can do without.’

‘Okay.’ I take big breaths so I won’t cry.

She puts her arm around me. ‘You’re just too young to understand.’

As soon as she says this, I realise she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.

Downstairs, she fetches the zinc bucket from the scullery and takes me down the fields. At first I feel uneasy in the strange clothes but walking along I forget. Kinsella’s fields are broad and level, divided in strips with electric fences she says I must not touch, unless I want a shock. When the wind blows, sections of the longer grass bend over, turning silver. On one strip of land, tall Friesian cows stand all around us, grazing. Some of them look up as we pass but not one of them moves away.

They have huge bags of milk and long teats. I can hear them pulling the grass up from the roots. The breeze, crossing the rim of the bucket, whispers as we walk along. Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy. As soon as I have this thought I realise its opposite is also true. We climb over a stile and follow a dry path worn through the grass. The path snakes through a long field over which white butterflies skim and dart, and we wind up at a small iron gate where stone steps run down to a well. The woman leaves the bucket on the grass and comes down with me.

‘Look,’ she says, ‘what water is here. Who’d ever think there wasn’t so much as a shower since the first of the month?’

I go down steps until I reach the water. I breathe and hear the sound my breath makes over the still mouth of the well so I breathe harder for a while to feel these sounds I make, coming back.