A Kind Man Read Free Page A

call out, but leave again at once if there was no answer. If a door was locked it was like a slap in the face. Only if you went away you might lock and leave a key with a neighbour. But who went away?
    She shut the gate and set off, across the wide empty field, the plum blossom in her hand pointing down-wards to the ground. The sky seemed huge and to grow wider as she reached the middle. From here, there was only a thin haze in the distance and a faint rising plume of smoke to mark the town. It was a walk of two miles and she took it three times every year, at Christmas, in August and on this day, which was the one that counted. Once, she had had pneumonia at Christmas, one August Tommy’s mother had died and she had been forced to miss, but somehow it had not mattered greatly. It was understood. She had never missed this April day and never would as long as her legs could bear her.
    The track reached the foot of the peak and then forked into two, narrower paths, one going straight ahead up the steep slope and the other around the base of it to the far side. Eve paused. A lark, so high that she could not see it, was streaming out a song that came spiralling down to her through empty space.Far above the peak, two buzzards soared silently, flat wings outstretched like windmill sails. Tommy had never been with her and never spoken to her about it either, but she knew well that it was not for any want of feeling but for an excess of it, overflowing but somehow damned up inside him. She did not lay any blame. If he had ever forgotten and not gone out to cut the branch of blossom for her to bring, perhaps that would be the time for blame. But he would never forget, she could be sure of that.
    She walked slowly because she needed to feel herself getting nearer a little at a time, making the journey as people made a pilgrimage and because, in spite of her usual prayer for grey skies, once she was out here she savoured the spring air and the sun and the smell of the new earth and the growing things, loved to hear the larks. As she rounded the peak, she looked up and ahead to the far slope where the sheep were with their lambs, dozens of them scattered about the hillside like scraps of paper thrown up in the air and allowed to settle anywhere. If there was a wind it usually blew their bleating towards her but today it was quite still. She only heard the soft sound of her footsteps on the track.
    The slope was gentle and after a half-mile, at the point where an old plough had been abandoned and lay knotted over with bindweed and grass, she couldsee the church tower. It had four flying angels on each corner and they caught the sun and shone gold. But today, just as she looked up to them, skeins of cloud were drawn across and the angels were dulled.
    Centuries before there had been a large village up here, but it had been deserted after a plague and reestablished further down on the far side, and the church had been left stranded by itself among ruins which had gradually fallen away and disappeared. But the church was never abandoned and services were even held in it half a dozen times each summer. People valued it. Guidebooks referred to what had become known as ‘St Paul-Alone’ or ‘St Paul-in-the Meadow’. Once or twice a visitor had been there when Eve had arrived and perhaps smiled or exchanged a word. The first time she had thought that she might mind, but she had not, there was a friendliness about having others here and she welcomed it, always looked out to see if people might be there.
    She walked more slowly still up the last few yards. There was no stone wall, though perhaps it had once been there, no gate or entrance, no shady trees. The church stood alone with its tower rising up strongly and the angels flying freely in the wind, and for a path there was simply a worn track up to the door. And on two sides the churchyard, which was part of the hillside, part of the whole wide landscape, notpenned in or confined, and the