Sandlands Read Free

and time of delivery and her weight at birth: 6 lb 12 oz. Babies were so small, so fragile. Libby had been 7 lb 9 oz.
    Attached to the card by a paper clip, which left behind a double rust-edged groove when she pushed it aside with her thumb, was a small passport-sized print – her first ‘official’ photograph. Staring down into her own infant eyes, Fran was struck, in the angle of the brows, the familiar lines of nose and mouth, by something she must always have known but had never really seen before, or never this clearly. Her own asymmetry; her own essential incompleteness.
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    The final encounter came towards the end of March. A long-delayed spring had finally crept in and taken the woods unawares. The carpet of moss bordering the path had brightened in a matter of days from khaki to emerald, and the creak of timber in the wind had given way to birdsong. The early warblers would be returning soon; last year it was not yet April when Fran heard her first chiffchaff. The tired winter celandines would be smothered by swathes of wood sorrel and pink purslane.
    Everywhere buds fattened, but for now both canopy and scrub were still as sparse as January, letting through broad shards of sunlight to warm the forest floor. It left the deer with little chance of camouflage and she saw them straight away, clustered in the coppiced clearing. For a moment, just long enough for anxiety, she thought the white doe was not with them, but then the group shifted and she became visible, standing slightly apart from the others, away to the rear. Her head was raised and turned in Fran’s direction, her ears alert with communion – or warning.
    The pain arrived from nowhere, a sledgehammer blow. No migraine had ever come like this before, detonating all at once in an intensity of brilliant light, which arced and leapt in tongues of flame from its source at the left side of her head. Every nerve receptor, every synapse was on fire. She clenched her eyes tight closed and clamped her hand hard over her ear but nothing could shut out the pain, the unbearable, all-consuming pain.
    Nor could it hide the slash of the hunter’s knife, the slice of the surgeon’s scalpel, which parted flesh, which severed, divided. She felt its full force, the fatal blow: the final cutting away. My heart is cleft in two . Then she sank to her knees, there on the path among the trodden, rotted leaves, and doubled over, both hands clawing to bury themselves in the crumbling mould. Earth to earth. My bones lie charring on the black coals.
    And slowly, slowly, as pain released its grip, so her tears at last began to fall, tumbling to join the moisture of the dark soil, while away in the trees, half hidden now, the white doe lowered her head, exhaled a soft, sweet breath, and nosed with her muzzle at a clump of coppiced twigs in search of the first green hazel shoots.

High House
    Folks who aren’t from hereabouts – seedypuffs, as my old neighbour Kezzie Hollock calls them, blown through on the wind like dandelion down – always make out that Suffolk’s flat. Well, it might be true of some parts, over westwards past Bury or up there in the Breck. But my Suffolk’s not flat at all. There’s no field I know without some kind of a rise to it, a top hedge and a bottom.
    You only have to think for a minute to know there’s nothing flat about us round here. There’s not a lane you can take when you walk out from the village that doesn’t have a climb in it here and there – enough to notice on a warm day when you’ve got to my age and have a bag to carry – and between the climbs there’s always a dip. There’s the valley itself, of course, where the land slopes down to the Alde. But even to the south and east, away from the river, there are places that lie low, stubborn places where sand collects in summer and where the water backs up murky brown in the mornings after a night of rain. Oh, yes,