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hope that if he ignores them long enough they’ll go away. But they don’t. And, of course, it’s not them , is it?’ she adds with sudden vehemence. ‘It’s her !’
    She sinks onto a chair beside the window, exhausted by the whole scene, and the final utterance that seems to have wrung the last of her energy from her. That, and the bad night to which her eyes bear testimony.
    After a long pause, in which she seems to have completely forgotten all about Catherine, she turnsand smiles, nodding, acknowledging that, in this young woman, she has found a patch of fresh air in a tired, stale world. ‘He, my friend, assures me that he will return when he feels he can. He is very busy. But when he returns, he will, of course, sign your book. I will see to that.’ She smiles at Catherine as if to say that is that. Their conversation is now concluded.
    Catherine nods back, then turns to the door as Miss Hale rises from the chair to let her out. But as much as she is finished with the conversation, Miss Hale lingers in the doorway, looking this breath of fresh air up and down, and smiles. ‘Eighteen. I remember eighteen.’

    Out in the high street, following the curve of the road down to the marketplace, Catherine reaches into her dress pocket. The tin is there; of course it is. She had gone to give it back, to tell Miss Hale that it was all a silly prank that went wrong, but failed in her errand. Now they’re imagining Furies, and wicked women who won’t let things go are at the bottom of all this, when all the time it was a sillyprank gone wrong. All she had to do was just give it back and unburden herself — and all of them — but she didn’t. And although she could feel the weight of the thing in her pocket, they were all weighed down by it now. And the moment that undid them won’t go. She’s convinced herself that the sensation of carrying around some sort of weight from these days won’t ever go now, and she will always be carrying it around with her. There was no giving it back, she’d missed her chance. Now she was a fake, and she knew it. One of Miss Hale’s girls, but also the cause of Miss Hale’s sleeplessness and tears.
    She stops, gripped with the impulse to throw the thing away, to walk down to the stream that flows near the town and throw it in. But what good would that do? The tin would be gone, but its weight would remain. And as she grips the tin and gives it a shake, she hears, faintly, a small metal object rattling around inside.
    She’d also wanted to tell Miss Hale that eighteen wasn’t so wonderful, anyway. That she’d been eighteen for most of the year and she’d never felt so alone. Until she met Daniel this summer, and, for the first time in her life, felt that there really was someone for her after all. And although she knew hewas going away and may very well come back to her as he insisted he would because she was beautiful and he was head over heels in love, he might not either (her mother had married a man who was head over heels in love with her and he’d never come back). But, for the moment, there really was someone out there for her, and that had made all the difference to the summer. But it had nothing to do with being eighteen, and everything to do with meeting Daniel.
    A little while later she is sitting on a bench by the stream that runs through the town at the back of the high street, the sounds of sheep all around, the field in front of her glowing a deep autumn yellow. Still dwelling on the conversation with Miss Hale, she reaches into her pocket for the book (for no particular reason that she is aware of) and begins flicking through it. Her eyes are skipping over the pages, barely taking in the writing, when she stops. She stops because she has come to a poem about a crying girl, which she has read before but not closely. A girl, a young woman, is standing in a garden. There are flowers in her arms, which she flings to the ground, then looks back at somebody, somebody