The Fête

In Britain, when you are a hundred, the King sends you a card.

He had not known this until March. He had learned it from the Dean’s list, from the line under Mrs Haverfield’s name that said aged 99, and he had gone to the Household’s office in London that weekend and asked a woman called Mrs Akinola, who had been in charge of the cards for nineteen years, how it worked. She had explained. When somebody in Britain turned a hundred, or a hundred and five, or a hundred and ten, or reached a sixtieth wedding anniversary, they could apply, or their family could apply, and a card came, from the King, by post, on the morning of the day, with a photograph on the front and a message inside, and a signature, printed.

“Printed,” said Frederick.

“Printed, sir. There are about fourteen thousand a year. Your father signed the first one himself, in 1972, and was told by his Private Secretary that if he signed all of them he would have no time to be King.”

“How many has Coln Saint Aldwyns had?”

Mrs Akinola looked it up. It took her about four seconds.

“None, sir,” she said. “Not one. Not since the cards began.” She looked at the screen. “There’s an application in. From the family. For the seventeenth of May. Mrs Edith Haverfield.” She looked up. “It came in January. From a Mr Michael Fennell. Grandson.”

“Don’t post it,” said Frederick.

Mrs Akinola looked at him over her glasses.

“I’ll take it,” said Frederick. “Myself. On the day.” He thought about it. “And I’d like to sign it. Not printed. Me.”

“Sir,” said Mrs Akinola, “if you sign that one, you’ll have to sign all of them.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “I’ll start in June.”

---

The seventeenth of May was the hottest day of the year so far.

It came up out of the valley in the morning like steam. By nine the dew was gone off the green and by ten the whole of Coln Saint Aldwyns was standing about on it in shirtsleeves and sundresses and hats, putting up the stalls for the fête, which was on the cricket field behind the church every year on the third Saturday in May and had been since 1946, with a tombola and a coconut shy and a white elephant stall and a dog show and a tug of war between the village and Bibury that the village had lost every year since 2003, and a cake tent.

The cake tent was the heart of it. It was a long white marquee at the top of the field by the pavilion, with trestle tables down both sides covered in white paper, and on the trestle tables, on paper plates, under squares of muslin to keep the flies off, the cakes. Victoria sponges and fruit cakes and lemon drizzles and coffee and walnut and a chocolate cake shaped like a tractor and a cake from Mrs Dunning at the shop that was the same cake Mrs Dunning had entered every year since 1984, which was a Dundee cake, and had never won.

And it was Mrs Haverfield’s birthday.

It was, as far as anybody could tell, the only thing anybody in the village had been thinking about since January. Sue Fennell had been thinking about it since Christmas. Mick had sent in the application for the card. The vicar had arranged for the church bells to ring at noon. Mrs Ellis had organised a collection, and the collection had bought a new coat, dark blue, the same blue as the hat with the bird on it, from a shop in Cheltenham, which was in a box at the New Inn under the bar. Gaz and Little Rob had made a banner, out of a bedsheet and paint, which said HAPPY 100TH NAN in letters a foot high, and had hung it across the lane between the churchyard wall and the cottage opposite, and then been told by Sue that NAN was only their name for her and the rest of the village called her Mrs Haverfield, and had got the paint out again, and now the banner said HAPPY 100TH NAN MRS HAVERFIELD, which everybody agreed was better.

And Mrs Haverfield herself had said nothing about any of it.

She had sat on the churchyard wall every morning for a fortnight with Ernest at her feet and watched the village get ready for her birthday with an expression of complete and comprehensive indifference, and if anybody said anything she said I’m not having a fuss, and if anybody said it’s your hundredth she said it’s a Saturday, and on the Friday night, at the New Inn, when Sue Fennell had said Nan, there’s going to be a fuss whether you like it or not, she had said, then I’ll not be there, and gone home at seven.

---

He went to Church Lane at half past ten with the card.

It was in a white envelope with the royal arms on the back, which Mrs Akinola had given him, and inside it was the card, which had a photograph on the front of the Palace, which he had asked them to change and they had said they could not, and a message inside which was the message, I am so pleased to know that you are celebrating your one hundredth birthday, which he had asked them to change, and they had said they could not, and then, at the bottom, under the message, in his own hand, in ink, which they had said he could, his name.

Not George R. Not the cipher. His name.

And under it, smaller, a line he had written in the boot room at midnight on Thursday, and crossed out, and written again, and crossed out, and written a third time on a fresh card, which Mrs Akinola had sent down from London by special delivery on Friday morning with a note that said Sir, this is the last spare. M.A.

He knocked on the green door of number nine.

It opened at once. She had been waiting behind it.

She stood in the doorway in her cardigan and slippers, very small, with Ernest at her ankles, and looked at him, at the envelope in his hand with the royal arms on the back, and at his face, and her own face went very still.

“I said I’m not having a fuss,” said Mrs Haverfield.

“It’s not a fuss. It’s a card.”

“Michael sent off for it.” She looked at the envelope. “In January. He thinks I don’t know. He told Sue and Sue told the vicar and the vicar told Edna Dunning and Edna told me at the post office counter while she was selling me a stamp.” She lifted her chin. “It comes by post.”

“Not this one.”

She looked at him for a long time.

Then she stepped back from the door.

“You’d better come in,” she said, exactly as she had said it to his mother on Boxing Day. “You’ll let the heat out.”

---

He had never been inside.

It was a small square front room with a low ceiling and a window onto the lane with a lace curtain, and a fireplace with a clock on the mantelpiece and photographs in frames all along it, very old ones, brown, of people in hats, and a wedding, and a man in uniform, and a boy in a cap holding a cricket bat, and a small girl on a wall. There were two armchairs by the fireplace, one with a cushion on it worn into the shape of a person, and a small table with a lace cloth, and on the table, laid out, as though she had known exactly when he would come and had got them out at ten past ten, two cups and two saucers and a teapot under a knitted cosy and a plate of biscuits.

And in the second armchair, the one without the cushion worn into the shape of a person, with her feet tucked under her, in a summer dress, with a cup of tea, his mother.

“Good morning, älskling,” said the Queen of Sweden.

“You’re here.”

“I have been here since nine. Edith and I have been playing rummy.” She nodded at the table, where, he now saw, under the plate of biscuits, there was a pack of cards, face down. “She is winning. She is cheating. I have not been able to see how.”

“I’m not cheating,” said Mrs Haverfield, sitting down in the chair with the worn cushion. “I’m better. There’s a difference.” She looked at Frederick. “Sit down. On the pouffe. You’re too tall to stand in here, you’ll hit the beam.”

He sat on the pouffe.

He held out the envelope.

She took it. She did not open it straight away. She held it in her lap, in both hands, and looked at the royal arms on the back of it, for some time, and then turned it over, and looked at the front, where, in his own hand, he had written Mrs Edith Haverfield, 9 Church Lane, Coln Saint Aldwyns, and no stamp.

“No stamp,” said Mrs Haverfield.

“No.”

“Edna’ll be furious.”

She opened it.

She took out the card. She looked at the photograph on the front, the Palace, for a moment, with an expression that suggested she had opinions about it and was keeping them to herself out of courtesy to the guest. She opened it. She read the message. I am so pleased to know that you are celebrating your one hundredth birthday. Her face did not change.

She read the name.

Her face did not change.

She read the line under the name.

Frederick did not watch her read it. He looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece. At the small girl on a wall, brown, faded, in a cotton dress, about seven, with her chin up. At the boy in the cap with the cricket bat, a few years older, grinning, standing in front of a pavilion that Frederick was fairly sure was the pavilion at the top of the cricket field behind the church, which was where the cake tent was now. Cole, R.

The line under his name said: I should have asked your name in 1951. I’m asking now. Thank you, Edith.

Mrs Haverfield closed the card.

She sat in her chair with the card in her lap and her hands on top of it and looked at the fireplace for a long time.

His mother drank her tea.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked.

“Well,” said Mrs Haverfield at last.

She stood up. She went to the mantelpiece. She moved the photograph of the boy in the cap with the cricket bat a little to the left, and the photograph of the small girl on the wall a little to the right, and in the space between them, in the middle of the mantelpiece, under the clock, she stood the card up, open, so that you could see the line at the bottom.

She looked at it.

“There,” she said. And sat down again, and picked up her cards. “Christina. Your deal.”

---

The car came at noon.

It was Mick’s idea. He had found it in March, in a garage in Cirencester belonging to a man who restored old cars and lent them for weddings: a long low open car, black, with a great curving bonnet and chrome on everything and running boards and a folded canvas hood and leather seats the colour of conkers, built in 1949 and, the man in Cirencester swore, the same model, the very same model, Mick, I’ve looked it up, as the one that had come down the lane by the church in the summer of 1951 with a King leaning out of the back of it asking the way to Bibury.

Mick drove it.

He drove it from the garage in Cirencester to the village at eleven, at a walk, the whole way, eight miles, with the 860 following behind it because the 860 had to go that way anyway, and he stopped it in Church Lane at noon outside number nine under the banner that said HAPPY 100TH NAN MRS HAVERFIELD, in a suit, with his grandfather’s tie, which Jack had worn to London and given back, and got out, and went round to the back door of the car, and opened it, and stood beside it.

The church bells began to ring.

The green door of number nine opened.

Mrs Haverfield came out in the new coat. Dark blue. The same blue as the hat with the bird on it, which she was also wearing. She came down the path very slowly with her stick, with the Queen of Sweden on one side and the King of Great Britain on the other, not touching her, an inch away, the way Castellanos had held his arm out an inch from the Duke’s on the Back Walk, and she stopped at the gate, and looked at the car.

She looked at it for a long time.

The whole village was in the lane. All of it. On both sides, from the churchyard wall to the green, in their summer clothes, quiet, with the bells going over their heads.

“Michael,” said Mrs Haverfield.

“Nan.”

“What on earth is that?”

“It’s the car, Nan.” Mick’s voice was not quite steady. “Same as 1951. The same one. Well. The same make. I found it.” He held the door. “I thought you’d like to go down the lane in it. Once. The other way.”

Mrs Haverfield looked at her grandson for a long time.

Then she let go of her stick, and handed it to Frederick, without looking at him, and took Mick’s hand, and climbed into the back of the open car, the way she had climbed onto the 860 every Saturday for sixty years, with great dignity and no help at all that she would admit to, and sat down on the conker-coloured leather in her new blue coat and her hat with the bird on it.

She looked at Frederick, standing at the gate with her stick.

“Well,” she said. “Get in. You can’t let a woman of a hundred go down the lane on her own. People will talk.”

---

So the King of Great Britain sat in the back of an open car of 1949 beside a woman of a hundred in a blue hat, with the Queen of Sweden in the front beside the driver, and Mick Fennell drove them, at a walk, down Church Lane, under the banner, past the churchyard wall, past the lych-gate, past the war memorial and the bus stop and the New Inn, with the bells ringing, through the whole village, which stood on both sides of the lane in the sun and did not cheer, and did not wave, and did not take a single photograph, because Sue Fennell had gone round every house on the Friday and told them that if anybody so much as lifted a telephone she would ban them from the New Inn for life.

They just stood. Two hundred people. On both sides of the lane. Quite still. In the sun. As the car went past.

And as it passed each of them, each of them, without anybody having told them to, said, quietly, the same thing.

Happy birthday, Mrs Haverfield.

She did not wave. She sat very upright in the back of the car with her hands folded on her knee and her chin up and her pale clear eyes looking straight ahead down the lane, toward Bibury, the other way, and said thank you to each of them by name as she passed. Every one. Gaz and Little Rob, by the bus stop, with tears running down both their faces. Mr Purvis, at his gate, ninety-one now, in his overcoat with his medals, with his cap off. Mrs Dunning, outside the shop, with her arms folded, furious about the stamp. Poppy, on her father’s shoulders. Sue Fennell, outside the New Inn, in her apron, not crying, absolutely not crying, with her hand over her mouth.

At the end of the lane, at the corner by Purvis’s gate, where in 1951 a car had turned round to go the other way, Mick stopped the car.

Mrs Haverfield sat in the back of it and looked at the gate.

“It was the other way,” she said, very quietly, to nobody.

Then she turned her head and looked at Frederick beside her.

“Wave,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Go on. You’re in the car. They’re in the lane. You wave.” She lifted her chin. “Your father waved. In 1951. In the back, in his sailor suit. At me. I didn’t wave back.” She looked at the lane, at the whole village standing in it in the sun. “So you wave. And they’ll wave back. And then it’s done.”

He lifted his hand.

He waved. At the lane. At the village. At two hundred people standing in the sun on both sides of Church Lane, Coln Saint Aldwyns, on the seventeenth of May 2031, under a banner that said HAPPY 100TH NAN MRS HAVERFIELD.

And two hundred people waved back.

---

They had tea in her front room afterwards. The four of them. Mrs Haverfield in the chair with the worn cushion, and the Queen in the other chair, and Frederick on the pouffe, and on the floor by the fireplace, with his back against the wall and his knees up and Ernest asleep across his feet, Jack.

He had come in without knocking. He had come in from the lane at a quarter to one in his red sweatshirt, which he had changed back into the moment the car had gone past, and stood in the doorway of the front room and looked at the four of them, and at the card on the mantelpiece between the boy with the cricket bat and the girl on the wall, and gone very red, and sat down on the floor.

“You’re on the floor,” said Mrs Haverfield.

“I like the floor, Nan.”

“You’ve always liked the floor. Since you were two. You used to sit exactly there and eat the coal.” She looked at him. “Sit up. You still look like a pudding.”

Jack sat up.

The Queen poured him a cup of tea, and he took it from her, the Queen of Sweden, in his great-grandmother’s front room, and said ta, and drank it, and the Queen watched him do it with an expression of great and private satisfaction.

Nobody said anything about anything.

Mrs Haverfield drank her tea. The clock ticked. The bells had stopped. Outside, through the lace curtain, the village was going up the lane toward the cricket field and the fête, slowly, in the heat.

“He’s a good boy,” said Mrs Haverfield, to the Queen, about Jack, as though Jack were not there. “I told your son in January. At New Year. He’s loud and he’s daft and he can’t sit still and he’s never read a book. And he’s a good boy.”

“I know,” said the Queen. “He brought my husband a flask of soup to a lambing shed at two in the morning that was not for my husband.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Mrs Haverfield.

On the floor, Jack had gone the colour of the bus.

“Nan,” he said.

“Hush.” Mrs Haverfield put down her cup. She looked at Frederick on the pouffe, and then at Jack on the floor, and then at the Queen, and then at the card on the mantelpiece, for some time.

“I’ve been on that wall for eighty years,” she said. “Watching. Everybody who’s come down that lane. Everybody who’s gone up it. I watched my brother go up it in 1938 with a suitcase to Oxford, and come back down it in 1939, and go up it again in uniform, and not come back. I watched a King come down it in a car and ask the way and turn round in Purvis’s gate. I’ve watched every wedding and every funeral and every christening in that church for eighty years.” She looked at Jack. “And I watched this one come down the lane in September with my dog, talking, with a lost boy in an American coat beside him who’d let him talk for a mile and a half.” She looked at Frederick. “And I thought, oh. There it is.”

Nobody said anything.

“That’s all,” said Mrs Haverfield. “I just wanted to say it. Out loud. In my own house. On my hundredth birthday. So it’s been said.” She picked up her cup again. “Now go away, the lot of you, and go to the fête. I’m a hundred. I’m going to have a sleep.”

---

The cake competition was at three, and the King judged it, with Mrs Haverfield, who had judged it every year since 1958 except the years she had been entering, and had woken from her sleep at half past two and come up the lane to the cricket field with her stick and Ernest and announced at the door of the cake tent that she was not letting a boy from America who thinks a pasty is a delicacy judge the cakes of Coln Saint Aldwyns on his own.

So they judged it together. They went down the trestle tables in the long white marquee, the two of them, in the heat, with the whole village crowded in at the entrance and round the sides, and lifted the muslin off each cake in turn, and tasted it, with a fork, and conferred.

Or rather: he tasted it, and conferred, and Mrs Haverfield overruled him.

“The lemon drizzle,” said Frederick. “That’s the best one.”

“It’s dry,” said Mrs Haverfield.

“It’s not dry. It’s.”

“It’s dry. Look at it. You can see it’s dry. Marjorie Pike’s done the drizzle too early, it’s gone in and the top’s set.” She lifted the muslin off the next one. “Coffee and walnut.”

He tasted it.

“That’s very good.”

“It’s ordinary.”

“It’s.”

“It’s very good and it’s ordinary. It’s the same coffee and walnut Jean Treadgold’s done every year since 1979. It’s always very good. It’s always ordinary.” She moved on. “Victoria sponge.”

He tasted it.

He thought about it, very carefully, with the whole of the village watching from the door of the cake tent, and the heat coming in under the canvas, and Sue Fennell standing at the back with her arms folded, who had entered a Victoria sponge every year since 2014 and had never once, Jack said, been placed.

“That’s the one,” said Frederick.

Mrs Haverfield looked at him.

“That’s the best cake in the tent,” said Frederick. “It’s light and it’s not dry and it’s not ordinary and the jam’s homemade and the cream’s real and it’s.” He stopped. He looked at the cake. “It’s the best Victoria sponge I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

“Have you eaten many?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not qualified.” Mrs Haverfield lifted the muslin off the next cake, at the end of the table. It was a Dundee cake. It was dark and round and dense and covered in almonds in perfect concentric circles, and it was, Frederick knew, because Jack had told him, the same Dundee cake that Edna Dunning from the shop had entered every year since 1984, and that had never won.

Mrs Haverfield did not taste it.

She looked at it for a long time.

“That,” she said, “is the winner.”

The cake tent was silent.

“You haven’t tasted it,” said Frederick.

“I don’t need to taste it. I’ve tasted it every year for forty-seven years. It’s the same every year. It’s perfect every year.” Mrs Haverfield looked at the cake. “And every year I’ve given it second, or third, or nothing, because it’s Edna’s, and Edna’s never once in forty-seven years got a stamp on a letter straight.” She lifted her chin. “And this morning Edna Dunning stood outside that shop in the sun with her arms folded, furious about a card with no stamp on it, and still came and stood in the lane and said happy birthday.” She put the muslin back over the Dundee cake, very gently. “First. Edna Dunning. The Dundee.”

At the door of the cake tent, somebody made a small sound, and it was Edna Dunning, who sat down very suddenly on a bale of straw.

“And the Victoria sponge?” said Frederick.

Mrs Haverfield looked at him.

“Second,” she said. “Sue Fennell. Because the King said it was the best cake in the tent, and the King’s not qualified, and I’m not having it said I let a King judge the cakes.” She looked at the back of the tent, at Sue Fennell, with her arms folded, who had not moved. “First time in seventeen years, Susan. Don’t let it go to your head.”

Sue Fennell did not say anything. She turned round and walked out of the back of the cake tent into the sun and was not seen for twenty minutes, and when she came back her eyes were red and she said it was the heat.

---

The vicar went down at half past three.

He went down in the cake tent, by the trestle table with the scones on it, all at once, in the heat, the way a tall tree goes down, slowly at first and then not slowly at all. He had been standing in his cassock in the hottest part of the marquee for an hour, by the urn, serving tea, talking to everybody, the Reverend Alan Prothero, who had been a chaplain in the Army for twenty-two years and built bonfires on four continents and had never, he had told anybody who would listen, never once fainted in my life, not in a desert, not in a jungle, not at Sandhurst in August in full kit, and he went down at half past three on the seventeenth of May in a cake tent in Gloucestershire beside a plate of scones and lay on the grass with his eyes shut and his cassock round his knees.

Somebody screamed.

Theo was there before anybody else had moved.

Frederick did not see him come. Nobody did. One moment Theo had been at the far end of the cake tent by the entrance with Kit and Freya Lomax, eating a scone, in his St John Ambulance uniform, green, with the white cross on the shoulder, because he had been on duty at the fête since nine; and the next moment he was on his knees on the grass beside the vicar with the green bag open and his blue gloves on and his hand on the vicar’s neck, feeling for the pulse, and his face doing the thing it did over a cut eyebrow or a chemistry paper.

“Everybody back,” said Theo.

He did not say it loudly. He said it the way Kimura had said one to fifty-eight sophomores on a hill above the Pacific. And everybody went back.

“Vicar,” said Theo. “Vicar. Can you hear me?”

The vicar opened his eyes.

“Hartigan,” said the vicar, faintly.

“You fainted. You’re in the cake tent. You’re all right.” Theo was doing things with his hands, quickly, steadily, the way he had done the strips on Hugo Lomax’s eyebrow. “Don’t sit up. Lie still. Kit, his feet. Up. On the bale. Freya.” He did not look round. “Water. Not tea. Water. And a cold cloth. Anything wet.”

Freya Lomax was already gone. She came back in about eleven seconds with a jug of water and a tea towel soaked in it, and knelt down on the other side of the vicar, without being asked, and put the cold cloth on his forehead, and Theo looked at her across the vicar for one second, and nodded, and she nodded back, and neither of them said anything, and Frederick, standing among the cakes with the whole village behind him, saw something go across Theo’s face that he had seen go across his own face in the mirror, sometimes, since November.

The vicar lay on the grass with his feet on a bale and a wet tea towel on his forehead and looked up at the canvas of the cake tent.

“Never,” said the vicar, faintly, with enormous indignation. “Not in a desert.”

“You’re seventy-one,” said Theo, “and you’ve been standing next to an urn in a black cassock in a tent in the sun for an hour without drinking anything.” He held up the jug. “Drink this. Slowly.”

The vicar drank it.

“Better,” said the vicar, after a while.

“Good.” Theo sat back on his heels. “You need to go and sit in the shade for an hour. With a hat. And drink a pint of water. Not a pint of anything else. Water.” He looked at Freya across the vicar. “Will you take him?”

“Yes,” said Freya.

“Make sure he drinks it.”

“I will.”

“He’ll argue.”

“I know,” said Freya Lomax, and helped the Reverend Alan Prothero sit up, and stand up, and walked him slowly out of the cake tent into the shade of the pavilion with her arm through his, talking to him in a low firm voice about fluid intake, and he went, meekly, like a man being led off a parade ground.

Theo took his gloves off.

He sat on the grass in the cake tent in his green uniform and looked at the gloves in his hand.

Kit Barraclough, beside him, was looking at him with an expression Frederick had not seen on Kit’s face before. Not the scorn of September. Not the grudging respect of the Highland games. Something else.

“You were fast,” said Kit.

“He was down.”

“I know he was down. Everybody saw he was down. You were there. Before anyone.” Kit pushed his glasses up his nose. “You were there before I’d even put my scone down.”

Theo looked at the gloves.

“I don’t want to be a paramedic,” he said.

Kit stared at him.

“I’ve wanted to be a paramedic since I was thirteen,” said Theo. “I decided. I never changed my mind. I did the cadet course. I’ve got the certificate.” He turned the gloves over. “And I just knelt down next to the vicar and felt for his pulse and I thought, I want to know why. Not just what to do. Why he went down. What happened inside him. What his heart did.” He looked up at Kit. “That’s not a paramedic. That’s a doctor.”

Kit Barraclough looked at him for a long time on the grass in the cake tent.

“Maybe,” said Kit, with exactly the scorn he had used in September, on the gravel, on the first day, and then put his hand on Theo’s shoulder, on the white cross, briefly, and took it away. “Bloody maybe.”

---

At the end of the afternoon, when the stalls were coming down and the tug of war had been lost to Bibury for the twenty-ninth year running and the dogs had been judged and the coconut shy had been dismantled and the sun was going down over the hill behind the church, Mrs Haverfield sat on the churchyard wall, as she always did, with Ernest at her feet, in her new blue coat and her hat with the bird on it, and watched the village go home.

Frederick sat down beside her on the wall.

He had never sat on it. Not once. In nine months. It was her wall.

She did not tell him to get off.

They sat there together in the last of the light and watched the village go down the lane, slowly, in the warm evening, carrying trestle tables and cake tins and a banner that said HAPPY 100TH NAN MRS HAVERFIELD, rolled up.

“Well,” said Mrs Haverfield. “That’s a hundred.”

“Yes.”

“I said I didn’t want a fuss.”

“I know.”

“It was a fuss.”

“It was.”

Mrs Haverfield looked at the lane.

“It was the best fuss I’ve ever had,” she said. “Don’t tell Susan.”

She sat for a while.

“You’ll be gone in June,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Back to America.”

“Yes.”

“And he’ll be here.”

“Yes.”

Mrs Haverfield nodded slowly. She looked at the lane, where, at the bottom, outside the New Inn, Jack was helping his father carry the trestle tables in through the door, and talking, loudly, about something, with his hands, so that he kept nearly dropping his end.

“I’ve watched people go up that lane for eighty years,” she said. “Most of them come back.” She lifted her chin. “Not all. But most.”

She put both hands on her stick.

“Mind you come back,” said Mrs Haverfield. And got up, and went in.