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'I don't think of Michael like that.' Stella knew, as she said  the words,  that  it  wasn't entirely true.  Occasionally, inadvertently, accidentally, she did succumb to a momentary lapse, but she'd learned to shake herself out of such thoughts. 'Besides, he's far too busy to be interested in that sort of thing. He's working all hours at the restaurant.' She decided not to attempt to explain the complication of Lucien to her father. She couldn't quite explain that one to herself.

'Are all young people obsessed with working these days? I can't remember that we were like that.' He lifted his eyes to the window and looked like he might be searching back through memories. 'We used to make the time to go for walks and go to dances. We did courting, went on day trips and had conversations. There should be more to life than work.'

'And when did you last take a day away from the farm? You've got no room to lecture anyone on working too hard.'

'That's different.' 

'Is it?'

After the funeral, friends had asked her father if he might consider selling the farm. He'd given these suggestions short shrift, and had been determined not to let things slide, but was his heart still in it? He moved like his back hurt these days, and he'd needed help when it had snowed last month. Stella had driven over, but it had taken them hours to get the sheep in and they'd both been soaked through. There were times when their conversations seemed to be nothing but foot rot, intestinal parasites and declining prices, and she knew that he'd been struggling to balance the books for the past year. Stella remembered newborn lambs placed in front of the fire here, the smell of them, the wobbling bleat of their voices, and her mother smiling as she held a baby's bottle to their eager mouths. Her mother had stayed up all hours when it was lambing time. She'd helped with the shearing, the trips to market, and her parents had shared the day-to-day cycle of feeding, mending fences and worrying over veterinarians' bills. It wasn't just grief that was deepening the lines around her father's eyes, was it? Was he coping? Her conscience told her that she ought to be here helping him. But hadn't her mother always said that she must hold fast to her own ambitions?

'Talking of working too hard, are you still slogging at the coalface of literature?' her father asked.

'Not so much recently.'

Stella had launched into her new book with enthusiasm, but had somewhat lost her head of steam. It was difficult to sustain momentum when she had to worry about her father eating his greens and remembering to close the gates, and the sales figures of her last book didn't exactly inspire confidence. Stella hadn't told her father that The Marvellous Mrs Raffald had sold less than five hundred copies.

'Who is this new one about again? I know you've told me more than once, but I keep forgetting the woman's name.'

That wasn't the best sign. 'It's a biography of Hannah Glasse. She wrote the best-selling cookery book of the eighteenth century.'

'Have you ever thought of writing about a person who the general public have actually heard of?'

'They ought to have heard of Hannah Glasse. She's much admired by other cooks. She published the first recipe for Yorkshire pudding, you know, but she ended up in a prison for bankrupts. Her life story is like the plot of a Dickens novel.'

'Perhaps it's just me, then? You know your mother would be proud of you, don't you?'

'Do you think so?' It mattered that he said that. 

'I do.'

Her father had pushed a pound note into her hand as they'd parted on the doorstep. Stella had stocked up on flour and butter at the Co-op, dried fruit, sugar, soap, matches and tea. It was a slight extravagance that she also bought a bottle of gin, and a piece of brisket from the butcher's, she knew that, but it was good to frequent the local tradespeople, to be seen to be passing the time of day in one's Astrakhan coat, and to have a little motivating luxury. The wheels must be greased, after all.

When she got home she decided to bake herself a curd tart. She took pleasure in making an enriched pastry and lining the tart case tidily. She turned on the wireless set while she waited for the pastry case to bake, sipped a gin-and-vermouth and the kitchen smelled of hot baking beans. Hannah Glasse had a recipe for a curd tart, didn't she? Didn't it include crushed macaroons and orange-flower water? And couldn't she write an interesting piece about the evolution of cheesecakes?

Grating lemon peel and nutmeg into the curds, Stella sang along to a ludicrously jolly Noël Coward song that required a lot of farmyard animal noises. But then she saw her mother's face smiling as she held the bottle for the lambs, and a shock of love and loss jolted a sudden pain in Stella's chest. Like a physical blow, it took all the breath out of her lungs, and she had to sit down at the table. Would this get better too? With time, would these rushes of awful realization stop coming? She sat still, concentrating on the rhythm of her breath until the world stilled again, a world without her mother in it, and the audience applauded obliviously on the radiogram.