Take it down. You did this to ruin me in front of everyone.
Nobody moved. The man from number fourteen was standing by his gate with a carrier bag, and he looked down into it, and then he put it on top of his wall very slowly and stepped away from it.
She did not let go. She said:
Take it down. Well?
And I did not answer her. I was not even looking at her.
I was looking at the house next to hers.
Where Joanna Lark was standing on her front step with her coat half on, looking at my sheet of card, with her whole face gone white.
PART 4
Nobody was ill.
I want that said properly, and early, because I know how this sounds.
By one o’clock that afternoon, every bag had been traced. The corner shop had pulled their display within ten minutes of Joanna ringing them. The market pitch never opened. Everybody on that street who had a bag either brought it back or binned it, and a man from the council came out on the Monday and was very kind and very thorough and took the empty container away.
Nobody ate a single one. Except for one, which I am coming to.
Glenys was not a thief in the way I wanted her to be.
I found that out about three weeks later from the woman who lives on her other side, who has known her for twenty years.
Glenys’s husband left in the spring. He took the car and most of what was in their joint account and moved in with somebody in the next town, and she has been living on almost nothing since, and she has told nobody on the street, because of pride.
I need the money was true.
This property isn’t yours either — I found that out too. Our house is rented. Hamish and I rented it for eleven years from a landlord who lives abroad, and Glenys knew that, because her husband used to do odd jobs for him. In her head the trees were nobody’s. In her head she was picking fruit off a landlord’s trees that a widow was going to have to leave behind anyway.
None of that makes what she said to me at the fence acceptable. He’s not here any more, is he — I have not forgiven that, and I am not going to.
