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you should ring her GP, Rachel, see what she thinks.’
    The GP had been kind but mystified. ‘Evie came into the surgery about four months ago to have her blood pressure checked,’ she said. ‘I listened to her heart then and it
sounded fine.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m just looking through her notes again but there’s no sign of anything like a virus that might have damaged her heart.’
    ‘When I rang her two days before she died she told me she was planning to dig up one of her flowerbeds and try a whole new planting scheme for the summer.’
    ‘Nothing giving her problems on the farm?’
    ‘Not that I’m aware of. She sold the livestock a few years ago. Thank God.’
    I’d shuddered at the images of the burning pyres of sheep and cattle in the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001.
    Evie’s doctor could add nothing more except her regrets.
    In the last two days I’d emptied drawers and cupboards, written to the telephone company to have the landline disconnected, informed Evie’s bank and building
society of her death and phoned friends and family on my mobile, ticking actions off a list and feeling as though I was moving underneath an ocean, limbs weighed down by the pressure of the water.
We hadn’t even had the funeral yet: that would have to wait until the crematorium was less busy. Flu season.
    As the house emptied it seemed to reflect my own state: a vacant womb that couldn’t contain what it was supposed to contain. Only Evie would have understood this. ‘Not being able to
have a baby made me feel I was worthless,’ she’d told me after one of my failed IVF treatments. ‘We were surrounded by animals who could reproduce whenever they were required to,
year after year, and I couldn’t even carry a baby past a few months.’
    I felt like that every time I walked to our local shops at home, tripping over buggies and prams and toddlers, all of them mocking my barren state.
    ‘Until Jessamy,’ I’d said.
    ‘Until Jessamy,’ Evie echoed. ‘When I got to four months with her and realized I wasn’t going to lose this baby I couldn’t believe it.’ And there was a
fierceness on her normally gentle face.
    My mobile trilled, breaking in on my remembering and alerting me to a text. ‘Cd come down 2 help . . .’ Luke. ‘No point, all going well, thanx, xxx,’ I texted back,
feeling even worse. But I’d manage. I always did.
    And I didn’t want Luke here just now. Admitting this made me feel shame, but it was true. Sometimes mad thoughts bubbled up and wanted to burst from my lips. I wanted to tell him to ditch
me and find himself someone else, someone who could produce a child or who wouldn’t care about not having children.
    Evie’s dog Pilot whined gently at me as I passed him in the hallway. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ I stroked his smooth dark head and went upstairs to my
cousin’s bedroom and sat on her bed, staring at her chest of drawers and wardrobe, the bookcase that Evie had long ago emptied of books and toys. Little of Jessamy remained in this house
except the DVD film and some photographs. And yet I often sensed my cousin’s presence in Winter’s Copse. Sometimes I found myself turning suddenly, half expecting to see that broad
grin, that way she had of standing, thumbs tucked into the belt loops of her skirt or trousers, ready for action, for a walk down to the village shop to buy sherbet fountains or Curly Wurlies.
    My pulse was still racing. The film had shaken me. I hadn’t been expecting to see Jessamy leaping across the garden. I hadn’t braced myself for it. ‘Did you think I’d
forget Jessamy, Evie?’ Like a loon I almost listened for an answer. Nothing. ‘I’ll never forget her, I promise,’ I went on. When I’d watched that DVD I’d felt
myself falling through time, back to when I myself was nine or ten again, spending much of the summer with my widowed aunt and my cousin at Winter’s Copse while my parents were abroad. I was