Trick or Treat by Lesley Glaister Page B

and he grew passionate about the land. He met others with the same passion for cultivation and for comradeship. For years they had been mostly apart. She flicks through the pages and a dead flat thing, a brownish thing, flutters out.
    It is a petal, the petal of a pressed flower. A rose petal? She supposes it came from Arthur, but that memory has gone.
    In the years before the war he was full of fire. Mein Kampf had been published and people were reading it and Arthur said the world was threatened with another war. Olive had strained not to believe him, and they had quarrelled, but oh how terribly right he had turned out to be. He may not have had much of an education but he had a nose for the way things were. In his union he was respected, all his life, looked up to and respected. The lead-up to the war was all meetings and rallies and conferences. They had made an anti-war exhibition and sent it all over England. They’d tried to anticipate what the outcome of a second world war would be. But they were wrong. Even Arthur was wrong. The truth was so much worse than they had imagined – they who were accused of scare-mongering.
    In those years before the war they’d hardly seen each other. Been together, yes, but hardly had time to notice, caught up in the terrible heady excitement and fear.
    And then there was the war, and their separation, and then the time after the war when Arthur lost his fire. Oh he had still dreamt and how she had loved him with his earthy fingers and his dreams.
    Between Olive’s fingers the rose petal dissolves into flakes. She did love Arthur but … if it had only been Arthur that she loved.
    If only she had been satisfied. Her memory travels towards darkness now, towards a place where she does not willingly go. She frowns at the pages of the books until the jumping words settle down, and she forces herself to try and make sense of them and of the doings of the Mellstock parish choir among the creaking trees.
    Arthur goes out to search for Olive’s hat. He takes Kropotkin, who is none the worse for his experience, and together they search in the gutter and under the cars, but they have no luck. It is a grim afternoon now, a proper November afternoon: the paving stones and the slate roofs glint wetly in the light of the watery circle that could be the sun or could be the moon. Drips hang from every twig, every sad privet hedge, and Arthur thinks longingly of his allotment. He fingers the godstone in his pocket.
    Olive is getting to be a proper worry nowadays. It is so hard to leave her. It is cruel to leave her for too long, for she loses her bearings. Olive. Desirable Olive. Bright Olive who always knew her mind; who refused to marry him on principle; who campaigned against the war and bravely spent the wartime nights fire-watching or driving ambulances through the blazing streets. His Olive who can’t cope now with taking a dog for a short walk. Arthur sniffs. The coldness brings a drop to the end of his nose, but it is sadness that makes his eyes swim. The godstone is warm in his clutch. It will last for ever, stone, unlike flesh, unlike mind, and somehow that is a comfort. Arthur is too in tune with the rising and the dying-away of the seasons, the endless cycle of ends and beginnings, to be in awe of death. But he does love Olive. And it pains him to see her decline.
    The hat is nowhere to be seen; some kid must have made off with it. Potkins has had enough. He’s decided it’s time for his tea and Arthur lets himself be pulled back up the hill. Life is full of sadness and madness, he thinks, and the loss of a cherry hat can break an old woman’s heart.

Five
    Rodney has turned up for his tea. Selflessly, Nell serves him her piece of smoked haddock on toast with a poached egg, and makes do with an egg herself.
    â€˜He used to love this,’ Rodney says, tucking in. ‘Remember, Mum? They used to have it for Saturday tea, all round the fire. Rodney