Selevan contemplated his approach. He thought about his conversation with Jago Reeth and what Jago had said on the subject of guiding and not directing a young person. Despite Selevan’s earlier reaction of easy-for-you-to-say-mate, he had to admit that Jago had spoken good sense. What was the point of trying to impose one’s will upon an adolescent when that adolescent had a will as well? It wasn’t as if people were all meant to do the same thing as their parents, was it? If they did, the world would never change, would never develop, would perhaps never even be interesting. It would all be lockstep, one generation after another. But, on the other hand, was that so bad?

Selevan didn’t know. What he did know was that he’d ended up, despite his own wishes in the matter and because of a cruel twist of fate in the person of his father’s ill health, doing the same thing as his parents. He’d given in to duty, and the end result had been carrying on with a dairy farm that he’d intended, as a young boy and then an adolescent, to escape as soon as possible. He’d never thought that situation was fair, so he had to ask himself how fair the family were being on Tammy, opposing her desires. On the other hand, what if her desires weren’t her desires at all but only the result of her fear? Now that was a question that wanted answering. But it couldn’t be answered unless it was asked.

He waited, though. First, he had to keep his promise to her and her parents, and that meant he had to go through her rucksack before he drove her to work. She submitted to the search with resignation. She watched him in silence. He could feel her gaze on him as he pawed through her belongings for contraband. Nothing. A meagre lunch. A wallet holding the five pounds he’d given her for spending money two weeks earlier. Lip balm and her address book. There was a paperback novel as well, and he leapt upon this as evidence. But the title-Shoes of the Fisherman-suggested she was reading at last about Cornwall and her heritage, so he let it go. He handed the rucksack over to her with a gruff, “See you keep it this way,” and then he noted she was wearing something he’d not seen before. It wasn’t a new garment. She was still in unrelieved black from head to toe, like Queen Victoria in the post-Albert period, but she had something different round her neck. It was inside her jersey, its green cord the only part he could see.

He said, “What’s this, then?” and he pulled it out. Not a necklace, he realised. Because if it was, it was the oddest necklace he’d ever looked at.

It had two ends, each of which was identical. They had small squares of cloth attached to them. These were embroidered with an ornamental M above which was embroidered a small gold crown. Selevan examined the cloth squares suspiciously. He said to Tammy, “What’s this, then, girl?”

“Scapular,” she told him.

“Scapper-what?”

“Scapular.”

“And the M means?”

“Mary.”

“Mary who?” he demanded.

She sighed. “Oh, Grandie,” was her reply.

This response didn’t exactly fill him with relief. He pocketed the scapular and told her to get her arse out to the car. When he joined her, he knew it was time, so he spoke.

“Is it the fear?” he asked her.

“What fear?”

“You know what fear. Men,” he said. “Has your mum…You know. You bloody well know what I’m talking about, girl.”

“I don’t, actually.”

“Has your mum told you…?”

His wife’s mum hadn’t. Poor Dot knew nothing. She’d come to him not only a virgin but as ignorant as a newborn lamb. He’d made a mess of things because of his inexperience and his nerves, which had evidenced as impatience and had reduced her to frightened tears. But modern girls weren’t like that, were they? They knew it all before they were ten.

On the other hand, ignorance and fear explained a lot about Tammy. For they could be what lay at the root of how she was living at present, all huddled into herself.

He said, “Has your mum told you ’bout it, girl?”

“About what?”

“Birds and bees. Cats and kittens. Has your mum told you?”

“Oh, Grandie,” she said.

“Stop the oh grandie and put me in the bloody picture. Because if she hasn’t…” Poor Dot, he thought. Poor ignorant Dot. The oldest girl in a family of girls, never having seen a grown naked man except in museums and hadn’t the poor fool woman actually believed that the male genitalia were shaped like fig leaves…God, what a horror the wedding night had been and what he’d learned from it all was the idjit he’d been to have been respectful and waited for marriage because if they’d done it beforehand at least she would have known whether she wanted to marry at all…Only she would have insisted upon marriage at that point, so any way you looked at, he’d have been caught. As he was always caught: by love, by duty, and now by Tammy.

“So what’s oh grandie meant to mean?” he asked her. “You know? You’re embarrassed? You’re what?”

She lowered her head. He thought she might be about to cry, and he didn’t want that, so he started the car. They rumbled up the slope and out of the caravan park. He saw that she was not going to speak. She intended to make this difficult for him. Damn and blast her, she was a stubborn little thing. He couldn’t reckon where she got that from, but it was no wonder her parents had reached the point of despair with her.

Well, there was nothing for it but to hammer away if she wasn’t going to answer him. So out of the caravan park and up the lane on the way into Casvelyn, Selevan got out his tools. “It’s the natural order of things,” he told her. “Men and women together. Anything else is unnatural and I mean anything else, if you receive my meaning, girl. Nothing to be worried over because we got separate parts, don’t we, and our separate parts’re meant to be joined. You got man on top and woman on bottom. They put their things together because that’s how it goes. He slides in and they rustle about and when it’s all said and done, they go to sleep. Sometimes they get a baby out of it. Sometimes they don’t. But it’s all the way it’s supposed to be and if a man’s got any wits about him, it’s a jolly nice thing that they both enjoy.”

There. He’d said it. But he wanted to repeat one part, to make certain she understood. “Anything else,” he said with a tap on the steering wheel, “isn’t in the natural order of things, and we’re meant to be natural. Natural. Like nature. And in nature, what you don’t see and don’t ever see is-”

“I’ve been talking to God,” Tammy said.

Now that was a real conversation stopper, Selevan thought. Straight out of the blue, like he hadn’t been trying to make a point with the girl. He said, “Have you, now? And what’s God been saying back? Nice that he’s got time for you, by the by, ’cause the bugger’s never had time for me.”

“I’ve tried to listen.” Tammy spoke like a girl with things on her mind. “I’ve tried to listen for his voice,” she said.

“His voice? God’s voice? From where? You expecting it out of the gorse or something?”

“God’s voice comes from within,” Tammy said, and she brought a lightly clenched fist to her skinny chest. “I’ve tried to listen to the voice from inside myself. It’s a quiet voice. It’s the voice of what’s right. You know when you hear it, Grandie.”

“Hear it a lot, do you?”

“When I get quiet I do. But now I can’t.”

“I’ve seen you quiet day and night.”

“But not inside.”

“How’s that?” He looked over at her. She was concentrating on the rain-streaked day, hedgerows dripping as the car skimmed past them, a magpie taking to the sky.

“My head’s full of chatter,” she said. “If my head won’t be silent, I can’t hear God.”

Chatter? he thought. What was the maddening girl on about? One moment he thought he had her sorted, the next he was flummoxed again. “What d’you got up there, then?” he asked, and he poked her head. “Goblins and ghoulies?”