Like Ahmet had been.

All of this made her weep for what had gone, as if Kuei's childhood was the distant shore of some beautiful retreating land. For Mrs Tung, taking care of the family's long-awaited grandson had been the last time she was useful.

'I was a skeleton for years,' said Mae, confused.

Mr Ken's face was seriously worried for her.

'Your grandmother loved you,' said Mae. 'She was so sad when you went away.'

He had managed to get her back into her own house. 'I did not go away.'

'You grew up,' she accused him, and started to weep. 'We should come out of shells,' she said. 'The shells should be the babies, and the babies should be left behind, alive. For the mothers. For the mothers to cradle.'

'Stay here,' said Mr Ken. And he ran.

And Mae was left alone, and she wept; she wept for the village that had already died, the old Kizuldah.

You should be able to turn a corner and find home again, with its undrained marshes in the valley floor. The valley was left unploughed for the waterfowl, the foxes, the stars, and young lovers.

Oh, Mrs Tung, I was a friend of yours, and still I did not know you. I never came close. After you had sat me on your knee and showed me pages of clothes and beautiful women. Even though I saw you every day, still I did not know you. I never asked you about Japanese airplanes. Was it true that the landlord put poachers' heads on spikes?

An answer came from somewhere. Yes.

You see? No one believes that now. People think it was just Communist fairy tales. We lose, we lose so much.

The voice came back. Only everything.

It was as though Old Mrs Tung had come in and sat down.

Once there was a cold snap and I dropped a shirt from the laundry line and it broke.

And Mae saw that world: of rising with the dawn, of bending all day jamming rice plants into mud.

In the morning, you would hear all the men going off, singing songs.

Sing them for me, said Mae in her mind. And stood up to work.

Both of them sang old work songs that only Mrs Tung remembered – simple songs about someone whose work trousers would not stay up, or about the love of the porcupine for the wood louse. She remembered jokes that the villagers had told, jokes about moths. Who was so innocent now to joke about moths, sole leather, or candles?

Mae hung up her laundry, singing to herself in a loud, rough, peasant voice.

'Mrs Chung?' asked a young voice.

Mae turned and had to blink. The round young face could have been from any era: the 1940s, the 1980s, or the 2000s. The low rope collar of the dress told her what year it was.

This was one of Saturday's graduates, Han An. 'I came to thank you for my graduation dress.'

'You are welcome,' said Mae, and bowed. An was the daughter of a woman who had been Mae's best friend when they were children. They hardly saw each other now.

'We heard that you were not well after the Test.'

Mae shook her head. No, she was not well at all.

The young woman looked shaken. 'We all thought that, as fashion expert, you would be most at home with the new things…'

Mae started to say what had happened, and found she could not. It was too complicated and too simple at the same time. She could phrase it, I am haunted by a ghost. She could say: I stole part of Mrs Tung's soul. She could say, I was in Airmail when she died. She could say: I think Airmail is a place.

All of it would be true and all of it false. Language, like Mrs Tung herself, was an old, fragile footbridge, breaking through.

Mae stood with the wet sheets folded over her arm. Everything foxed her. An saw this. 'Let me help you,' said An.

An had bought cakes of gratitude. She passed these to Mae to hold out of reach of Mr Ken's dog, and began to nip clothes pegs onto the sheets.

If I was still concerned about being fashion expert, Mae thought, I would be alarmed. I would be alarmed at this loss of status. But I cannot be alarmed. I cannot help it.

An led her back into her own kitchen. She made Mae tea. Mae unwrapped the cakes, and she began to weep. She wept copiously, like a natural spring welling up out of the depths of the earth.

They were old-fashioned cakes, cakes such as the villagers had baked for each other for hundreds of years; beautiful little cakes made mostly from air, old rice, spare sugar, preserved sweet things in tiny precious slices. A story of hundreds of years of poverty and gratitude was told in those cakes. It seemed to her that Old Mrs Tung, all her friends and her mother's friends, all of the village women from the hard centuries, had clustered around to receive that thank-you.

Joe came home early, with Dr Bauschu, the county doctor.

'You cannot work, wife,' said Joe, heartsick, as if she were a favourite machine that had broken.

She paused and contemplated what must be true. 'My heart is too full,' she replied.

And suddenly, she remembered him, she saw him. Tiny, mischievous, in shorts – the child Joe. She saw him as Mrs Tung saw him. Oh, what an angel! A beautiful, merry little fellow in shorts, running amongst the others, chuckling and buffing them on the head, still laughing when they cuffed him back. He grew quickly and was too soon developed. Joe had ceased to learn.

There was little enough mischief in Joe now, or laughter.

'Oh, husband! What we have all lost, what we will all go on losing through all of history, it cannot be weighed. It cannot be measured!'

Her handsome, comic husband stood helpless, scratching his head. Whoever had heard of a wife who could not work because she perceived the weight of history?

Dr Bauschu asked her to sit down and roll up her sleeve. He was a hard, thin man who circulated among half a dozen villages with a battered old black briefcase. He had always been highly critical of the fashion expert – she did too much massaging with oils, too much dental flossing, services on the borderline where beauty crossed into health.

He seemed quite pleased that she was ill. 'So, you see, when illness really comes, even you call for the doctor.'

How unpleasant could he be? I am in mourning, fool, for a whole way of life.

Dr Bauschu insisted on taking her temperature, her pulse. He prodded her for lumps and peered down her throat. 'It is a nervous condition triggered by the trauma of that Test. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong. I suggest a drawing-off of humours.'

Even Mae knew that he had ceased to be scientific. He heated her good glasses, and set them on her lower back, to suck and draw.

'The doctor used to come every six months,' said Mae, sleepily, 'in a white van with a red crescent. We would all line up for treatment, even if there were nothing wrong. There always was something to cure: a tooth or a cut or head lice.'

The doctor's glasses gleamed as he snapped shut his bag. She was talking nonsense. The fashion expert had fallen.

That night most of the village crowded into Mae's single room.

Mae's sister-in-law, Mrs Wang, barracked around Mae's kitchen, trying to brew tea by looking in all the wrong places, scattering arrangements. Joe's brother Siao quietly followed her, replacing things. Ten of the Soongs, who were connected to Mae by various marriages crowded into her house. She couldn't even think of some of their names.

Mae's mother exclaimed to Old Mrs Soong. 'It is God's will. We have sinned and gone on sinning, so God punishes us.'

'Nonsense, Mother,' said Mae. 'God doesn't punish. He doesn't reward. He lets us get on with it.'

'Her father was murdered,' said her desolate mother, handkerchief gesturing towards Mae, as if that explained everything. 'She lost her sister and her daughter…'

All the family legends came out. Mae was too tired and harassed for them now. Wasted love was wearisome. Her handsome older sister Missy, who died… Mae's elder daughter, who also died… Why remind her of that now? Being with people, feeling so ill, reminded Mae of the worst of her past. She wanted everything gone. She wanted sleep, but they had all come to make her feel better.