Page 45 of The Gathering Storm

‘Josh says he’ll teach me to drive Mr Pickles.’

‘She doesn’t have pedals.’

‘Stirrups are pedals,’ Alec said, and dropped Polly’s hand to run ahead shouting, ‘Pedal-pedal-pedal!’ at the top of his healthy young voice.

‘I don’t think he’s missed me a bit,’ Polly said, smiling.

Jessie linked arms with her comfortably. ‘He did.’

They followed the porter towards the exit. Polly looked around at all the familiar things that seemed oddly smaller than she remembered. She supposed it was having been surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean for five days. Thousands of miles of ocean that separated her from Erich. She ached.

Jessie glanced at her face. ‘Is it nice to be home?’ she asked. ‘Or rather not?’

‘I haven’t taken it in yet,’ Polly said. ‘Nothing seems real.’

‘A bit of a contrast to Queen Mary,’ Jessie suggested.

‘But that was the unrealest thing of all.’

Jessie drove, and Alec sat on Polly’s lap, reassuringly heavy, growing bony as he entered boyhood from infancy. His seat bones grinding her thighs were actually painful when he fidgeted, which was all the time. He was beginning to smell like a boy, too, a slight metallic scent, and his voice was always too loud – he hadn’t learned to modify it yet. Her son. Her blue-eyed, fair-haired son. She squeezed him in a hug, and he grunted in surprise.

They turned onto the track, and there was Morland Place ahead of them, the stone honey-coloured in the June sunshine. It was waiting for her. Like Alec, it seemed to be saying to her, Don’t go away again. But when Alec said it, it was love. Just then, Morland Place felt like duty.