I nodded, and Aurelius went on.

"The night I was found there was a big fire here. Mrs. Love told me so, when I was nine. She thought she should, because of the smell of smoke on my clothes when she found me. Later I came over to have a look. And I've been coming ever since. Later I looked it up in the archives of the local paper. Anyway-"

His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

"Anyway, the minute I got here I knew. This is home, I said to myself. This is where I come from. There was no doubt about it. I knew."

With his last words, Aurelius had let the lightness slip, allowed a fervor to creep in. He cleared his throat. "Obviously I don't expect anyone to believe it. I've no evidence as such. Only a coincidence of dates, and Mrs. Love's vague memory of a smell of smoke-and my own conviction."

"I believe it," I said.

Aurelius bit his lip and sent me a wary sideways look.

His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment.

"I believe you," I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. "I've had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can't know. From before you can remember."

And there it was again! A sudden movement in the corner of my eye, there and gone in the same instant. "Did you see that, Aurelius?" He followed my gaze to the topiary pyramids and beyond. "See what? No, I didn't see anything." It had gone. Or else it had never been there at all. I turned back to Aurelius, but I had lost my nerve. The moment for confidences was gone. "'Haveyou got a birthday?" Aurelius asked. "Yes. I've got a birthday." All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years. "I'll make a note of it, shall I?" he said brightly. "Then I can send you a card." I feigned a smile. "It's coming up soon, actually. " Aurelius opened a little blue notebook divided into months. "The nineteenth," I told him, and he wrote it down with a pencil so small it looked like a toothpick in his huge hand.

MRS. LOVE TURNS A HEEL

When it started to rain we put our hoods up and made our way hurriedly to the shelter of the church. In the porch we did a little jig to drive the raindrops off our coats, and then went inside. We sat in a pew near the altar and I stared up at the pale, vaulted ceiling until I made myself dizzy. "Tell me about when you were found," I said. "What do you know aboutit?" "I know what Mrs. Love told me," he answered. "I can tell you that.

And of course there's always my inheritance." "You have an inheritance?" "Yes. It's nothing much. Not what people usually mean when they talk about an inheritance, but all the same… In fact, I could show it to you later." "That would be nice." "Yes… Because I was thinking, nine is a bit too adjacent to breakfast for cake, isn't it?" It was said with a reluctant grimace that turned into a gleam with his next words: "So I thought, Invite Margaret back for elevenses. Cake and coffee, how does that sound? You could do with feeding up. And I'll show you my inheritance at the same time. What little there is to see."

I accepted the invitation. Aurelius took his glasses from his pocket and began to polish them absently with a handkerchief. "Well now." Slowly he took a deep breath. Slowly he exhaled. "As it was told to me. Mrs. Love, and her story."

His face settled into passive neutrality, a sign that, in the way of all storytellers, he was disappearing to make way for the voice of the story itself. And then he recited, and from his very first words, at the heart of his voice, it was Mrs. Love I heard, conjured from the grave by the memory of her story.

Her story, and Aurelius's, and also, perhaps, Emmeline's.

There was a pitch-black sky that night, and a storm was brewing in it. In the treetops the wind was whistling, and it was raining fit to break the windows. I was knitting in this chair by the fire, a gray sock it was, the second one, and I was just turning the heel. Well, I felt a shiver. Not that I was cold, mind you. I'd a nice lot of firewood piled up in the log basket that I'd brought in from the shed that afternoon, and I'd only just put another log on. So I wasn't cold, not at all, but I thought to myself, What a night, I'm glad I'm not some poor soul caught outdoors away from home on a night like this, and it was thinking of that poor soul as made me shiver.

Everything was quiet indoors, only the crack of the fire every so often, and the click-click of the knitting needles, and my sighs. My sighs, you say? Well, yes, my sighs. Because I wasn't happy. I'd fallen into remembering, and that's a bad habit for a woman of fifty. I'd got a warm fire, a roof over my head and a cooked dinner inside me, but was I content? Not I. So there I sat sighing over my gray sock, while the rain kept coming. After a time I got up to fetch a slice of plum cake from the pantry, nice and mature, fed with brandy. Cheered me up no end. But when I came back and picked up my knitting, my heart quite turned over. Do you know why? I'd turned the heel of that sock twice!

Now that bothered me. It really bothered me, because I'm a careful knitter, not slapdash like my sister Kitty used to be, nor half blind like my poor old mother when she got near the end. I'd only made that mistake twice in my life.

The first time I turned a heel too often was when I was a young thing. A sunny afternoon. I was sitting by an open window, enjoying the smell of everything blooming in the garden. It was a blue sock then. For… well, for a young man. My young man. I won't tell you his name, there's no need. Well, I'd been daydreaming. Silly. White dresses and white cakes and a lot of nonsense like that. And all of a sudden I looked down and saw that I'd turned the heel twice. There it was, plain as day. A ribbed leg part, a heel, more ribbing for the foot and then- another heel. I laughed out loud. It didn't matter. Easy enough to undo it and put it right.

I'd already drawn the needles out when Kitty came running up the garden path. What's up with her? I thought, all of a hurry. I saw her face was greenish white, and then she stopped dead the minute she saw me through the window. That's when I knew it wasn't a trouble for her but for me. She opened her mouth but she couldn't even say my name. She was crying. And then out she came with it.

There'd been an accident. He'd been out with his brother, my young man. After some grouse. Where they didn't ought to have been. Someone saw them and they took fright. Ran off. Daniel, the brother, he got to the stile first and hopped over. My young man, he was too hasty. His gun got caught in the stile. He should have slowed down, taken his time. He heard footsteps coming after them and panicked. Yanked at the gun. I don't need to spell it out, do I? You can guess what happened.

I undid my knitting. All those little knots that you make one after another, row by row, to knit a sock, I undid them. It's easy. Take the needles out, a little tug and they just fall apart. One after another, row by row. I undid the extra heel and then I just kept going. The foot, the first heel, the ribbing of the leg. All those loops unraveling themselves as you pull the wool. Then there was nothing left to unravel, only a pile of crinkled blue wool in my lap.

It doesn't take long to knit a sock and it takes a lot less to undo it.

I expect I wound the blue wool into a ball to make something else. But I don't remember that.

The second time I turned a heel twice, I was beginning to get old. Kitty and me were sitting by the fireside here, together. It was a year since her husband had died, nearly a year since she'd come to live with me. She was getting so much better, I thought. She'd been smiling more. Taking an interest in things. She could hear his name without welling up. We sat here and I was knitting-a nice pair of bed socks it was, for Kitty, softest lambs' wool, pink to go with her dressing gown- and she had a book in her lap. She can't have been looking at it, though, because she said, "Joan, you've turned that heel twice."