Annie soon became aware of the difference in her Freddie. He moved around with new energy, he was whistling and singing, and his eyes had changed. They were mysteriously alive now, as if he had found some secret light, and Annie couldn’t help being pleased. She even began to feel better in herself. She had to admit that Kate Loxley had brought a new bright spirit into both their lives. The entrenched anxiety began to crumble, day by day, and her feelings warmed towards the brave, happy girl who was coping with a new life and the rigorous demands of a nurse’s training.

‘What’s Kate’s favourite colour?’ Annie asked Freddie as he was heading out to start the lorry.

‘Red,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘I’ll see you later, Mother – about six.’

Annie stood at the gate watching him drive off in a cloud of dust. ‘Red,’ she thought, and glanced up the hill at the hospital where Kate was working, its windows a soft amber in the afternoon sun. She looked down the road and she could see the wool shop. Her fingers itched to get her hands on some lovely red wool and knit Kate a cardigan. A red cardigan.

She walked inside and looked at herself in the mirror.

‘All your life, Annie Barcussy,’ she said to her reflection, ‘you’ve been standing at the gate expecting other folks to run your errands. Now it’s time you changed.’

She’d vowed never to go out again, yet now she found herself putting on her hat, taking some money from the bakery box, and wrapping her hand around Levi’s walking stick. What would she do if the panic started? She couldn’t be bothered with it. All she could see was the excitement of coming home with a basket of red wool, and a pattern for a cardigan.

Annie opened the gate and stepped out, her basket over one arm, squared her shoulders and walked steadily down the road to the shop.

On a blazing hot Saturday in July, it seemed to Freddie that the whole day was encapsulated in one moment of time. It was like the centre of a sparkle, where all the rays of light converged, focusing the essence of his dreams into one intense minute of pure light.

All day he’d waited for the moment to come. He could think of little else as he and Kate travelled down to Weymouth. They got off the train, walked hand in hand down the street towards the clock tower, and arrived at the promenade railings. Seeing the sea for the first time stunned Freddie into silence. The water heaved and glittered before him like the sequinned gown of an opera singer; it had the same massive, mysterious power as the undiscovered half of his consciousness.

For once, Kate was quiet as she watched his reaction, and waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. He was far away, under the waves, following exotic fish into caves, watching shoals of them catching the light as they twisted and turned.

‘Well, say something!’ Kate prompted him after ten minutes of contemplative gazing.

‘Ah – well – words might spoil it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect it to be so blue, well blue-green like a kingfisher. And I didn’t know it would be so vast.’ He pointed at the horizon. ‘That sharp line, ’tis like the blade of a knife. What would I see if I went out there?’

‘France,’ said Kate.

Freddie digested that information as he followed her down some steps to the sand. France had been pink in his geography book at school, and that was all he knew about it.

As usual, Kate kicked off her shoes, looked at him bewitchingly, and went running across the sand to paddle in the edge of the sea. He struggled out of his boots and socks, rolled up his trousers and sprinted over the velvety sand into deliciously cool crystal-clear water. Together they paddled, watching the sunlight marbling their skin.

‘Taste it. It’s SALTY.’ Kate offered him some sea water in the palm of her hand. He dipped a finger, tasted the salt, then looked into her amber eyes. Is this the moment? he thought. No wait. Wait and be sure.

Someone was guiding him that day, Freddie knew. The same feeling of being in a bubble of light with Kate lingered all day as if they were cupped in the womb of a shining angel whose wings covered the sea. He fancied there were golden ribbons in the air around them, winding, binding them together. He wanted to tell Kate, but it was hard to find an opportunity. She was so busy introducing him to the wonders of the seaside, collecting shells, popping seaweed, and building sand-castles. Then came the picnic, leaning against the hot sea wall, the taste of butter and cucumber, the burn of the sun on his white feet.

The moment came just one hour before the train home. They were sitting on the end of a wooden jetty, dangling their feet in the water, and Kate was playfully trying to link her toes with his. Her sunburned arm kept brushing against his, and the sea-breeze was blowing through her hair. The sunlight was sparkling on the water.

‘Kate.’

There was something compelling in the way he lowered his voice an octave, and the way his eyes looked at her, unwavering and deep. Kate stopped giggling and paid attention.

‘Now I’m going to tell you something,’ he began, and he reached out and took her hands in his. ‘In all of my life, I’ve never done anything major without thinking about it first, and I’ve thought and thought about this, Kate. I’ve loved you ever since I saw you riding down the lane on Daisy. I’ve kept an eye on you, in secret, all those years, and when I got the chance to meet you that day at the station, I saw something in you that is very rare and beautiful. No, don’t say anything – hear me out.’ Freddie’s voice deepened with the passion he was feeling, and Kate listened, spellbound by his intensity. ‘I don’t just mean beautiful to look at, Kate, because you are, but it’s something beyond that, some magic in your eyes. You’re a beautiful person. You’re kind and full of life and – and hope. I think you are pure goodness. And when you went I was – devastated. I put my heart and soul into carving the stone angel, and her face is your face because I carried you in my heart all those years, Kate.’ Freddie paused and squeezed her hands. He looked at the sunlight in her eyes and knew from the way she was listening that he could say everything in his heart. ‘No one else knows this, but I can pick up feelings from touching stone, as if it’s a storehouse of everything that has happened close to it. So when I’d finished the stone angel, I stood out there in the twilight, with the planet Venus bright in the west, and I put my two hands on the stone angel and recited a poem, one that says everything I feel about you, Kate, and I could feel the stone absorbing my words like a prayer.’

‘What was it? The prayer?’ Kate asked, her eyes never leaving his face.

‘It’s W. B. Yeats again.’ Freddie took out his wallet and extracted a dog-eared square of cardboard, cut from a cigarette packet covered in tiny neat handwriting.

‘My granny wrote this out for me when I was a lad,’ he said, ‘with a quill pen she’d made from a chicken feather. She’d got a dark blue tablecloth she embroidered with white and gold, and she’d done the sun, moon and stars on it, and the clouds. I got it now – and I put it over the stone angel to keep the prayer in there until you saw it. ’Tis a lovely old thing, I treasure it, and she made it because she liked the poem. Have you read it?’

‘No – you read it to me, please,’ implored Kate. ‘I love to hear your voice.’

‘Oh all right.’ Freddie studied the poem for a moment, then slowly read it in a voice so quiet and deep that it blended with the whispering of the sea.

‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths

Enwrought with gold and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet: