You’d better come in.’ Mrs Mullen looked down at the boy’s bags, both small. The taxi had already turned and started down the long straight road twelve miles back to the station. ‘Well, pick them up.’ She had no intention of waiting on two children. ‘Oh. Yes.’ She did not know how a boy of eight should look but Edward Cayley seemed thin, his knee-caps protruding awkwardly from bony little legs. His hair was freshly cut, too short, leaving a fringe of bristle on his neck. ‘Put them down there.’ ‘Yes.’ They stood in the dimness of the hall staring at one another in silence for a full minute, Mrs Mullen struck by an unfamiliar sympathy for a child who was not like the few children she had known, who had been sturdy, loud, greedy, grubby and disrespectful. That was how village children were. Edward Cayley was the opposite of all those things and though she did not yet know about his appetite, no boy so thin, and pale as a peeled willow, could surely be a big eater. Edward looked at Mrs Mullen, and then at his own feet, knowing that staring round a strange house was impolite.
