‘All I’m saying is, who’s going to remember it now, really? Or care? Nobody, Astrid. That’s who.’ ‘But a young woman died!’ Astrid cried. ‘Sally Morgan died!’ ‘She was famous at the time, I grant you, but no one remembers her now, do they? Or you, for that matter.’

She hadn’t been terribly good at loving people after Magnus. Loving people involved cranking up the very mechanism that needed to remain shut down. Charlie used to say, ‘You’re completely unreachable.’

I discovered something curious too: the sweeps turn backwards (anticlockwise). This took me by surprise. And as I watched, it seemed to me as if each reverse pass was taking the windmill back through its memories, swooping through past moments which caused it to sigh and weep and laugh and cry out with pain, or regret, or joy, or delight – or

Afterwards, she thought her life was over, but it really wasn’t; it had just been halted for a bit, then had changed tack. She’d been stripped of one identity but eventually she had adapted to being someone different. She didn’t mind that sometimes she was unhappy, it was silly to believe that one could be happy all the time. When circumstances

She felt, suddenly, that she was being watched, and she turned to look at the queue zigzagging behind her, certain that she was about to find Magnus’s face among the strangers: the puff of white hair, the pale, Celtic eyes. He’d tracked her for decades now, popping up at weak points like this, glimpsed before vanishing. It would almost be odd if he

But Mrs Baker wasn’t a knitter. Her needle skills were focussed on damage limitation: mending, reattaching, strengthening.

Various bits of her were fizzing and buzzing: her wrist, her lower spine, her breastbone. She felt like that board game, Operation, where body parts light up, electric, at the slightest touch.

When Nina came in, if she didn’t close the door fast enough, a tornado would swirl in with her, flapping the curtains, blowing papers into the air, knocking over picture frames. Joe accepted this with equanimity. ‘It’s the windmill’s job to withstand gales. It calls the wind up here, and sometimes it’s too much, and it gets battered and torn up,

It would be her home for the next seven years, until the Great Storm brought Charlie to her door. The cottage had been derelict in those days, and she’d had no money to restore it, not that she’d wanted to. She had only wanted the windmill. She’d moved right in. She only had a couple of bags, and nowhere else to go and she’d simply slotted herself