Windmill Hill

‘Your heart,’ she said, ‘will have been compensating for years without you even knowing there was something wrong. But then at some point it will have started to send out signals.’ Dizzy spells, tiredness, shortness of breath; a sense of things misfiring, spinning; palpitations, insomnia. The notion that her heart had been signalling to her made he

Nothing is but what is not. They’d had a terrible fight about that line. Magnus had insisted that it was simple: Macbeth’s fixation on something that has not yet happened but should, could, must, will – the power fantasy more real than the present. Astrid, though, had felt that the line was more nuanced; Shakespeare is saying that what we perceive,

the wind had picked up, coming in off the sea, rushing over the ridge of the Downs, clear and hard, carrying salt and complicated scents of wildflowers with seagulls cresting in, and over, clouds travelling fast, faster, onwards, past; and the power builds and hums, the muscles strain for release and at last familiar feet run up inside, and there i

The notion that the windmill might collapse was not, in fact, outlandish. Pieces of it were definitely coming loose. The next big storm could rip off the sweeps, perhaps even take off the fantail. She pictured the iron star wheel spinning through the sky and slicing through the cottage roof. The villagers would be up in arms. They’d roar up the hil

The mourning was, in fact, trickier than it sounded. It wasn’t just a question of stagey weeping at the back of a church. The acting required significant research, sometimes several phone calls with the client for background information, and then a dramatic performance sustained over many hours. Astrid had never thought before how funerals are prim

The deceased were never terribly old, that was part of the problem. A limited number of mourners would, after all, be normal at funerals for the very elderly. Most were for people who were younger than her, only in the hinterlands of old age, and each booking told its own sad story of grudge-holding, misunderstandings, lost opportunities, dysfuncti

‘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.’

The truth was that over the past eight months, ever since the Awful Incident, they’d both become a bit unhinged, prone to bickering and flare-ups, and odd sightings. Finding Magnus’s interview in the Sunday Times had only worsened their nerves, and then when Nina came to the windmill – sweet, kind Nina – everything had somehow escalated so that now

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, an