Windmill Hill

It was a risk to mention the Royal Shakespeare Company, and RADA, but the Discreet Mourners woman failed to link Astrid Miller, Audrey Hepburn’s Friend One, with the Astrid Fellowes who had been at the centre of a scandal in the 1970s and had gone mad on stage at the National, midway through a matinee of Macbeth.

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

‘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

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 perha

‘Exposure, Eileen! We can’t have it! You know why.’ It had only been eight months since the Awful Incident

But a good editor can make a film. You’re basically sitting in a room for sixteen hours a day with the director, and together you figure out what shots work best – you know, whether one scene is flowing, or a character’s dominating, or underplayed, or which look or cut best conveys a certain feeling or mood. It can be incredibly subtle. I could sho

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

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

The problem was that when she bought the windmill, people had recognised her from all the newspaper reports; they thought they knew what kind of person she was, and consequently, from the moment she arrived on the hill, they had wanted her off it. She rather missed being noticed, disapproved of, gossiped about. They never really had occasion to sto