They spent the evening talking, by fits and starts, with long silences in between. They talked about the things that happened before the war, before Colin's marriage, the things they had done together. They talked about the farm and Anne's work, about Barker and Curtis and Ballinger, about Mrs. Sutton who watched them from her house across the road.
Mrs. Sutton had once been Colin's nurse up at the Manor: she had married old Sutton after his first wife's death; old Sutton who wouldn't die and let Anne have his farm. And now she watched them as if she were afraid of what they might do next.
"Poor old Nanna," Jerrold said.
"Goodness knows what she thinks of us," said Anne.
"It doesn't matter what she thinks," said Colin.
And they laughed; they laughed; and Jerrold was not quite sure, yet.
But before the night was over he thought he was.
They had given him the little room in the gable. It led out of Colin's room. And there on the chimneypiece he saw an old photograph of himself at the age of thirteen, holding a puppy in his arms. He had given it to Anne on the last day of the midsummer holidays, nineteen hundred. Also he found a pair of Anne's slippers under the bed, and, caught in a crack of the dressing-table, one long black hair. This room leading out of Colin's was Anne's room.
And Colin called out to him, "Do you mind leaving the door open, Jerry?
I can't sleep if it's shut."
v