‘Come down to the well with me,’ she says.

‘Now?’

‘Does now not suit you?’

Something about the way she says this makes me wonder if it’s something we are not supposed to do.

‘Is this secret?’

‘What?’

‘I mean, am I not supposed to tell?’

She turns me round, to face her. I have not really looked into her eyes, until now. Her eyes are dark blue pebbled with other blues.

‘There are no secrets in this house, do you hear?’

I don’t want to answer back – but feel she wants an answer.

‘Do you hear me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s not “yeah.” It’s “yes.” What is it?’

‘It’s yes.’

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, there are no secrets in this house.’

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.’

‘Okay.’ I take big breaths so I won’t cry.

She puts her arm around me. ‘You’re just too young to understand.’

As soon as she says this, I realise she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.

Downstairs, she fetches the zinc bucket from the scullery and takes me down the fields. At first I feel uneasy in the strange clothes, but walking along I grow that bit easier. Kinsella’s fields are broad and level, divided in strips with electric fences which she says I must not touch – unless I want a shock. When the wind blows, sections of the longer grass bend over, turning silver. On one strip of land, tall Friesian cows stand all around us, grazing. Some of them look up as we pass but not one of them moves away. They have huge bags of milk and long teats. I can hear them pulling the grass up from the roots. The breeze, crossing the rim of the bucket, whispers sometimes as we walk along. Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.

Soon, we climb over a stile and follow a parched path worn through the grass. The path goes on, snakes through a long field over which white butterflies skim and dart, and we wind up at a small iron gate where broad, stone steps slope down to a well of dark water. The woman leaves the bucket on the grass and holds my hand, comes with me.

‘Look,’ she says, ‘what water is here. Who’d ever think there wasn’t so much as a shower since the first of the month?’

Down here, it is cool and still and when I breathe, I hear the sound my breath makes over the still mouth of the well – so I breathe harder for a while to feel these sounds I make, coming back. The woman stands behind, not seeming to mind each breath coming back, as though they are hers.

‘Taste it,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Use the dipper.’ She points.

Hanging on the wall is a mug, a shadow cupped in the dusty enamel. I reach out and take it from the nail. She holds the belt of my trousers so I won’t fall in.

‘It’s deeper than you’d think,’ she says. ‘Be careful.’

The sun, at a slant now, throws a rippled version of how we look back at us. For a moment, I am afraid. I wait until I see myself not as I was when I arrived, looking like a gypsy child, but as I am now, clean, in different clothes, with the woman behind me. I dip the ladle and bring it to my lips. This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone. I dip it again and lift it level with the sunlight. I drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home. Then the woman pulls me back to where I am safe on the grass, and goes down alone. The bucket floats on its side for a moment before it sinks and swallows, making a grateful sound, a glug, before it’s torn away and lifted.

Walking back along the path and through the fields, holding her hand, I feel I have her balanced. Without me, I am certain she would tip over. I wonder how she manages when I am not here, and conclude that she must ordinarily fetch two buckets. I try to remember another time when I felt like this and am sad because I can’t remember a time, and happy, too, because I cannot.