The Glasshouse Winter

There were four hundred and six panes in the glasshouse at Ardmore and by February my father had counted them all twice.

He did it aloud, on the second circuit, the way a man says a rosary — not for the number, which he already had, but for the walking. Down the west wall, along the cold end where the vine was, up the east, and back. Four hundred and six. Two of them cracked, one missing since the gale in November and boarded with a square of hardboard that had gone soft in the middle and bowed inward like something breathing.

My mother had been gone since the second week of December. Nobody in that house used the word gone in the way I have just used it, and I am not going to start now.

What we said was: your mother is in Perth.

What we meant was a low grey building with a car park, and a nurse who called my father *Mr Bell* in a voice she must have practised, and a window on the second floor that did not open.

The glasshouse had been hers. That was the trouble. She had built it out of a derelict lean-to over four summers with a book from the library and my uncle's second-best tools, and every winter since it had been understood, without a word passing between any of us, that keeping it from freezing was the household's real work, and everything else — the farm, the school run, my father's job at the mill — was what we did in between.

So he counted panes. And I carried paraffin. And the vine, which she had grafted herself and which had never in nine years produced anything you could eat, went on making its slow black wood in the dark at the cold end, waiting for somebody to tell it what year it was.