When Will There Be Good News?

A family is walking down a country lane together—a mother and three children. Jessica is eight, Joanna is six, and Joseph is a baby. Jessica is leading their dog, which she spends a lot of time training. Jessica is usually in charge because Joanna prefers not to think for herself.

The family has just gotten off a bus after shopping in town. They don’t have a car. The father, a writer named Howard Mason, has driven away in it. It was his idea to move to rural Devon, because he needed “space to write.” Joanna misses her old home and school and dislikes the long trek to town (a long walk and two bus rides).

The family’s country life has not been successful. A fox ate their hens, and the bees in their beehive froze. Their father just says he’ll put it all in his novel. Their mother, Gabrielle, a painter, no longer paints in the country. She is clever, funny, and quite unlike their friends’ mothers. She and Howard fight sometimes. During the fights, Jessica gathers her siblings in their bed, and they all fall asleep. After their first winter in the country, Howard moves back to London and lives with Martina, his “other woman,” a poet. Gabrielle still doesn’t paint.

As they walk along the country road, laden with shopping, Gabrielle promises the children that they will move back into town in time for school. Joanna admires her mother’s strength as she pushes the baby’s buggy uphill. Jessica is “fierce” like their mother, but Joanna thinks she has only inherited their mother’s allergies. Most of Joanna’s things are hand-me-downs from Jessica. “Joanna filled the spaces Jessica left behind as she moved on.”

They walk along a huge wheat field. Joanna got lost in it once, and the dog found her. They stop for a snack in the shade. In London, they used to have “proper picnics” using their grandmother’s picnic basket. They don’t have any of their wealthy grandmother’s money because, Gabrielle explains, Gabrielle and Howard eloped.

As they continue making their way toward home, a man suddenly appears, seemingly out of nowhere. Their dog growls. The man is walking quickly toward them, huffing and puffing. Gabrielle starts walking faster and urges the girls to hurry, leaving the dropped groceries behind. The man is now walking in the same direction they are. Their dog tries to block his path. The man kicks the dog, hard, into the wheat. It makes a “terrible squealing noise.” Jessica screams at the man and runs after the dog.

Joanna realizes that her mother is fighting the man. He has a knife he keeps raising in the air. Soon Gabrielle is covered with blood. Joanna realizes that her mother is screaming at her to run. Her mother is finally cut down where she stood, stabbed through the heart. Jessica, too, is stabbed and dies curled up with the dead dog. The baby dies in the buggy. Joanna, meanwhile, obeys her mother’s scream—“Run, Joanna, run.” She runs into the wheat and gets lost.

Later, after dark, Joanna is found by other dogs. A stranger picks her up, saying, “Not a scratch on her.” Even then, Joanna thinks that she should have rescued the baby—Jessica would have. But she just did as she was told. Thirty years later, “the thing that drove her to distraction was that she couldn’t remember what the dog was called. And there was no one left to ask.”