Alice Pagett—Molly Pagett

The relationship between Alice Pagett and Molly Pagett is defined by care made vigilant through uncertainty. Since Alice lost her hearing and speech after mumps at four, Molly has lived with the practical and emotional demands of her daughter’s condition. When Alice’s behavior around the oak and her apparent recovery unsettle the household, Molly’s attention becomes the story’s intimate measure of both danger and hope: she watches, searches, interprets, and longs for her daughter to be well.

A Mother’s Vigilance

Molly’s concern begins in the daily rhythms of caring for Alice. From the bottom of the stairs, she can hear the familiar electronic sounds of Alice playing Galaxy Invader, a game her daughter can manage with a skill that both baffles and impresses her. The detail places Molly’s care in ordinary domestic life: she listens for Alice, knows her habits, and notices when those habits change. Even the game’s sounds acquire particular importance later, when Alice can hear them again.

The household’s ordinary routines sit beside strain. Molly’s anxieties have increased over the preceding two weeks, and the strain of life with Len Pagett is reflected in her fluctuating cigarette habit. Her attention, however, remains fixed on Alice. When Father Hagan arrives at night to say that Alice is at the presbytery with a doctor, Molly insists that her daughter is safely in bed. Finding the bed empty overturns that reassurance. Alice is not simply missing from the house: she has gone to the church, and the explanation is bound up with a previous journey that Molly has not been able to forget.

The Oak and the Return of Fear

Two weeks earlier, Molly had searched the church and its grounds, and even run to the road, after Alice disappeared. Father Hagan helped her search; he was the one who spotted Alice kneeling before the tree in the field. Alice had been smiling, but the expression vanished when she noticed their approach. She then seemed confused and disoriented. Molly asked her in sign language why she had gone there, but Alice looked puzzled, as if she did not understand the question. Although Alice seemed mostly herself afterward, Molly had noticed some distance in her and could not fully put the incident aside.

The nighttime return to the church restores that fear. Alice is found pale but peaceful, and the doctor finds nothing physically wrong, suggesting that she may have been sleepwalking. Len Pagett responds with anger and disbelief at the idea that Alice could have walked all the way to the church, while Molly remains frightened by the repetition: why has Alice gone to the tree again? Her care is therefore not merely a response to Alice’s disability. It is also an effort to understand behavior that Alice herself appears unable to explain, and to protect her when familiar signs of safety no longer settle the matter.

Reading Signs, Holding Back Hope

Molly’s relationship with Alice includes an especially painful uncertainty about communication. After the nighttime episode, a young man who nearly ran Alice down tells the family that Alice spoke to him. For Molly, this report opens the possibility that something has changed, but she cannot establish what it means. The next morning, she sees Alice absorbed in the same drawing she has made day after day for two weeks; even Father Hagan has been unable to make sense of the pictures. Molly brings her daughter a hot lemon drink and biscuits, yet Alice does not look up. When Molly takes the yellow crayon from her hand, Alice seems, for an instant, not to recognize her mother, then smiles.

The scene places familiar maternal gestures beside estrangement. Molly brings food, sits on the edge of the bed, and watches Alice’s face, but she cannot make the drawing or the brief look of nonrecognition yield a clear explanation. She imagines a return to the previous routine: Alice back at the special school for the deaf in Have, Molly at her part-time home-help job, and the household restored to normal. Yet she also prays for something better. Hope is present, but she is afraid to trust it.

Recovery and Renewed Devotion

When Alice appears to regain her hearing, Molly’s vigilance becomes joyful attention. In the night, she hears the familiar sounds of the game coming from Alice’s room and recognizes that her daughter can hear it. She approaches quietly, careful not to wake Len, and remembers how she once listened for the smallest sound from Alice as a baby. The possibility of hearing Alice cry again is itself a source of joy: for Molly, sound signifies not an interruption but a form of closeness she had long been unable to share with her daughter.

Molly understands the recovery through her devotion to the Virgin Mary. She believes that the affliction has lifted through divine intervention, and recalls that she had prayed fervently for Alice and encouraged her daughter’s own worship. That interpretation coexists with anxiety: doctors want to keep Alice in hospital for further tests, but Molly refuses consent because she fears that their probing might undo the recovery. Her decision shows how completely hope and protectiveness have become intertwined. Molly wants medical reassurance, but she also fears that scrutiny may threaten what she regards as a miracle.

Across these episodes, Molly is both a caregiver and an interpreter of Alice’s changing condition. She cannot explain the oak visits, the repeated drawing, or the sudden recovery, and the story does not make her uncertainty disappear. Instead, her enduring attention—listening at the stairs, searching the grounds, watching Alice draw, and waiting outside her bedroom—gives the relationship its continuity. Against events that resist explanation, Molly’s care remains concrete, intimate, and constant.