“There’s the postman,” said Greta, rising from her chair and wrapping her dressing gown of much-washed turquoise chenille about her. The postman was coming up the road—a young boy in a dark uniform and cap tenaciously weaving his bicycle over the slight incline. Elizabeth sat up and leaned her elbows on the table, watching him. She did not herself understand her interest in the mail, which was delivered twice a day. Nor did she understand why her interest should make the Stricklands so uneasy; after all, she thought, they can hardly imagine that I expect a letter from him. The letters addressed to her still expressed sympathy, enumerated the virtues of the dead, emphasized the importance of his brief life. Vaguely, she felt a resentment at being left to answer them all—just as, previously, she had been obliged to acknowledge the letters of good wishes and congratulation, and the receipt of wedding presents. Trying to find something different to say for every one of her short replies, she wondered that the event did not fully strike her now that it was commemorated in other people’s words and her own. But she wrote, each time: “Your sympathy has meant so much to me,” or, “I was very touched by your kind letter,” not easily but without real pain. Once, she turned her writing pad over and wrote on the back: “He is dead,” and watched the letters turn fuzzy on the gray cardboard, hoping to comprehend them. But she remained as numb as before, and after a moment stroked the words out heavily with her pen so that they were indistinguishable. If Greta saw it, she told herself, she would think I had gone out of my mind.

At times, she wondered whether it was simply too soon for her to miss him. He had been dead little more than a month. Six weeks ago, they had eaten their meals together, made love, driven about in a car. It was no time at all. During his lifetime, they had quite often been parted for several weeks because of his work, and once for almost three months when he had gone on business to the Far East. But she had missed him, then. Missed him unbearably, wept at the airport when he set out and again when he came home—thin and exhausted, having been ill and overworked in the Hôtel des Indes or the Raffles or whatever it happened to be. And how, she asked herself, could I have missed him then and not now? Testing herself a little at a time, she found that she could think with equanimity about any aspect of their life together, although she expected continually as she pursued these thoughts that at some point her stillness would be shattered, and grief and anguish would begin.