She was awake a long time the first night. This was not surprising, after the flight. She had never flown long-distance before. She felt the night grey in her head, not black, never quite black. The night was grey and the room where she did not sleep was spare and the house where so many people had passed in the past sounded of emptiness even though Jonathan’s mother and his brother were asleep in the rooms along the passage, and Jonathan himself asleep where he had slept through his childhood – and the dog downstairs, which was a new dog, Jonathan had said, that his mother had got while he was away, not the kind of dog they used to have, big golden dogs, retrievers, but a spaniel, black-and-white and long-eared, which slept in a basket in a corner of the kitchen. She had an idea that the emptiness she heard was not only inside her jet-lagged head but also the wind in the hollow of the chimney above the fireplace in the room. And that was black. In the winter, she thought, in the past when those others had lived in the house, there would have been a fire burning, smoke filling the chimney in the nights, and inside it would be black from that, soft and black from soot; but now in the summer the chimney was empty. The wind brought the sound of the clock from the church across the fields. The sound came through the open window and down the black chimney also. She put on the light and saw that the time on her watch was still the time in Japan. One a.m. in England, by the clock. Nine in Japan. She corrected her watch and lay awake some more.