Flakes of black straw hung in the hedges. Her walking stirred the ground so that she had the taste of ash on her lips. The spinney was up ahead. No, not that way, Jess, not today. We’ll go back the way we came.

She went back and worked all of the rest of the day in the garden. That day, and the ones that followed. Never did she work so hard in the garden as in that time after the boys went away to school. It was early for lifting and dividing and replanting, but if she did it with care the plants would not mind. Besides, it was so much easier to imagine how they would look in their new positions, next year, how the border might be rearranged, when the plants still had their leaves to them and a touch of colour, and one could see the form of the clumps. So much of gardening was that, the labour carrying one outside of the present moment and into the future, imagining how the garden would be, next year, another year, any year but this one.

She felt a shadow above her as if someone was standing there. Charlie darling, she said without looking up, yet she knew even as she spoke, but only a piece of her knew, that the shadow was not made by Charlie there but only a branch of the crabapple which she had moved beneath as she forked up weeds. So much she used to talk to Charlie about her plans for the garden.

Autumn crocuses, that’s what we are missing. I wonder when it’s best to plant them? In the winter, do you think, like the cyclamen? Look how well the cyclamen I planted the first year are doing, under the cherry tree, they’ve begun to naturalise, the clump bigger now every year. And Charlie might say, But I thought crocuses came in the spring. And she would say, with a flash of irritation, That’s why these are called autumn ones, silly. I thought you knew about that sort of thing.

She had thought he knew. But he didn’t know. And he had brought her here.

Then she would fall within herself. She would feel herself falling, and have to grip the fork and work the harder. In the night, too, she would feel herself falling, when she woke in the night, or in the morning when she woke so early, she would feel herself falling behind closed lids and have to pull herself up before she could open her eyes to the day.