Outside, there was glass on the grass. She had to put on leather gloves and pick it up, piece by piece, before any person or animal walked there. She would wrap the pieces in newspaper before she put them in the dustbin. She didn’t want anyone cutting themselves. One of the splinters had made a tiny nick on her finger, where there was a tear in a glove. She took off the glove and put the cut to her mouth to suck away the blood. He was standing at the door watching.

You’ll have to pay for that window. You can clear out the garage and earn some money and pay for the glass.

She couldn’t help thinking how like his father he was. Those blue eyes, the squareness of the face, the long back that meant that he would be tall. Regular features, thick fair hair that wouldn’t brush down. Some silent weight in him, that she had found in Charlie, that she had not seen at first, that she had got to recognise over the years of their marriage, ugly and intractable. She had observed Richard intensely from the day he was born, because he was the first, and later perhaps with a kind of foreboding because he was like his father. He said nothing, but doggedly cleared the garage. He spent the whole day doing it. Never before and never again would she see it so tidy.

A morning like others

Time passed. Times returned. All days began the same way. They always had, days at the farm, days in the country, waking in her bed to that day’s degree of morning light.

This had been specifically a day in November. November one year was not so different from November any other. This particular morning there was almost no light at all, only a glimmer of grey where the curtains did not meet.

She woke, half woke, as he rose from the bed. He let in the cold between the sheets, so she pulled them closer when he was gone and curled back into herself and into sleep. Half-sleep.

What happened next she might have remembered or she might have imagined later, because the beginning of this day was indistinguishable really from that of so many other days. It was possible, after all, that this was one of the mornings when Charlie’s movements didn’t wake her and she slept on regardless, even spreading out into the warm space that he had left; but then there would have been no narrative, and memory requires narrative, requires this day to begin in consciousness. So there it was. In her memory she heard, half heard, him dress, open the door quietly so as not to wake her, pull it to, pad downstairs in his socks. She would think that he was wearing burgundy-coloured socks, because he had only one pair that colour, and it occurred to her later, when she cleared all his clothes, that she never saw them again. (The small things and the worn things taken from his drawers, folded as they were, and burned in the incinerator which was a black barrel at the back of the yard; other things given away; those particular socks never seen.)