The boys were watching. Billy was watching.

Think I should be off now, Billy said. If that’s what you’d like, madam.

Yes, Billy. Thank you, Billy.

Boys, come to the sitting room.

Again, to the sitting room. Out of the steam and the smell of burning.

We’ll be quiet there. Let’s go into the sitting room. There’s something I need to tell you.

Richard went stiff as ice before he cried. She saw the tears rushing to freeze in his eyes. And then he went red and they melted. But Jonny showed nothing. At first she looked at his blank face and wondered if he understood. He was just seven. What did a seven-year-old understand of death? (Everything, perhaps, or nothing. Perhaps no less than a grown woman understood. He’d seen dead things after all, birds, rabbits, rats. He knew what dead things were. Simply that when a person was dead he just wasn’t any more.)

The dog had come into the room with them, crowding against their legs where they sat all three on the sofa. She had her arms around the boys and then she held the dog. She felt the dog’s warmth, and the slight shiveriness within her, smelled the world outside that she had brought to them inside. She sensed that the dog understood. The dog of course had been there.

Daddy’s had an accident, she said. That voice again, that might not have been hers. She said that he tripped when he was climbing a fence and the gun went off. It seemed a plain enough story for boys to understand, even if boys knew that a man shouldn’t be climbing a fence with a loaded gun. But clearer because of that, because they would assume that if a man were to do such a thing, and the gun were indeed to go off, then he might well die as a consequence. It was the sort of thing one said, wasn’t it? At the time, in her world, among people like herself – themselves.

Only much later did she think about the mud on Jonny’s boots. It was too late by then. Her lie was told, fixed from that first moment as fact. It wasn’t the sort of lie one could go back on. If he had been outside that morning, if he had followed his father, if he had seen what might have been seen outside, then one could only hope that he hadn’t noticed that what she said was different from what was there; he was only seven, after all. It wasn’t meant as a lie, but as a way to make truth gentle. An accident, she had said it was, with the two boys beside her on the sofa, and the dog, who knew but didn’t know her words, before them. And Jonny was closed in on himself, but so was his brother with the tears like ice in his eyes; the two boys, each so different, each closed away. And she would be closed too, only the dog shivery but warm between them. But did they really understand? And the dog? Did Jess know he was gone for ever or was she looking for him each time that she went to the door and whimpered? Jess attached herself most to Jonny after that, though it made Richard jealous. Every day Jonny took her for a walk when he came back from school. If it was raining and Claire said he couldn’t go, he was angry with her.