If you have a ball, she said, then you must do your bowling outside.

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.