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.)

He padded down the stairs, dark red foot after dark red foot, past the sporting prints dim on the wall, to the kitchen. (Uncle Ralph’s prints still there, before she redecorated and took them down.) Or first to his study, perhaps, to the gun cupboard there. Either then or later he took out the Purdey and a handful of cartridges to put in the pocket of his coat – or perhaps the cartridges were already in his pocket, for there would have been no reason for him to take so many if his intention were clear. Often she had found cartridges left in the pocket of his coat, even working their way through tears into the lining, weighing it down when you lifted it though the pockets when you turned them out were empty. The coat was of thick greenish Harris tweed, heavily worn. (That did not come back to her. If it had, then she might have kept it and put her hands to the tough weave and taken in its smell which had seemed to her so essentially a smell of him.)