‘Is that so?’ She took a plate of food from Ned, and throughout dinner she asked their children the usual questions about school, about their days. Open questions for stubborn Sally, direct ones for quiet Grace. Deflecting the task of talking onto the children. Ned could see the falseness in her expressions, the energy it was costing her to stay sound. After eating, the girls went to their rooms. Ned found a bottle of brandy. Plinked out the cork.

‘Not the washing, then?’

His wife took the chipped crystal tumbler from his hand. ‘No.’ Tossed its heat down her throat. ‘Not in that way.’

It wasn’t a torn muscle, she said. Nothing strained or overworked. She told him how the doctor had questioned her, examined her, felt for lumps and irregularities, listened to her breathing and heart rate, and could find nothing that explained the ache in her chest. Or anything that accounted for the rattle in her throat and her shortness of breath, which she hadn’t mentioned to Ned because she hadn’t wanted to worry him. The doctor had taken her pulse again, this time from her wrist. He’d turned her hand over in his. Felt at a sticky residue on her palm.

‘What’s this?’ he’d asked.

She’d told him it was the same stuff that was always there on washing days: the spray Ned and his men used on the orchard, wafting over the apples, settling on the bedding she wouldn’t have hung out if they’d remembered to tell her they were going to do it. Settling on tea towels, on shirts, on her skin and in her pores. The chemical taste of it in her mouth, coating her tongue, clogging her nostrils. A thick film of it on her hands from dragging all those spoiled sheets and clothes off the line. Not coming off as she did all the washing again, no matter how many loads were required.

Ned had begun to breathe very fast. His hand hurt. He looked down and saw that he was squeezing his fingers, twisting the knuckles against his grip. His face was hot and his throat itched. He thought of all the times he’d sprayed his trees. Thought of the thick gloves he wore when he did it, the strips of old flannel shirt that he wrapped around his mouth and nose. Of his heavy clouds of death, wafting over the orchard. He asked what else the doctor had said, and his wife told him that she’d been booked in with four specialists. The appointments began next week.