Knocking interrupts reveries. Conn, the shepherd boy, glances towards the door; sees it rattling with an intense energy. His pleasurable longueur dissipated, he is brought back to himself; the crude noise dragging him into the lull of the present – and this, he feels, is surely a lonelier time, less compressed and emptier of incident than the one the woman opposite him has weaved around him with her words.

‘Well, do I answer it?’

Widow Gertrude, sitting on a stool opposite him, her hands comfortably on her lap, has been recounting, at great leisure, her life to him, telling it with sighing embellishments; not passing over any minute details that could be improved by a greater feeling in the delivery, or by some enormous exaggeration. She pauses, cocks her head.

‘Only the future knocks that hard,’ she says.

‘I do not understand,’ he says.

‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Methinks they knock too violently to mean us well. Smaller and fewer knocks would suffice, and those that fall should be spread out more evenly. We are not animals being called from pasture.’

The knock, though growing slightly weaker in force, is persistent in its frequency. A woman outside the door begins screaming.

‘This needs answering,’ Conn says.

They have been here for six days, or has or has it been seven? He cannot remember. It is always dark and nothing marks the time but the story she tells, and their sleeps that interrupt it; but even still in her constant story she has not yet reached the birth of her mother. Her story gives the impression of being infinite and, to Conn, it would not matter when it is left off, because nestled within each part are hidden suggestions that lead on to the next part, but also a plethora of sufficient closures to make each part the finish, and the two are always tussling together in an uneasy truce.

‘What?’ Gertrude says.

‘This knocking needs answering.’

From being outside so much in his life, he has imbued doors with melodramatic ideals. For him, they are romantic portals to the worlds within them. It would be a great pleasure, he imagines, to open a door with a sense of manly authority, to let someone in, or perhaps to keep them out; to have a little bit of ownership, a little internal place in a world that is so much made up of outsides.

‘Give it a little time,’ Gertrude says. ‘Youth is rash, fomenting and stirs up trash that would, if left alone, sink to the bottom and disappear.’

‘You would not have me answer it?’ Conn asks.

‘We are in a little happy coven here,’ the widow says. ‘A little woven cocoon of tranquillity nestled in the midst of an indiscriminate slaughterhouse. Why would we disturb it? One day, not far from now, we will have to answer what calls, but why now?’