Away to the right there was a glow above the orchard, almost as if there were a fire there, though the light was too steady for flames. She leaned and peered. A light in the orchard. What on earth was Alec up to? Was he outside still? At this hour? It was he, of course, who would try hardest to hold on to her. As a toddler he could not bear to have her out of his sight, following her around the house, even into the toilet, staggering after her, her little warder, her second-born, her baby. It pierced her that she could not spare him this, and a wave of tenderness went through her, followed by a sudden flush of self-hate in which she appeared to herself as a cronish, mean-spirited woman, who in the long enterprise of loving had failed those towards whom she had the most explicit duty. A mother was there to be devoured! (It was the hour for such strange thoughts: moths that only flew at dawn.) Not just her milk, but her bones and blood and brain. Had she kept something from them? Was that what Alec had come back for – to find what she had kept from him? To claim it? To eat up the last of her? She had a sudden startling image of them, Alec and Larry, in black suits like bank clerks, coming into the room and sitting by the bed, until shyly, tearfully, they reached beneath the pulled-up sheet to bite off a fingertip, an earlobe...

Ash dropped on to the bubbled paintwork of the windowsill and she carried her cigarette into the bathroom and doused it under the tap, careful to avoid the mirror there, for she too wished to remember herself differently. She sat on the toilet seat, panting, then crept back to the bedroom and eased herself between the sheets. Soon, the sun would break through the lower branches of the trees that grew alongside the drive. Already the first birds were beginning, single notes, tentative, as if their instinct for the light might be mistaken. She shut her eyes. For the first time in days she felt herself relaxing, almost a swoon. Now, she thought, now would not be a bad time; and once again she felt it, the sensation of an approach, the secret certainty that someone was moving towards her, distant still, but closer to her every hour, someone who would help her do it, who would know how to help her. It frightened her a little but she wanted him to come, and she opened her hands, thinking it would be best to be ready.

WHAT ARE DAYS FOR?

‘... it is the breathing time of day with me.
Let the foils be brought...’

Hamlet (Act v, scene ii)

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