For whatever reason, excitement or scholarship or both, her mother had committed herself to the Arthurian legends. After Gwen’s father died—from a lingering war wound in the late fifties—her mother continued the research and became an accomplished and renowned scholar.

Cass never bothered Gwen at the café. Never asked her to move or give up her table. Gwen associated that welcoming place with losing herself in the adventures of King Arthur.

She had inherited her mother’s books, some of which she did consider to be translations. Gwen had studied mathematics and accounting at university and was not skilled at reading Middle English, though she loved to read and had plowed her way through excerpts from The Canterbury Tales. Even those required frequent checking of footnotes. A first-year scan course in English literature was the only arts class she’d taken during her time at university. She’d forgotten the details of the Tales, but remembered Chaucer’s bawdy humour.

She’d never finished sorting her mother’s books. Some were packed in boxes, some displayed on shelves along the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Brigg had been all for selling the lot to a second-hand bookstore. He had pressured, for a time, but Gwen dug in her heels—one of the few times she had. Those times—of defiance—could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And now, out of nowhere, into her thoughts dropped the word “roundheels,” causing a noise to erupt from her throat, a half snort. With a cold, old shudder, she shook from her mind one memory that represented all memories: the number of times she’d half suffocated under Brigg’s heavy, lumpy body. Who else would have endured what she had endured? Did that mean she was weak? Spineless? She laughed aloud, and Rico squawked.

Again, she felt for the strip of paper. What sort of grief would she talk about among strangers?

“Woe came upon the people,” she said to Rico, recalling a line from an Arthurian tale. She tried to envisage a group of wailing strangers. She would be expected to say something. Wail along with the crowd. Or maybe there’d be no wailing; maybe there was a possibility of laughter.

She would become still and listen. Perhaps she would become friends with someone. A person who, like her, had been cast adrift. Someone with a heightened awareness of this new lone state. Gwen didn’t know which had been more upsetting: her retirement or Brigg’s death, which had made her a widow. The two events were muddled and inseparable.

Janey, from Spinney’s, had shown up at Brigg’s funeral and she referred to his passing as an unfortunate “off-time” death. Gwen nodded and accepted Janey’s hug, but she’d never heard the term and looked it up later on the web so she could be sure of its meaning.

Off-time death: Not expected, premature. Before the expected time.

Brigg was not yet seventy at the time of the stroke.

Along with Janey, three others from Gwen’s former office attended the funeral to express condolences. Gwen genuinely appreciated their presence, but seeing her former workmates made her realize that she missed the office routines as much as she missed the routines of marriage, despite Brigg.