She clutches at Rascal. ‘Listen,’ she says. For it had been so clear.

Rascal listens, holding his breath, but can hear nothing.

Something is cracking. It is Karen who is the house at this moment, and all that it spans and gathers together is giving way.

Rascal, with his small helpless thoughts, cannot share in this. His father’s death, in an unknown place so that he cannot be pictured there, has opened up a chasm in front of him and he is terrified of moving. He cannot understand it. He merely butts against it in one direction, and in the other there is this chasm. He has to cling to his mother, while his thoughts race. But he has no part in the hidden cracking. His sorrow is fierce and straightforward, and soon it will fade, and the chasm will be filled so that he can run around freely as before. He cannot be broken.

‘Listen,’ she says, so confused is she.

He does all he can to conjure up some sound, but notices nothing.

‘What can you hear?’ he asks, afraid. ‘Are they going to come and take you away too?’ he says, his eyes widening at the thought of such a possibility.

‘No, of course not. And I can’t hear anything either. It was only something I imagined. Sit quietly now, Rascal.’

He blinks and looks up at her and says confidentially, ‘I’ll sit quiet as a mouse.’

She seizes his hands when he says this. She is sitting blinded, in the shadow of Peter’s message. It has encircled her, unfolded itself. She is nothing. Peter of the white face came in and said that it had just been made known.

How did it happen?

Peter had told her what had been made known. And she had heard a shot. But a suspicion of something else raced through her. She dared not ask what Peter thought, and he looked as though he was glad she didn’t. He left at once. She wanted to call after him but could not bring herself to do so.

‘But Stig held his tongue,’ Peter emphasized, before he went. His face was white.

She is still preoccupied by this deafening shot that she does not know whether to believe in, but to which she is clinging. She is at the centre of the explosion. What else Peter said has not yet dawned on her as it will later.

In the meantime Rascal is sitting quiet as a mouse. Childish little thoughts are working in his brain. Then he remembers something.

‘Mother! We must go to Grandpa! I don’t expect he knows about it.’

She says yes, yes, we must go to Grandpa.

‘But he has been told,’ she explains. ‘The whole house knows about it. It has been made known.’

‘But aren’t we to go then?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll go soon.’

Rascal is on his feet. ‘Come on, then!’

‘Not straight away,’ she begs. ‘Let’s wait a bit. Then we’ll be able to face going to Grandpa.’