I’ll go and make your coffee, she said.

From the bed Eden, she felt white, frozen in the folds of sheet. Across the passage the clock had stopped. This was the morning she had been expecting.

No, she said. Julia!

Little remained in the room but their two stripped faces.

Well, said Julia, the thick voice. There’s no other way but to know, she said.

To hurt or to protect. She stood above the bed, it was still the child, it was also that thin body, that you didn’t want to look, because.

Yes, it’s happened, she said, it tumbled. And somebody’s had their way. Though what’s the good, I’ll never know. No one’ll ever tell me that. To throw away what you’ve got. It’s little enough, but to throw away. Of course, I don’t understand. I’m the one as must take what I’m told. It’s better that way, they say. I wouldn’t understand. No, Eden, and I don’t. I’ll never understand why. What it’s all about.

Thinned out, the voice stood still, like your own heart, your own fears. Outside the bed it was still cold. And the glass. To press your face against a window. A key down the back, they said. Eden held her face against the window, the line of roofs, the numb trees.

We had a postcard telling us. Just that he was killed, said Julia.

It was like the last line in an obituary. Now was the moment to add your own word for the dead. The letters of friends. But to have known too intimately turned the platitude to a shrinking of the body against glass. When the body has learnt its purpose at the hands of the dead, it fails to convince, becomes a fleshy shroud.

I’ll go and make your coffee, Julia said.

While there was still time to call out: Wait, Julia, this is something that concerns us both, something we must both bear – the voice would not come. Julia implied that this was her own ground, on which no one must encroach. All the physical aspects of the dead, these would be stored in Julia’s mind, the clothes sorted, the pipe left on the mantelpiece. Some stiff concrete image of the man, sitting in the kitchen perhaps, or a boy playing in the yard, would remain Julia’s conception of the dead. Because the dead are what you make them, a personal matter, unshared.

Eden felt the cold begin to touch her body. She was alone now. The stockings hung waiting, sloughed and empty on the arm of the chair. The sense of aloneness, this is also a personal matter, she knew, this is no different from any morning, the sounds just restored to the house, except, except that somewhere, on a Spanish field or mountainside, twisted in the roots of the trees, in this same white light, there lies a little of myself. Drawing on her stockings, she began to shiver. She wanted not to think of the body, the kindness of the body, the many articulate ways it can have. It was easy to over-value these, and to set up the physical image as Julia did. But there were the other, the more pervasive moments that flower in the desert places of the mind or room.