Through the rest of the day, he couldn’t rid himself of the image of the dying fox. He cycled furiously back home, barely seeing anything, and dumped his bike behind the shop. He aimed a vicious kick at the back wall of the yard. It was the way the fox had looked at him. Accusatory, as if it had seen something rotten in his heart. He had wanted to hurt Verity for putting up a barrier against him; and with a sick certainty he knew that he wanted to hurt Jack too.

*

Lying on her bed, with her mother’s sampler above her – Home Sweet Home stitched in green – Verity felt again the cold, slow dribble of it down her thigh, Jack pulling back as if he had been burned. ‘Jesus,’ he would say. She turned away so as not to see it, the swollen, unnatural thing she tried not to look at, and pushed her face into the pillow until he drew near again and pressed against her back.

There must be something wrong with her, something immoral, and she imagined that it could be seen by other people, not like a giant red mark on her forehead like they used to give adulterers, but a stink, a reek, like a warning.

She told herself it was only once, it wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t. It had been shocking, painful, and so reckless. But once the breach (that was how she thought of it) was made, it was easier for it to happen again. Her body started to respond to it and then to crave it. She began to think of her body as a different thing, something separate from the rest of her, something she had not known before and had not thought was possible. Now they went straight to bed, and only later she or he would make the bitter coffee. They would sit on the bed with their mugs and look at the changing light on the fields. Sometimes she would draw him, charcoal portraits with thick black lines, among the crumpled sheets and their bodies still smelling of each other. Sometimes he would take photographs of her lying in the bed and then he’d put the camera down and kiss her neck, his hands would be on her and it would start all over again.

*