She looked up at the ceiling again. It was quiet. Was he sleeping? She moved her foot and wriggled her ankle. She didn’t get enough exercise. They used to go for walks together in the evenings or on Sundays. Now he stayed in bed on Sundays too. It was an old bed. It was worn more than hers, which was against the other wall. He wasn’t much for marital relations.

She bent over and picked up a piece of thread from the floor. She never cleaned until he left. She bumped the table with her head, and the spoon clinked against the cup. Her face flushed and her heart started pounding. She was so clumsy. No matter how much she tried, some accident always happened. She could have just left the thread there. The bed creaked.

‘Are you sitting there drinking coffee again?’ he shouted.

‘Oh,’ she shouted back, ‘did I wake you? I just warmed up what was left from this morning.’

‘I heard you take the lid off the coffee tin.’ His voice resounded through the ceiling. ‘Drink all the coffee you want. You don’t have to make up silly stories.’

She stood up with her cup in hand. She was going to carry it out to the kitchen. She listened first, in case he was going to say more. The echo of his voice was still reverberating inside her, and she couldn’t move until it petered out. Then her heart calmed down again. The bed creaked loudly a few times, triumphantly.

She walked out and put down the cup first, then the spoon, then the saucer. What he said was right. He didn’t care if she drank coffee. He really was quite amiable. It wasn’t his fault that he was such a light sleeper. She decided to go and visit Henny. She decided that quite often, but it rarely amounted to anything. She really enjoyed being with her sister’s children, even though they were terribly noisy. She was not convinced that so much noise could be a good thing. As a kind of counterbalance she always whispered. Then Henny laughed and said she was getting to be too strange. Henny said that Arthur was making her go nutty by lying in bed and creaking all day. But where else was he supposed to go? Henny was really unreasonable.

She took a couple of hesitant steps toward the door.

‘You going out gallivanting?’ he shouted.

She brought her hand to her chest. Her throat was suddenly parched. She cleared her throat.

‘No,’ she yelled. ‘Just putting on my shoes.’

‘They’re noisy,’ he roared, and she could hear that he was about to lose his patience. She collected herself. If she didn’t yell as loud as she could, he maintained, it was impossible to hear her. Otherwise his hearing was fine.

‘Then I won’t put them on,’ she shouted desperately.