Over on the fairground, the fox prowls at night. It must, for there are always mice in the grass. In the patch where the beer tent stood in June, the ground is pounded down, and when she walks over, she can still catch a whiff of stale beer, and then she sees the rental on the far side of the stubble field. There it squats, reduced to its essence of walls and whitewash. That’s the place I’m renting, she thinks. From there I can see everything plainly, yet the house says nothing to her, and then she walks back to it and gazes out toward the fairground. There the mood feels familiar. Maybe it’s the empty lot’s defenselessness, she doesn’t know, but late one night at a party she’d pressed him into a corner. She’d said that they could always be friends. “Friends?” he’d said. “So you want us to be friends?” He didn’t say anything else before going out into the hallway and putting on his winter coat, it was snowing, she could see that when he opened the door. Afterward, she thought that he could just as well have said, “Burn in hell,” and then she was slowly revolving, trussed up with hooks, while down at her feet a little motor kindly saw to her rotation. Beneath her, the lawn and the beer tent atmosphere. The kids frolicking on the fairground, coltish and clueless, and behind them the wood with its dark chill.​52

We put flowers in the wire mesh around the rabbits we exhibited behind the fairground, she recalls. We decorated our doll carriages with sweet william, roses, whatever else we could swipe from our mothers’ flower beds. Then we paraded through the village and out to the fairground. What were we, six seven eight in our prettiest dresses, and the grownups applauded, some of them on the point of tears. A woman and love, she thinks, and it feels honeyed on the tongue, and she stands at the edge of the stubble and spits. She looks across to the fairground, spitting. The fairground interests her more than the walks above the shore, the cormorants, the beech forest, and it’s dawned on her that while it lasted, she was really two people at the same time. One who was as if possessed by love, and one who walked alongside, silent and observing, and sometimes the two would have arguments that the observer always lost, because love bears all things, endures all things, but if I have not love, the lover screamed, I am clanging brass, a sounding cymbal, and the observer made a mental note that horror vacui might be what gets the country’s church bells to ring.