Shakespeare was in the bedroom, to countervail against her dislike of it. It was a dislikable room, mutilated by the remodelling, which had shorn it for a bathroom. The tree beyond the bedroom window, she thought, coming back into the sitting-room with the book in her hand—even the tree, in itself a pleasant thing, must be contemplated as a sparrow-rack, where, from the first light onward, sparrows would congregate and clatter, making sleep impossible.

She found The Winter’s Tale, and turned to the trial scene. Here it was:

… with immodest hatred,

The child-bed privilege denied, which ’longs

To women of all fashion. Lastly, hurried

Here, to this place, i’ the open air, before

I have got strength of limit.

Verifying quotations would indeed be an interesting pursuit if they all turned out to be as wide of the mark as this one. If Willie had shown a spark of even modest hate, she might have known a spark of hope.

She laid Shakespeare on the sofa and presently sat down beside him. To do so was a deliberate act, for she still retained, as a vestige of the last few weeks, an inability to sit down. One says ‘a glutton for work’, and during her 6last month at Pond House she had exemplified that odious phrase, rushing gluttonously from one useful deed to another, cleaning, dispatching, repairing, turning out and destroying.

‘All this revengeful housecleaning!’ Willie had lamented.

‘It’s only fair to Annelies to get my smell out of the house,’ she had replied.

In the first onset of grief, when grief was still pure enough to be magnanimous, the explanation might have been almost true, but not by the time she gave it. By then, she had no more magnanimity than a criminal on the run. There must be nothing left behind by which she could be tracked. A visual recollection of something overlooked and unscotched would strike her, as she lay sleepless—strike her violently, as though the object itself had been catapulted against her face. With her heart hammering and the blood pounding in her ears, she would begin to interrogate herself as to where, in their magpie’s nest of a house, she had last set eyes on the red flannel heart embroidered with forget-me-nots, or the mug with ‘William’ on it that she had bought at Aberdovey. And all the while the most damning piece of evidence had slipped her memory, and only came to light by chance.

Invalided after Dunkirk, Willie had retained from his equipment one of those metal slides that isolate the military button for polishing. Thinking that this would serve the same purpose for the brass knobs on the spice cupboard, she began to search for it in the collector’s cabinet, where Willie’s father had kept his birds’ eggs, where Willie 7hoarded his oddments. In the third drawer down, she came on the letters, her sight stumbling from Annelies’s crisp blue sheets to her own letters, written from the flat of then to the Willie of then. She had looked at them no longer than to think how surprisingly and for the worse her handwriting had altered during the twelve years of happy married illiteracy, when she heard Willie saying, ‘I know nothing about it. Do please go away,’ to the children at the back door who had come to fetch the things for the jumble sale. Slamming the drawer to, she ran downstairs to recall the children. When she went back to the cabinet, the drawer was locked. Embarrassment tied her tongue.