He heads first toward the apple shed, trudging stiff-legged through the snow after the first yard or two of passage proves the futility of lifting his feet. He hadn’t asked where anything was; it seemed too provocative an inquiry, an invitation for more disheartened fragmentation: a question that pointed with just accusation toward his crime of abandonment. He’d seen the apples last, he thought, in the wine cellar. Indeed, they were not in the shed, its creaking door admitting a trapezoid of sapphire light. Only bushel baskets stacked up, stout canvas shoulder bags for apple picking, the old iron cider press he’d had no chance to use, stored under a horsehair blanket trafficked by mice. He gathers some burlap sacks hanging by the door and turns back into his own path, the churned snow phosphorescent, lightly powdered with new-fallen flakes, and follows it as far as it takes him toward the house until forced to trailblaze the last few buried yards to the fortified back door. At the stone step he stamps his stinging feet, trying to loosen the layer of snow that has crusted to his trouser legs. The key orbits smoothly in the lock, and he goes inside.

The interior of his house admits him, as if arrested, frozen in time, a dim, closed museum of his life, the velvet cordons transmogrified into crimson draft stoppers filled with dried beans, sewn on her second-hand machine, wedged against the chilling doorways. His eyes remember the vaulting granite of the refloored hall, the immaculate scullery, the orderly kitchen, the chairs squared at the rounded perimeter of the dining table, all as if lit by the glare of the moon. He remembers with a hitch in his unsteady heart: climbing a staircase in Hampstead to Assia’s previous digs, there to collect that offered table on their moving day—Assia’s startling, penetrating eyes; his stammering of Sylvia’s invitation to visit once they’d settled at Court Green as he tumbled out, that table on his back.

But the table was never theirs. In this house, now condensed in the unfamiliar snow light, it is his marriage that beats like a heart. He feels them everywhere, his wife and himself, more vivid than they’d ever felt while he was living here, their voices, their night sighs echoing off the creamy wainscotting, off the pink plaster walls, in the blue shadows, against the cold, contracted sides of the Aga scrubbed and swept clear of ashes. He switches on the lights, retreating from the apparition he’s caught in the shadows: the sharpness of his family, his grieving wife, the veracity of it all. He searches out the flashlight by the back door, taking the burlap sacks through the scullery and the broom closet and into the wine cellar to get what he came here for.