There will be no moon tonight. The headlamps on his borrowed van can’t be trusted. His house, by all appearances, has every measure of warmth: the thick red carpet he installed on the stairs, the drawn curtains of red corduroy. Nicky’s playpen loaded with toys in excess, the cocked heads of plush animals lined up on the cushioned window seat in the playroom. The crockery, the few copper pots she left behind, arranged artfully in the kitchen nooks, talismanic, to greet her on spring’s return. Their books insulating his hand-built parlor shelves, dust jackets aged, colors deepened, like cellared wine or brandy or apples. All their smatterings of furniture from this auction, that neighbor’s attic, the heat of her attention’s love still kindled in their clean paint, their burnished, waxed finishes made new under her hopeful fingers. But in truth, it’s cold to the bone, his breath a ghost hovering before his numb face. He’ll have to live with it overnight.

*   *   *

A taxi smokes curbside at Montagu Square on the day after Boxing Day. The single passenger, a woman, has hurried to the front door to ring the bell and waits now on the step, hugging a heavy, rectangular parcel. A minute, two, pass; the snow continues to fall, silent, but loud, so loud it masks the dangerous sound, as yet unintelligible, of the parcel, hugged close against the damage of snowmelt. The snow falls, and a man appears in a dark suit: the agent from the estate company, present to show the leaseable flat. There follows a quick conversation, snow settling prettily onto the shoulders of the woman’s coat, and then the man in the suit stands aside, nodding to the woman, holding the door open for her entrance. It closes behind her as she passes through.

39. “Stings”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“Stings”

DECEMBER 28, 1962

COURT GREEN

The snow has gone crystalline in the overnight freeze and pours like beads of shattered glass through his fingers. His carpentry tools—his chisel, his blade file, his mallet and square—are cleaned, honed, oiled, carefully lined up in the makeshift workshop he had marshaled in the cottage. In the loft the corms of the gladioli drowse under linen rags, dry in their frangible husks, snug with the tender dahlia tubers; all wintering over, all locked away.

The morning air against his skin, his face, is stitched with ice. He wipes his bare hands of dry, cold snow and turns from the cottage, his steps exaggerated and high, tramping up and through the crusted drifts, past the loaded van and its unsure battery, toward the thick oak door at the back of the house to lock it. He is leaving, his key in his hand.