This had been specifically a day in November. November one year was not so different from November any other. This particular morning there was almost no light at all, only a glimmer of grey where the curtains did not meet.
She woke, half woke, as he rose from the bed. He let in the cold between the sheets, so she pulled them closer when he was gone and curled back into herself and into sleep. Half-sleep.
What happened next she might have remembered or she might have imagined later, because the beginning of this day was indistinguishable really from that of so many other days. It was possible, after all, that this was one of the mornings when Charlie’s movements didn’t wake her and she slept on regardless, even spreading out into the warm space that he had left; but then there would have been no narrative, and memory requires narrative, requires this day to begin in consciousness. So there it was. In her memory she heard, half heard, him dress, open the door quietly so as not to wake her, pull it to, pad downstairs in his socks. She would think that he was wearing burgundy-coloured socks, because he had only one pair that colour, and it occurred to her later, when she cleared all his clothes, that she never saw them again. (The small things and the worn things taken from his drawers, folded as they were, and burned in the incinerator which was a black barrel at the back of the yard; other things given away; those particular socks never seen.)
He padded down the stairs, dark red foot after dark red foot, past the sporting prints dim on the wall, to the kitchen. (Uncle Ralph’s prints still there, before she redecorated and took them down.) Or first to his study, perhaps, to the gun cupboard there. Either then or later he took out the Purdey and a handful of cartridges to put in the pocket of his coat – or perhaps the cartridges were already in his pocket, for there would have been no reason for him to take so many if his intention were clear. Often she had found cartridges left in the pocket of his coat, even working their way through tears into the lining, weighing it down when you lifted it though the pockets when you turned them out were empty. The coat was of thick greenish Harris tweed, heavily worn. (That did not come back to her. If it had, then she might have kept it and put her hands to the tough weave and taken in its smell which had seemed to her so essentially a smell of him.)
Did she hear the shot? Her memory told her that she did. But this was a morning like many others. There had been other mornings when there were shots, when he or Billy had gone out early. One shot was much like another, coming from some indeterminate direction dully across the fields. The death of a rabbit sounds much the same as the death of a man. If she heard the shot she thought nothing of it, but only dozed the longer because it was a Saturday morning and there was no need to wake the boys to take them to school. Thank goodness for that, she thought, when finally she got out of bed and walked yawning across the room to draw the curtains, thank goodness, because there was such thick fog outside. They were still at the village school then; that was then, before, when they all lived at home and she drove them each day the mile to school. There was nothing she hated more than driving the boys to school in winter fog, leaning forward to the windscreen as if that would help her to see better, wiping the condensation with the back of her hand, worrying that there might be ice, at the same time going over their spelling or their tables with them as advancing bands of fog seemed to materialise in the headlights. No school this morning, but there would be homework, for Richard at least; not for Jonny as he was too young. She thought as she got up that she would make them all a good breakfast. Charlie would like that, if he had already been outside in the cold. But what could he be doing outside, in this fog? Not shooting, surely? And yet hadn’t there been a shot? He would barely be able to see further than the end of his nose. (And was it then at the time or was it only later when she remembered, that this simple thoughtless thought turned cold in her? How could she think that, why think that, just then? The day just passed, the day before, the evening just passed, had been a slow, easy day, an easy evening. Perhaps even for some days before it had been so, she could not count them now. Only she knew that there had been some time of calm, before. The brooding that was sometimes such a weight in him had seemed to be gone, that previous evening at least, like mud gone from his boots. How could that be, she would think later. Surely there had been a sign, something in his behaviour, some premonition? What had she seen, and what missed? Possibly the calm itself was the sign, a calm that meant that his plan was made and the intention had given him ease. And she had lived with him through those days and slept beside him through the nights, and known nothing. If these questions were not with her at the time then they would be with her ever after.)
He had made himself a black coffee before he went out. That was all. There was only the cup on the table with the dregs of the coffee. She thought, when she came
