On the kitchen table a loaf of bread was white-furred and blue-measled. In the vase on the window sill the heads of flowers wilted wearily, a brown wreath of fallen petals circling its base. No one had entered the cottage after her husband’s body was taken away and John Gibson’s phone call had been at pains to assure her that everything remained untouched, as if he imagined that because of her absence from his final moments, she would think it important to see the scene in its final state. In the subsequent weeks, however, he had gone on cutting the grass, just as for the past twenty years. It looked as if it had been done in the previous few days and she tried to rekindle the fresh scent that had greeted her arrival in the hope of dispelling the damp mustiness now seemingly infecting every corner of the cottage. In the grate the thick bed of ashes remained uncleared while on the black, salt-spotted hearth hunkered the final small pile of bleached driftwood that her husband had gathered.
