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that put his own intended moves out of mind, and set him searching through the many coats on their hangers, looking for the dark gentian blue one with the large collar. Her best amber-gold one was there, the new one she had bought only a few weeks ago. Her second-best tweed raincoat was there. But not the blue. When did Annet ever go into town to the cinema in her everyday coat? He looked for the blue nylon head-scarf, that she used to drape casually over the rail, since it could hardly be creased even if one tried. He couldn’t find it. And her shoes, the shoes she had been wearing that rainy Thursday afternoon, strong half-brogue walking shoes suitable for such weather – where were they? Her more prized pairs she nursed carefully in her own room, but her walking shoes stayed down here. Where were they now?
    Slowly he went back into the living-room. They both looked up at him with a quick, oblique uneasiness, and fastening on his face, calmed and stilled into a kind of resigned despair.
    ‘It’s a fine night,’ he said, with what sounded even in his own ears like horrible inconsequence. ‘Stars shining, not a sign of rain. Did she go off wearing her rain-hood, and her heavy shoes, a night like this?’
    No one, apparently, noticed his effrontery in making deductions unasked about Annet’s movements, no one bridled at his asking these questions as though he had a right to an answer. The Becks looked at each other with a long, drear look, and crumbled before his eyes.
    ‘She isn’t out with Myra – is she?’
    ‘No,’ said Mrs Beck, and straightened her back and met his eyes wretchedly; not resenting him, almost grateful for him. As a pair they only depressed and de-gutted each other, those two, they grasped at a third, now that it was inevitable, like drowning men at a good solid log. ‘No, she isn’t.’ She dropped her hands in her lap, and let them lie, let the breath go out of her body in a great, helpless sigh.
    Tom moistened his lips. ‘She went out on Thursday,’ he said, ‘just as I came in. She was wearing that blue coat she wears around, and those shoes, and the rain-hood. That makes sense, it was raining then. But where I’ve been it hasn’t rained again all the week-end. I don’t know about here. But the roads were bone dry all the way.’
    ‘It hasn’t rained here, either,’ said Mrs Beck in the same flat, drearily angry tone. Beck made an inarticulate sound of protest, and she rode over him, raising her voice. ‘What’s the use? He may as well know. At this rate everybody’ll know before long. Where’s the sense in thinking we can keep it quiet? She did go out on Thursday afternoon. She said she was going to post the letters and then have a quick walk before tea. She said she wouldn’t be long.’
    ‘Mother!’ said Beck in reproachful appeal. She turned her head for a moment and gave him a startled, wondering, almost derisive look in return for the incongruous word; but her eyes came back almost at once to Tom’s face. If she was pinning her hopes to anyone at this minute, he realised, it was to him. ‘And she never came home,’ said Mrs Beck.
     
    Once it was out they could all breathe and articulate again, and by an appreciable degree the tension eased. Things admitted can be faced. They have to be, there’s no choice in the matter. But they were all trembling; and the relationship between them, that had been so decorous and neutral until that moment, would never be the same again.
    Very carefully, so as not to unbalance himself and them, Tom asked: ‘Have you notified the police that she’s missing?’
    They had not. They shook their heads mutely, eyeing each other, each willing the other – he should have foreseen it – to tell him the reasons that were so obvious to them and should have been incomprehensible to him. They imagined him seeing Annet, with her perilous beauty, dead in a ditch; they couldn’t know that he was seeing her rather as they saw her, alive,