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either, not even cows. There was something literally unbearable about her removal, something deeply cruel, as well as fatal. He put his forehead against the glass of the windowpane. It was the fatality that was so terrible. Without Caro there, without her living self being there as proof of this other world, this other life of hope and movement that she had carried about with her like an aura, the fates could just close in. He swallowed hard. Something about Caro, about who she was, where she’d come from, had made him feel – why the hell had she made him feel it? – that he could dodge destiny, that he – if he kept running – was the fleeter of foot.
    She’d even made him feel that the money didn’t matter, that his seeming ability to manage the farm’s finances was not running away with him. He had never spoken to her openly about his fears, about the secret loans, about his tendency to feel that, if he spent more money, he would somehow see a return on it automatically, but he had hinted at it. And she had smiled at him. She had smiled that calm but perceiving smile and told him not to be afraid of the short-term; the short-term was always full of shocks, it was the long-term you had to focus on. And now she had gone, and the consolation of the long-term had gone with her, and he was left here alone with the shocks.
    He took his forehead away from the glass, and rubbed it. Below him in the yard, Gareth went by at some distance, holding a cow either side of him on halters. Robin was good at training cows to halters, had rigged up some device like a whirling clothesline where the young heifers were broken in to being led. He said it made them better to show and in the saleroom, that a well-behaved cow was more likely to attract a buyer’s eye. Robin . . . What would Robin think if he were to come home now and find Joe in his dead wife’s bedroom with no explanation to offer for it? And there wasn’t an explanation, was there, not a solid one, not one you could hold out to a sceptical brother who, after all, was entitled to any manifestation of grief he cared to indulge in? Whereas he, Joe, brother-in-law to the deceased woman only, husband and father of living beings, had no such entitlement. No right at all, no claim except this sensation that appalled him so, that she had somehow held a key to the future for him, and that when she had died, she had taken it with her.
    He went out onto the landing. The house was very still. Velma would be still in the kitchen, too, affecting to wash up but in reality waiting for Joe to come down and explain himself. Velma hadn’t come to the funeral. Said she never did, couldn’t take the things. ‘Morbid,’ she said. ‘When you’re gone, you’re gone. Funerals is sick.’ What had she said to Robin, Joe wondered, if anything? ‘Sorry to hear of your loss’ or, ‘I’ll miss her, that’s for sure’ or simply, ‘You want me to get you another jar of coffee? This one’s nearly gone’?
    Across the landing, the door to Robin’s room was open. His bed was made, after a fashion, but the two wooden chairs Joe could see were heaped with clothes and there were shoes and newspapers on the floor and scattered copies of dairy-farming magazines. Odd, really. Robin had always been so orderly. There was a photograph of Caro on the chest of drawers against the far wall, a black-and-white picture taken of her leaning on the gate from the garden to the fifteen-acre field where the young heifers were first put out, close to the house where an eye could be kept on them. Joe couldn’t see the picture very clearly from this distance, but Caro’s hair appeared to be loose and she was wearing something checked.
    â€˜You OK?’ Velma called.
    She was standing at the foot of the stairs, holding a duster and a can of spray polish.
    â€˜Find what you want?’
    â€˜No,’