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today.” At this the girl goes furiously silent and shoves her spoon with violent force into a lumpy wodge of stirabout in the baby-bowl before her on the table. The back door opens, making its usual bang and rattle, and Ivy Blount appears, in her old brown mackintosh and her cut-off green wellingtons. She has a basket of eggs on her arm and is bearing by the neck a recently throttled chicken. She pauses on the threshold and looks at the three people in the room with an expression of distracted startlement. The dog thumps his tail in welcome. Miss Blount is unofficial cook, housekeeper and, as Duffy the cowman darkly asserts, taken-for-granted skivvy here at Arden House.
    “Good morning, Ivy!” Ursula says, too loudly, for she persists in the mistaken conviction that Miss Blount is hard of hearing. Seeing the ill-plucked chicken she wonders if she might broach the subject of lunch. She really cannot think why she should have to feed that fellow Wagstaff yet knows she must. And how he will sneer, as always. Suddenly and with a shock she recognises the chicken. It is, or used to be, the speckled brown one with the orange feet; she saw it from the window of her room not an hour ago, unsuspectingly scratching for worms between the cobbles down in the yard. She was fond of that one. She used to have names for all the hens, though Adam laughed at her.
    Something in her head is pounding; it is like a hammer hitting a block of soft metal, over and over. What if she, too, were to have a stroke? The sudden idea of it almost delights her. She pictures herself lying with Adam up there in the dark, the two of them motionless on their backs and blankly staring, their hands folded identically over their breasts, like a pair of statues laid out side by side on a tomb.
    Ivy advances and sets the chicken and the basket of eggs on the table and takes off her mac. She is wearing a heavy tweed skirt and a man’s old-fashioned striped shirt with the sleeves rolled. The wings of her finely aristocratic nose are translucent. She gives off a faint odour of roses and dishwater. The dog gets up with an effort and waddles forward and snuffles at her knees. Adam notes the chicken’s glazing eyeball and tries to think of a word—obsidian? agate? Its head is still attached above a ruff of burnished umber feathers. He can smell the poor dead thing, its blood-warm reek. Petra is peering at the bird in smouldering alarm as if she fears it might suddenly struggle back to life and come flapping and squawking at her across the table.
    The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas. We have stronger stomachs, stouter lungs, we see it all in all its awfulness at every moment and are not daunted; that is the difference; that is what makes us divine.
    Young Adam rises from the table and crosses the room and climbs the three steps to the door with the stricken mien of a man mounting the gallows. He pauses and glances back at no one in particular and then goes out, shutting the door behind him so softly it seems a rebuke. His departure leaves an unsettled silence. Ursula has drifted again to her place at the sink with her face lifted to the window. She is glad Petra has shut up and does not care that the child is furious at her for breaking in on her flow of nonsense. Everybody is on edge, everybody’s nerves are stretched to the limit. This waiting is unbearable. It is as if Adam had toppled from an immensely high place and were falling, falling, with dreamlike slowness, and they were all looking up in awe and anguish, at this plummeting speck that presently will lie sprawled at their feet, smashed, bloodied, dead. Dead. The word is another thud of the hammer, achingly soft and dull.
    Ivy Blount takes down her