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myself. There was a long gap between the 3:00 arrival and the next, at 7:43. I had started to grieve inwardly by now, though I kept telling myself it was much too early for that. All the same, I knew her strength of spirit, her ability to make a decision when she had to, her tenacity in sticking to it once it had been reached. If she had left me this time, bringing her back would not prove easy; I knew that with the dull, aching certainty of the newly bereaved. But I had seen no corpse, no farewell letter, no concrete indication that she intended to leave me.
    From time to time I tried to write, but the thing was not on me, not that day, not for some time after. My thoughts were constantly torn apart by speculation about Sarah, above all the vexed question of whether she had decided to walk out on me or not. She had done it twice before, but only for short periods, and each time she had left a note saying where she was going.
    I did not go down to Tredannack that evening, to the pub. There was the possibility that the phone might ring while I was absent. I listened to the radio for a while, a program about Russian icons. An old man spoke in a measured voice of tempera and gesso, of levkas and gold. Images of saints with stern faces and gilded halos fell like so many drops of water on my numbed brain. The telephone did not ring. I tried it out once, just to make sure it was working. The engineers assured me that it was in perfect order, and rang me back to prove it.
    There were people in London I thought of phoning, friends who might know if she was back. I rang our flat there several times, but the reply was from the answering machine. On two occasions I left a brief message, asking Sarah to ring me if she did arrive home. I realized that she had left her handbag behind. Unless she had taken cash, she would not have had enough money to get to London.
    It grew dark sometime after nine o'clock. A curious darkness, not summerlike, but harsher, denser, more complete. It had grown warmer throughout the day, but now, with the sun down again, the warmth in the air vanished rapidly, and I was forced to put the heating on again, checking first that I had fed the meter. Outside, the sea grew in volume, as though a wind were rising. There had been no forecast of storms.
    It was around midnight when I heard a door slam upstairs. One of the bedroom doors. I was in the living room. The radio had been switched off, and I was trying to concentrate on Nabokov's Pale Fire . The sound caught me completely by surprise, making me jump. Sarah must have come in quietly, I thought, and gone straight up to our room, thinking, perhaps, that I was already there.
    I waited for what must have been about five minutes, but there was no further sound upstairs. In all likelihood, Sarah was still angry with me.
    I went out. The passage and staircase were in pitch darkness. I switched on lights and stood for a moment at the foot of the stairs, gazing upward as though not quite certain what I should find up there. It was cold in the passage, not a summer's night at all.
    I climbed the stairs slowly. Something—instinct, an imperfect apprehension, guilt; I cannot be sure— something held me back from calling out.
    I reached our bedroom door in silence. It was wide open, as I had left it, and the room itself was in darkness.
    'Sarah? Are you there, love?" I said, switching on the light.
    But there was no one.
    I looked in each of the other rooms on that floor, but she was not in any of them. I had begun to feel afraid again. Begun to fear that it had not after all been Sarah, that I was still alone in the house, but that someone—or something—else had returned there. Someone or something that had never been away.
    I climbed the steep stairs to the next floor. Three rooms, and the door to one of them wide open. It had not been open when I had been up there last. I started to say Sarah's name, but the word dried in my throat. I moved toward the room.
    At that