The evening she handled rather well

He did not mention the time. Not on the stair, not in the gravel, not on the five hundred and twenty yards of the Rise. He was pleasant the whole way, and she waited the entire distance for one word about an hour and forty minutes on a plank in a cold passage, and got nothing.

At the fountain she said, “What did you do all that time?”

Ravel went still.

It was not much. He moved economically anyway, and it would have looked like nothing to anybody who had not spent two years watching him: a half second in which his hands and his face and the roll of his shoulders all stopped together, the way a clock stops.

“Read,” he said.

The strip of paper had been at the plates in the spring, and she had seen it on his thigh at nine feet in a lit passage an hour ago, and it was at the plates still.

“Anything good?” she said.

“It is a book about the dressing of gravers,” said Ravel, and smiled at her, and they went on up the hill.

✦

Gret had left a pie and gone home. The shutter in the kitchen did not stick when Marit put her hand to it, and did not smoke, and she stood with her fingers on the frame and found that the latch had been taken off and rebedded and the screw holes plugged, at some point in the last two days, by somebody who had not said anything about it.

They ate. He was quieter than he had been at the fountain and quieter still by the end of it, and it went on getting further away all evening without one word in it she could have written down and shown anybody.

“The Baskes have asked us on the eleventh,” she said.

“Have they.”

“Supper. There’ll be the Vidry cousins.”

Ravel turned his cup round on the table. “Do you want to go?”

“I asked whether you did.”

“I don’t mind either way,” he said. “You decide. You always decide these things better than I do.”

She had declined it eight days ago. She had written the note at that table and sent it by Gret’s boy, and it had been the right answer, and there was no version of the eleventh in which either of them went to the Baskes.

The book on the dressing of gravers stood in the second row of the shelf behind the door with its spine to the wall, and had stood there since morning, and he had come into the room twice.

He went up at half past nine. Marit banked the stove and stood a while in the front room with the lamp in her hand.

She had the sentence. She had had it since the second turn of the hill, and it was seven or eight words long, and she knew exactly where in an evening it would go, and she could feel what it would cost to say, low down under the breastbone where the hum was.

She went up.

The landing turned at the top of the stair, and the corner of it past the linen press was as far from the bed as the house went. She had paced it in her first week here, when nine feet was three hundred. She stood in the corner in the dark with the lamp shaded against her skirt, and after a moment the pull came on, flat and broad across her sternum, pushing steadily back, and a cold ring closed at her ribs, and she stayed in it because it was the only place in the house that was hers.

Then she went in and put the lamp on the chest and said that the Baskes were on the eleventh and she would write in the morning, and Ravel said that sounded sensible, and she thought, lying down nine feet from him with the hum going on behind her breastbone, that she had handled the whole day rather well.