Jerrold came back to it alone.

XII

COLIN, JERROLD, AND ANNE

i

He went through the wide empty house, looking through all the rooms, trying to find some memory of the happiness he had had there long ago.  The house was full of Anne.  Anne’s figure crossed the floors before him, her head turned over her shoulder to see if he were coming; her voice called to him from the doorways, her running feet sounded on the stairs.  That was her place at the table; that was the armchair she used to curl up in; just there, on the landing, he had kissed her when he went to school.

They had given his mother’s room to Maisie, and they had put his things into the room beyond, his father’s room.  Everything was in its place as it had been in his father’s time, the great wardrobe, the white marble-topped washstand, the bed he had died on.  He saw him lying there and Anne going to and fro between the washstand and the bed.  The parrot curtains hung from the windows, straight and still.

Jerrold shuddered as he looked at these things.

They had thought that he would want to sleep in that room because he was married, because Maisie would have the room it led out of.

But he couldn’t sleep in it.  He couldn’t stay in it a minute; he would never pass its door without that sickening pang of memory.  He moved his things across the gallery into Anne’s room.

He would sleep there; he would sleep in the white bed that Anne had slept in.

He told himself that he had to be near Colin; there was only the passage between and their doors could stand open; that was why he wanted to sleep there.  But he knew that was not why.  He wanted to sleep there because there was no other room where he could feel Anne so near him, where he could see her so clearly.  When the dawn came she would be with him, sitting in her chair by the window.  The window looked to the west, to Upper Speed and the Manor Farm house.  The house was down there behind the trees, and somewhere there, jutting out above the porch, was the window of Anne’s room.

He looked at his watch.  One o’clock.  At two he would go and see Anne.

ii

When Jerrold called at the Manor Farm house Anne was out.  Old Ballinger came slouching up from the farmyard to tell him that Miss Anne had gone up to the Far Acres field to try the new tractor.

The Far Acres field lay at the western end of the estate.  Jerrold followed her there.  Five furrows, five bright brown bands on the sallow stubble, marked out the Far Acres into five plots.  In the turning space at the top corner he saw Anne on her black horse and Colin standing beside her.

With a great clanking and clanging the new American, tractor struggled towards them up the hill, dragging its plough.  It stopped and turned at the “headland” as Jerrold came up.