In slow half-sleep, Hal heard Clara washing herself and the girls, and going downstairs.
When he got up it was later than usual and the room was hot. He had breakfast with a strange out-of-time feeling, because the rest of them had been up before him and he’d been away. The girls, their faces mottled with faded red, were playing at his feet, refusing their breakfasts, and Clara was trying to make them eat, worrying. Hal drank his coffee, watching them.
Clara came over to him and kissed him on the forehead, with her hands on either side of his face. Her dark blue eyes were infinite; he couldn’t fathom them.
‘Is everything all right?’ he said.
She spoke carefully. ‘Yes, Hal. It’s all right.’
After that she was very busy with the girls.
Adile was cleaning downstairs and Clara went upstairs.
The bedroom smelled different from the rest of the house. It smelled of the night before. She looked around the room. It must have been coming up from the sheets where he had lain on them. The air was thick and burned-smelling. She went to the bed, pulled the sheets from it and bundled them up in the corner, and then she opened the window wide.
She thought that it wasn’t as if he’d hurt her very much – she’d had two children hadn’t she? There was no need to make a fuss about it.
She breathed in, putting her hand up to push her hair from her forehead, but the same smell was on her hands – she pulled back from it, sickened.
She went back from the window, into the bathroom, and washed her hands very carefully with the hard soap. She dried them on the towel and put the towel into the basket to be washed, but on the landing, she caught the smell again, through the open bedroom door. The clean air from the window was blowing it through the bedroom onto her.
She closed the bedroom door. The room could still be aired with the door shut, she thought.