Even though she knew that Henry was dead she was not quite convinced of the fact. Her heart beat heavily in the dark room while she sought to make sense of the noise that had woken her. Her inability to do so alarmed her, as did the torpor that kept her half sitting in the bed, although it would have made more sense to get up. Gradually she pieced together a few crucial facts. She had, in a spirit of reckless preparation for the day ahead, taken one of her pills, rather late, and this, on top of two unaccustomed glasses of wine, had proved a mistake. I have a hangover, she thought with horror, though her head was quite clear, and she was not ill. More facts emerged: it was Sunday. The room was dark because it was raining. The summer was apparently over. The sun had gone, and although it might return, might even return in a day or two, it had taken with it a measure of contentment, a child-like trust in a user-friendly universe, one in which the days were all alike, with no abrupt reversals, no surprises in reserve.
