It was too big to talk about, what had happened. It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn’t find its edges. It would always feel too big. He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember an

it seemed lazy – unkind, even – to let her lie here in this icy stillness. I wanted her to have the dancing light and the whisper of the flames to keep her company … But what fool would heat a room with a corpse in it? And I could imagine de Havilland’s face when he saw me climbing the stairs with a basket of logs. I turned away. There was no point

When my mother’s ashes came back from the crematorium, my family spent a couple of days staring at the plastic box that held them. Then we took the box to the old cast iron bridge across the Tamar River. Both bridge and river had been continual companions to her life. I undid a surprising number of layers and poured the ashes into the water below.

the repetitions and rhythms that suffocated him little by little, but never fast enough.