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what he meant to her.
    For all her efforts Harriet can’t really remember Owen very well. His memory has been worn thin from use, like a patch of cloth rubbed too vigorously and too often. She has her ideas of him and of their happiness, but at this point the reality of him has been subsumed into her own need to remember him in a certain way. In real life he would never have bent to her will, but now that he’s dead she can do whatever she chooses with him. This knowledge sickens her, but she is also powerless against it.
    She turns away from the woman without answering her question and moves out of Sanctuary Wood to rejoin the rest of the tour group.
     
     
    That night in the hotel, Harriet can’t sleep. She lies fully clothed on the narrow guest-house bed, listening to the women crying through the thin walls that separate the various rooms. The high-pitched murmuring sounds like birds in the trees.
    She is thinking of the mud dragging her feet to ground, of the black trees, sharp as spears, standing upright in the small patch of earth that had once been a wood.
    She gets up, lights a candle, and carries it over to the chair by the fireplace. There are a few books on the mantel. She trails a finger over their spines.
    She puts the candle holder on the floor, gets down on her hands and knees in front of the fireplace. She tries to pray, but the words have left her. The fire has only recently gone out. She puts her hand into the grate and pulls out a warm half-burned lump of coal. She makes a mark with it on her arm, then another on the tiles around the fireplace.
    Harriet gets up and goes into the hallway. People have put pieces of cardboard by the doors to their rooms for the muddy boots. She carefully lifts her boots off the cardboard, and carries it back into the room. She gets down, once again, on the floor by the hearth and turns over the cardboard. She picks up the piece of coal and begins to draw.
    Later, much later, when she is back home in England, she will write what will become the first of what she comes to call her descriptions.
For hours, for no reason that I could imagine, I drew black swans. Hunched over a piece of cardboard on the floor of the hotel room, the coal softening to dust on this surface beneath me.
    What I wanted was the simple pleasure of seeing you again. But you didn’t come, couldn’t come. I don’t know how to make you return to me.
    But I did come to know the black swan. I knew the long snake flex of its neck, knew that the shape of the body was a leaf, a wing, an open hand, the human heart. I fastened these images to paper, called them swan. And then I rose, black dust dripping from my hands, my arms spread empty to the empty sky, as I walked out through broken streets feathered with shadow—darkness lifting me home.
     

NOVEMBER 14, 1940
     

H arriet Marsh is certain of very few things. As she washes the front hall of her building, she takes an inventory. She used to believe in love, but she has worn that down to nothing. Every time she visits the memory of Owen it is foggier, farther away. She used to believe her writing was a way to stay connected to her dead husband, but years of typing up her descriptions after work in the cold offices of Bartlett’s Coal Merchants have left her emptied out of feeling. She is tired of trying to hammer a moment shut with words. All she has left is the outdoors, and most days this is a noon-hour head-down tromp through the muddy farmers’ fields that surround Coventry, where she tries desperately to be moved by a single dog rose or the flower of the black-thorn hedge.
    Nothing holds its truth for long enough. Home leaves us, not the other way around, she thinks. And what are we meant to do when we come to know that?
     
     
    Harriet is disappointed by the new war but not devastated by it. She won’t suffer as she suffered in the first war. This war does not have the power to do that to her. She sullenly capitulates to the rationing, doesn’t