They, every living person in the whole world, all of them, were stolen – or stole – away from me while I dozed after love. I had felt her head lift from my shoulder, and after a pause, to which thinking back on it later I could assign no length, her lips had rested on my forehead for a moment. Then she had unclothed my body’s warmer side of hers, let the sheet fall in her place, slipped my restraining murmur. All that some time before I woke.
I woke, not hearing the expected kettle settled on the stove downstairs, the bright twinned cries of saucers on the tray, cups and teaspoons on the saucers. The morning was summer, yet it was not quite usual that her gown still hung with mine behind the door.
I would have called had not the silence closed itself against my call.
Naked too, I stood at the stair-head; all the doors of the upper rooms were open, all the upper rooms were empty. I stood on chill tiles in the hall below; all the doors were open, rooms empty. The front door open, the garden empty.
A loose horse-step. At the garden gate the piebald pony from the riding-school next door lifted its hoof to free it from the loop of reins trailing from its mouth, and moved away as I came down the path.
Leaning over the gate I saw the other ponies cropping the verges here and there in the lane, reins lying loosely across saddles.
Every room of the house empty, once again. At the head of the stairs I picked up the telephone and carried it to the bed, dialled a number at random, let it ring and ring and ring.
Had she lifted her head from my shoulder to listen to something? To listen for something?
It began to be cold.
She stepped into the bedroom with her arm raised to take her gown from the back of the door, and stood, arm still raised, eyes widening towards me, hearing the quiet weeping of the telephone in my lap.
Someone lifted the distant receiver, and I replaced mine.
She lifted the two gowns off the hook with one grasp, separated them and tossed me mine. She sat beside me, found a box with one match in her pocket. We bent our heads together to light our cigarettes at the single flame.
‘I was looking for you in the garden‚’ she said. ‘You weren’t in the house.’
‘I looked for you too, in the house and in the garden; you weren’t there.’
The loose hoof-falls had scanned themselves again; the line of ponies was passing the gate, with laughter of the girl riders.
I laughed too and fell back on the bed. ‘Well, and how was that managed? Everyone got out of the world for a while then got back into it? Except me!’
‘No, I was the sole exception! But I can imagine how it was done, though I’m not a scientist. A crowded train comes into a crowded station; if you are on the train you see everyone else get out, if you are on the platform you see everyone else get in.’
‘That was very clever! But what about aeroplanes in the sky at that moment? The risk of disasters?’
‘You talk as if I masterminded it all! You’re the one who tells me about automatic pilots and computers that can keep things going for a while. Probably the little planes that don’t have computers all happened to have alighted just before it happened. Everything that couldn’t be sustained in motion was gently brought to rest and nothing broken. We’ll read about it in the evening paper.’
‘I think we won’t. Perhaps a few rationalizations, why the power-supply faltered, why the countdowns were held up. I think anyway these moments are briefer for other folk than us; they skip over them. But you are not like that. Please tell me where you were?’
‘Not for an instant was I not here! Looking for you, every moment of the time!’
I pulled her face down to me and looked into her grey eyes, as I have often done since, not pressing the question but waiting until she murmurs, as she did then, teasingly or reproachfully, I do not know which, ‘But you were the one that went away …’