Whatever hour you woke there was a door shunting. From room to room
they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure -
a ghostly couple. 'Here we left it," she said. And he
added, 'Oh, but here too!" 'It's upstairs,"
she murmured. 'And in the garden," he whispered
'Quietly," they said, 'or we shall wake them."
But it wasn't that you woke us. Oh, no. 'They're
looking for it; they're drawing the curtain," one might
say, and so read on a page or two. 'Now they've found
it," one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin.
And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the
house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons
bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding
from the farm. 'What did I come in here for? What did I want to
find?" My hands were empty. 'Perhaps it's upstairs
then?" The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the
garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
