Her husband gives her a hug, he’s pretty sure that’s the required gesture at this point. Astrid looks pale and weak, so he decides that a cup of tea with sugar might be the correct next step, and shuffles off to the kitchen in his long johns to make it, failing to see that his wife finds herself in the middle of a storm.

Yes, at this moment, Astrid is being carried by a high, horrible wind, all force with no form, which has plucked her loose from solid objects. How she clutches and cries out as she flies! Till she finds herself blown against a door, at the end of a passage, and knocks on it as hard as she can, though she has no power.

After a minute she gives up. Sits there for a little while, then tries again. She knows by now there will be no response, but she’s after something else. She hears the tinny beep against her ear and it almost physically conjures for her the empty rooms and passages down which it carries. That corner. That ornament. That sill. She closes her eyes, listening. A commotion of longing and revulsion inside. How did it become so complicated? Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.

Lying in the warm water, while the light in the room changes, she can often forget herself for a while. Or become herself so completely that everything else ceases, including the hard, long day behind her. But she’s unsettled this evening, something jangled at the heart of it all.

Truth is, for him marriage has been like two people coming together to make a third, a mischievous extra presence working against them both, cooking up trouble, subverting his good intentions. But all that is too complicated, when right now he’s angry about something simple.

Odd that, how certain blindnesses are revealing. But you can tell from the level of anxiety it provokes how her imminent arrival has disturbed him.