I had expected him to say something. That is the whole shape of the thing I had constructed in four weeks: a man on a step, and a sentence, and me having an answer ready.
He did not say anything at all.
He looked along the four of them and back, and then he sat down.
Not a collapse. He put a hand on the door frame and lowered himself onto the step, in a good jumper, in the snow, like a man whose legs had made a decision without him.
And Rory — who is eight, and who had been told we were going on an adventure — said, to me, in a completely ordinary voice: “Mum, is that man all right?”
That man.
My son stood on a
lawn four feet from his father and asked whether that man was all right, because the man had gone grey and sat down, and because a child’s first instinct is that somebody is poorly.
