Edith and Denis

Edith was at the dining-room window when Denis passed the door on his way to the bedroom with two of the cases.

"Do you recognize anything?" he called. The town would look different, he thought, with only the roofs to be seen—like a grey, stormy sea that had the World Wide Insurance tower sticking up out of it like a lighthouse.

He lifted the cases on to the bed and then remembered that one was filled with her books, which she'd want somewhere else. But unpacking and putting things in their places was her job. So he left the cases on the bed and went to her at the window.

"I asked if you recognized anything," he said. He looked out—and down. "Good heavens, what a drop! No wonder the flat was empty."

"It's this window," Edith said. "I can easily do it inside on a chair, but it's the outside that's dirty. It hasn't been cleaned for months. Trouble is it opens outwards."

"You're not to try to clean the outside, Edie," he said firmly. "You'd have to stand on the windowsill with a hundred and twenty meters of nothing under you. It doesn't bear thinking about."

"I'm not like you. I'm not afraid of heights."

"It's not a question of having or not having a head for heights. It's the feeling one can get of a force stronger than oneself. It's sometimes impossible to do anything about it."

"It's a question of health," Edith said. "That feeling doesn't come to people who are fit and in their right minds."

"You're wrong. It can. Didn't I tell you about a man I knew in the army? He was a mountaineer, killed in a fall. When he was found, there was an old note in his pocket saying 'I knew it would happen like this one day. I didn't slip. I just had to let myself go. He let himself go for five hundred meters."

The thought came back to Edith the next morning after Denis had gone to work. She was standing on the windowsill by the open window, looking down at the toy buses and cars in the street below. "Let yourself go indeed," she thought. "I've never heard such nonsense." Then she began to clean the window with a wet duster and a dry one.