For eleven days after the phone died, Thomas reached for it forty or fifty times a day.
He counted, on the fourth day, out of a scientific curiosity that turned out to be a poor idea. The reaching was not deliberate. His hand went to the tunic pocket while he was listening to someone, while he was walking, while he was waiting for water to boil — a small automatic movement his body had performed several thousand times a year for fourteen years and had no intention of unlearning on a schedule.
Each time, he found the weight of it exactly where it had always been. Each time, there was nothing to check.
"You're doing it again," Victoria observed, on the ninth day, over the eastern spur accounts.
"I know."
"You've done it four times since we sat down."
"I know that too. It's not that I forget it's dead." Thomas took his hand out of his pocket with some effort. "I've stopped expecting anything from it. The hand hasn't caught up. It's a fairly humiliating demonstration of how much of a person is simply habit."
Victoria made a note in the margin, and did not look up, and said, "Wat took his boots off at the door of the forge every night for nine years after his wife died, because she'd made him do it and she hated the mud, and there was nobody in that house to mind the mud for six of those years." She turned the page. "He told me that once. He was very drunk and mortified about it afterward. I'd suggest you're in respectable company."
The reaching thinned to a dozen times a day by the end of the month, and to a few times a week by autumn, and never entirely stopped.
What surprised him more was the time.
He had not accounted for it. For fourteen years there had been an object in his life that required attention — checking, reading, recording, worrying, transcribing. It had been perhaps an hour a day at its lightest and rather more than that at its worst, and now it was simply gone, and the hours it had occupied did not fill themselves.
He noticed it first in the evenings. He and Victoria had developed, over the years, a wordless division of the hours after supper: she worked, and he checked the readings and wrote his Sunday letter and sat with whatever the day's numbers had done to him. It had been a private ritual conducted in a shared room.
Now he sat in that room with nothing to do in it.
"You could read," Victoria suggested.
"I could."
"You could take up an instrument, and be very bad at it, and I could be openly cruel about it. I'd enjoy that enormously."
"I'm aware you would."
"You could talk to me." She set down her quill. "I want to be clear that I'm not being sentimental. I mean it as a practical suggestion. We have been married eleven years and there has been a third thing in this room for all of them, and I don't actually know what we talk about when it isn't here."
Thomas thought about that for a long moment.
"Neither do I," he admitted. "That's — I hadn't put it that way, but that's precisely what's unsettling me. I've been a man carrying something for so long that I've forgotten what I am without it. And I keep waiting to find out and it keeps not resolving."
"Then we find out slowly." Victoria closed the ledger, which she almost never did before finishing. "Tell me something you liked. Not something about the valley. Something from before, or something you've never had occasion to mention. I've spent eleven years hearing about your mother's letters and I could not tell you a single thing about what you enjoyed."
It took him some minutes to produce an answer, which he found embarrassing.
"Cold weather," he said eventually. "Not this. Not the damp. Proper cold, dry, where the air hurts a bit and the sky goes very sharp and blue. There was a stretch of road near my parents' house that ran along a ridge and you could see forty miles on a day like that. I used to drive out there for no reason at all."
"Drive."
"A machine. It's — that's a whole conversation."
"We have," Victoria said, "as it turns out, a great many evenings."
They talked for three hours, that night, about almost nothing.
Thomas walked home from the schoolhouse the following week and realised, halfway up the lane, that he had gone the entire day without reaching once, and that this had not felt like a loss.
It was raining. He stopped and stood in it for a bit, which he had not done in years, and got thoroughly wet, and arrived home to be told by his wife that he was an idiot and that his supper had gone cold, and he found he was in an unreasonably good mood about all of it.