There was a man coming across the fields, heading straight for the house. Eleanor watched him from behind one of the only sets of curtains still hanging.

The carpets were deeper in colour where the furniture had been. Decades of daylight from bay windows and never closing the curtains will do that. Now, the family room looked like a crime scene, outlines of the departed all over the floor. Some had been murdered in front of the window itself, some forced into a corner against the wall, all of them then bagged up and carried away into storage by careless removal men in one haughty morning that arrived far sooner than Eleanor would have wanted. 

She couldn’t see his face at that distance, if it was kind or not, angry or not. 

Every day the agents rang and told her someone else was interested, a couple from the city, an absent businessman, a family of seven. They talked loudly as though she couldn’t hear them. She kept reminding them that she needed to sell, hoping that they’d read between the lines and realise she was saying she didn’t want to sell.

So stop being so cheerful about every stranger you want to drag through my property. 

There was something wrong with him. He appeared to be swaying as he came on. She would have liked to simply turn out the lights and pretend to be out, but he would already have seen them. 

Eleanor thought of the collection of firearms her father once hung above the fireplace behind her. Bane of her mother’s life, constant fascination of her brother’s. One Christmas her mother had caught her looking down the barrel of some old revolver and slapped the taste of chocolate from her mouth. 

 Now the wall was bare but for the fixings and there were no weapons left besides the poker for the fire. Someone in a suit had remarked how successful the auction had been. 

What she had taken to be the scraggly hair of a vagrant she was now sure was actually trails of blood down his face. The visitor reached the spot where the fields gave way to the front of the house and stood looking up, glassy eyed and panting. She thought of calling the police, but the idea came and went, leaving her to watch it into the distance of her mind. 

He came on, towards the front door, she knew it was locked but she crossed from the window and checked it anyway. The poker had found its way into her hand and she couldn’t remember picking it up. She looked down and saw soot on her fingers and her skirt. 

The shape of him, outside. Red blood that looked green through the stained glass. 

‘What do you want?’ she barked through the window. How she wished she wasn’t alone. She wanted her brother, for all the use he would be, now weak and old on some distant shore.

‘Which way is town?’ he called back. His voice was soft but she kept her guard. 

‘Back the way you came. Beyond the woods behind you and go right.’

She watched the bloodstain turn in the glass, the colour changed from green to blue and then vivid red. He said nothing. 

‘If you hurry you’ll make it by dark,’ Eleanor said. She doubted it.

‘Is there a phone I could use?’

‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘No phone?’

‘It’s disconnected. I’m very poor, you see...and I have a sickness’. She thought hard about what was the most catching. ‘Consumption,’ she said. 

‘What if something happened to you?’ he said, in his nice, quiet voice. She couldn’t answer. He was standing so still, looking in through the glass at the shape of her. 

 ‘I mean with you being unwell and no phone. It’s not safe.’

She found her voice and an idea in the same instance. ‘My sons live with me. They’ll be back any moment.’

‘Oh good. Okay. Could I trouble you for some water?’

She wanted to know what happened to him. He was blurred. Not just the sight of him, but in how he moved and how he spoke. 

‘There’s an outside tap, it’s not safe for you to use my glasses, I have consumption. The tap’s around the side here, to the left. Help yourself.’

‘Okay.’ He stayed where he was. 

‘You should hurry if you want to make town before dark.’

‘Yes. Which way is town?’ 

Eleanor felt her blood run a little cooler, her eyes slipped out of focus. She hadn’t realised, but the notion of her sons returning at any moment had actually been of some comfort, even though they had never existed. 

‘Back the way you came and through the woods, head right. It’s not far.’

‘Thank you.’

She saw him turn again, as he had before, to look out at the woods. He set off walking, but stopped after a few feet, then carried on again. He made no move towards the tap.

Eleanor and the poker waited together at the window, in an old wooden chair, long after it was too dark to see anything. She wondered how she would ever sleep but she had no one to call apart from the estate agents and it just rang and rang into what was probably an empty office. 

She thought about him all night, wondering if he made it through the woods. Asking herself if she should have had more courage. 

In the morning she looked out of the top bedroom window and saw a snaking path through the field, all the way to the woods.