IT WAS EARLY in the morning when she fell, and the sun coming in through the back door made a triangle on the kitchen floor. From where she lay, quite comfortably tucked on the thick green carpet between the sofa and the sideboard, she could see how it picked out the pattern on the kitchen lino, almost as if had been slightly raised, and how it touched the little nests of dust that her broom must have missed under the lip of the kitchen cupboards.

The bright shape of the sunlight changed as the minutes passed, disappearing from the kitchen to pop up first in the back bedroom, then across the busy pattern of lavender and white tiles in the bathroom, and then, later, in her bedroom – it almost reached all the way across the floor to the thick rose-coloured chenille of her bedspread – before it swung around further in search of the sunroom. The pile of the carpet, from this angle, looked like blades of grass.