pieces, he was getting surer and surer.  Sometimes he could remember things she'd said.  But not her voice saying them.  Wal came in for supper pretty often, for instance, and once she'd said (he knew but couldn't hear her saying it): All these women of his, and none of them feed him.  What else they do for him we don't know, do we?  That was exactly the kind of thing she used to say.   If he could just hear her in his mind, properly, he thought, he would be able to see her, too.

      Another time.

     What you are, he told himself, is a randy old bastard.   Did that sound like her?  No, she wouldn't have said that.   It wasn't the kind of thing she'd say, she wasn't a one for language, though on the other hand.  But no, that was him, here, now, what he thought up here on the Beacon on the turn of afternoon and evening, randy old bastard or not, walking on the warm grass in the rising wind, looking at the mares' tails in the summer downland sky.

   Anyway, another time.  She had said.  No.  He had said.  She'd said something, it didn't matter what, and he'd said, Jess, that's you all over.  And it wasn't after dark either.  It was in the daytime, and she pulled her her dress off all at once over her head and with barely anything underneath  

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