At the end of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, someone watching over the dying man sees that the end is imminent and says, ‘It is finished.’ Ivan Ilyich, misunderstanding this, believes that death is finished. ‘It is no more,’ he thinks. He takes a breath and dies. At the start of winter I’d told Kit that we were finished. Later, I’d let myself believe that we were not. I’d been as contented as Ivan Ilyich, and as wrong.
