Autumn

Autumn functions in the narrative as more than a season: it is a temporal register for death, aftermath, and the persistence of what cannot be concluded. Its appearances connect a remembered burial to the narrator’s later crisis, while also placing private grief within a landscape of cooling light, stalled movement, and diminishing bodily certainty.

Autumn as a Date of Death

Autumn first acquires its sharpest historical force through the death of the Father-in-Law. The jars of jam in the house bear labels from “summer ’94,” “summer ’97,” and “autumn 2002,” turning seasonal names into a domestic archive. These dates preserve the ordinary work of the man who has been buried, even as the house now contains the evidence of his absence. Autumn therefore marks not an abstract passage of time but the point at which a life’s accumulated objects, habits, and private histories become suddenly retrospective.

The funeral intensifies this contrast. Public mourners describe the Father-in-Law as an excellent father and husband and remember him among comrades at the inn, recounting beer, aperitifs, and stories of the front line. The widow’s knowledge is darker and more intimate: she remembers him sitting for hours in the semidarkness, facing the illuminated tree. The Narrator is affected not only by the death itself but by the disappearance of his words, his turns of phrase, his thick, saliva-filled voice, and the idiosyncratic sounds of his body. Autumn consequently becomes the season in which familiar speech and physical presence are converted into memory, while the official account of a man’s life is exposed as inadequate.

Autumn and the Widow’s Suspended Time

For the Mother-in-Law, autumn does not lead cleanly from mourning toward recovery. She continues cooking for two, changing pillowcases, and mending underwear torn at the crotch, as though domestic repetition could keep the dead man present. Her body becomes an “infested house” through which she must move without touching the floor; sleep offers the only imagined peace, yet even sleep is broken by sleepwalking, nocturnal cries of fire, improvised conversations with God through a shoe, and hoovering at four in the morning.

The season’s association with death is inseparable from this disturbance of time. The Mother-in-Law watches the fingers carrying bread to her mouth as though they belonged to somebody else, and she chokes because, for the person left behind, time does not pass but remains a perpetual limbo. Her grief is made tangible through neglected bread, medication begun on the day of the funeral, flies left near homemade chestnut jam, and the failure to check the expiry date. Autumn is thus experienced as a duration that has lost its forward motion: the calendar continues, but the mourner remains inside the moment of separation.

The Narrator encounters this grief during an early-morning vigil beside the fire. The Mother-in-Law hears the absent Husband in the rustle of a newspaper, the clearing of a throat, and the uncrossing of legs, as if death had removed the man without removing his gestures. Around her remain photographs, prayer cards, clothing, towels, perfume, a toothbrush, a comb, socks, ointment, talcum powder, books, an armchair, a pipe, matches, underwear, vests, and shaving cream. Yet the decisive absence is not an object but the living body: breathing, leaving a mark on a cushion, making goat-like noises while chewing, stretching, and cracking knuckles. Autumn exposes the difference between preserving things and preserving presence.

The Bitter Autumn-Winter Present

Autumn returns in the Narrator’s own destabilized present, explicitly joined to winter. She stands in the middle of the road wearing a straw hat and holding the same suitcase with which she arrived, while bicycles, lorries, and lame dogs pass close enough to threaten her. The road becomes a threshold between staying and leaving, safety and self-destruction, domestic life and public exposure. She likes walking barefoot on the tarmac until her feet turn grey, a small act that makes the season’s cold materiality visible on her body.

The surrounding scene is marked by failed or distorted movement. The Husband dismantles the plastic pool and pours its rusty water onto the grass; thousands of ants drown, unnoticed. The Narrator waits for a call and confuses the road’s distant sounds with the vibration of her phone. A meow, a hammer blow, a toy car, and a chainsaw are absorbed into a single field of threat and expectation. Her phone seems to burn in her hand, but the desired caller does not call. Autumn here is not merely a backdrop to emotional crisis: it is the season in which perception itself becomes unreliable, with ordinary noises acquiring the force of messages and impending violence.

The bodily imagery grows increasingly unstable. The baby’s forehead is blazing while the Narrator remains exposed on the road; the approaching Husband appears through darkness as flashes of silver, gesturing like someone directing a plane to land. She becomes a shadow from head to toe. Even speech deteriorates when the Son points to a rooster and says “cock-a-doodle-doo,” followed by the Narrator’s perception of zombie spiders marching in single file. The season gathers these fragments into an atmosphere of cold, intoxication, repulsion, harassment, and exhaustion, but it does not organize them into recovery.

Seasonal Time and Narrative Form

Autumn links two kinds of temporal rupture. In the Mother-in-Law’s mourning, the past remains physically active inside the house: the dead man’s habits are recreated by sounds, objects, recipes, and labels. In the Narrator’s road scene, the present is so overloaded that external time loses coherence; traffic, waiting, bodily danger, childcare, and erotic longing occupy the same unstable instant. The repeated season therefore creates a structure of return rather than a simple chronology. Autumn is remembered, inhabited, and psychologically reexperienced.

Its narrative effect depends on the tension between exactness and vagueness. The labels provide concrete seasonal dates, while the broader phrase “bitter autumn-winter” names an emotional climate that cannot be measured by the calendar alone. The text moves from the precise record of preserved jam to the grey soles of the Narrator’s feet, from funeral customs to hallucinated signals, allowing seasonal time to mediate between social fact and subjective fracture. What appears at first to be background becomes a form of evidence: the world continues to mark its dates even when the characters can no longer experience time as continuous.

Significance of Autumn

Autumn carries the book’s tragic and anti-renewal logic. It traditionally suggests decline before winter, and here that decline is attached to the Father-in-Law’s death, the Mother-in-Law’s inability to re-enter ordinary life, and the Narrator’s exposure to danger and communicative failure. Yet the season does not simply symbolize death. It also preserves stubborn continuities: jam is made and labeled, domestic routines persist, a child remains present, traffic continues, and the Husband comes searching when it is too late to see.

The result is a season of coexistence between persistence and disappearance. The dead remain in speech and gesture; the living move as though already shadowed; household objects testify both to intimacy and to its limits. Autumn’s decisive significance lies in this refusal to make loss clean or final. It gives grief a calendar without giving it closure, and it makes the ordinary world—road, house, food, fire, clothing, and animal noise—feel newly strange because every familiar thing now carries the pressure of absence.