Emma Morley’s fatal cycling accident occurs on a rainy July afternoon as she rides across North London to meet Dexter at their new house. The journey ends before she reaches him: thrown from her bicycle by a blur of movement, unable to move, and aware at last that she is not all right, she thinks of her childhood and of Dexter waiting. Her death converts a routine trip into the irreversible break at the heart of their shared future.

Background and Immediate Circumstances

The day has proceeded by familiar routines. Emma works until two, eats lunch, and goes swimming. She sometimes prefers the ladies’ pool on Hampstead Heath in July, but the sky has become precariously dark and overcast, so she goes instead to the indoor pool. There, for twenty minutes, she weaves unhappily among teenagers diving, ducking, and flirting, their energy sharpened by the freedom of the end of term. The ordinary irritations of the afternoon make the turn toward catastrophe especially abrupt.

In the changing room, Emma listens to Dexter’s message and smiles. She memorizes the address of the property and calls him back. Her message is affectionate and conciliatory: she says she is setting out, jokes that she cannot wait to see the breakfast bar, allows that she may be five minutes late, and apologizes for being snappy during their earlier argument. She stresses that the argument had nothing to do with him and tells him she loves him. Her final, playful assurance that he is lucky precedes the simple fact that he will be waiting for her.

Outside the sports centre, the clouds finally break. Warm, fat grey raindrops darken the weather; Emma curses the rain and the wet bicycle seat, then sets off toward Kilburn. She improvises a route through a maze of residential streets toward Lexington Road. Her destination is not merely an address: Dexter is expecting her at their new house, and she is looking forward to seeing it with him.

The Accident

The rain grows heavier, falling in oily drops of brown city water. Emma rides standing on the pedals, her head lowered, and is only vaguely aware of movement in the side road to her left. The narration does not identify what moves there or explain precisely how the accident happens. Instead, it gives the shock through its physical consequence: Emma is picked up and hurled, then comes to rest on the roadside verge with her face against the wet pavement.

Her first instinct is to look for her bicycle, which has disappeared from beneath her. She tries to move her head and cannot. Although she wants to remove her helmet because she thinks she looks ridiculous, the people gathered around her are fearful; they ask repeatedly whether she is all right. One of them is crying. Their distress makes Emma recognize what she has not yet understood: she is not all right. Rain continues to fall on her face as other people crowd close, but the scene offers no account of medical assistance or rescue before her death.

Even in that moment, Emma measures what has happened against the plan she has just made. She is definitely going to be late, she thinks, and Dexter will be waiting. The thought ties the accident directly to the message from the changing room: minutes earlier she was setting out to see him, confident enough to joke about the breakfast bar and affectionate enough to apologize. Now the same journey has become impossible to complete.

Final Thoughts and Death

Emma thinks distinctly of two things. First comes a photograph of herself at nine, wearing a red swimsuit on a beach. She cannot remember whether it was Filey or Scarborough. In the photograph, her mother and father are swinging her toward the camera, their sunburnt faces bent with laughter. The remembered image gives her last thoughts a particular family intimacy: a childhood moment preserved in a photograph, recalled without certainty about its location but with the people and their laughter still present.

Then she thinks of Dexter sheltering from the rain on the steps of the new house, checking his watch and growing impatient. She imagines that he will wonder where she is and worry. Her attention turns not to an explanation of the accident but to the person who is waiting at its destination. The scene ends with her death: everything she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever. The narration thus moves from immediate bodily sensation, to memory, to an imagined future with Dexter, and then to the absolute ending of consciousness.

Narrative Consequences and Significance

The event’s force lies in the distance between Emma’s expectation and what occurs. She leaves the pool with an apology and a loving message to Dexter; she rides toward a house they are to share; she anticipates arriving only a few minutes late. The accident overturns each small expectation without warning. A wet seat and a difficult route, details of an ordinary bicycle journey, become the setting for a death that neither Emma nor Dexter has prepared for.

The prose narrows the event through Emma’s perceptions. Movement at the edge of her awareness remains a blur, while the missing bicycle, her inability to move her head, the helmet she wants to remove, the rain, and the onlookers’ fear become sharply legible. This selective account leaves the mechanics of the accident unresolved and keeps attention on her changing understanding of her condition. The shift into present tense during the crash makes its sensations immediate; the abrupt declaration of death then closes the scene rather than extending it into a description of aftermath.

The accident also changes the meaning of the journey. Elsewhere, travel has offered Emma a release from the enclosed repetitions of daily life: arriving at a Greek island, she recognizes how far away she feels from London and its familiar rooms and buses. Here, movement across the city carries no such open-ended promise. Emma rides through residential streets toward a particular shared home, but the route is interrupted before arrival. The contrast is not that travel itself guarantees freedom or danger, but that the same act of going somewhere can hold radically different possibilities.

After Emma’s death, the narrative turns to Part Five, titled Three Anniversaries, and opens with an epigraph from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles about the date of one’s death passing unnoticed among the days of the year. This transition places the accident within a structure of remembrance: the ordinary July day becomes the date Dexter must live beyond. The central consequence is not a resolved account of the crash, but the permanent absence left at the very moment Emma believed Dexter was waiting for her.