October 27, 1984

October 27, 1984 is the date Henry identifies as his foretold death: while he is in the Meadow, a hunter’s shot will strike him, and Clare will find him. The novel presents the date first as a future Henry can describe but cannot avert, then returns to it as a fatal event in the family’s history. Because the chronology also gives Henry’s age as 43 on that date, while Clare is 13, the scene joins his later life to her childhood and makes their unequal knowledge of the same moment central to its meaning.

The date as foreknowledge

In Henry’s account dated October 27, 1984, he says he knows how the end will happen. He imagines himself in the Meadow on an overcast autumn morning, wearing a black wool overcoat, boots, and gloves, while Clare remains asleep in her warm bed. A shot will sound during deer-hunting season. Henry’s precise picture of the circumstances makes the date more than an abstract prediction: he anticipates the landscape, the hunters, and the arrival of Clare’s father Philip and brother Mark carrying their rifles.

The account is narrated in the future tense, giving the foretold event the form of something already settled even before the scene occurs. Henry expects Mark to mistake him for an animal moving through the grass and fire. He also foresees the immediate recognition that follows: his name will be called, and Clare will come out from the house. The scene’s suspense comes not from uncertainty about whether Henry has predicted the event, but from the interval between knowing its outline and being unable to change it.

The shooting and Clare’s sight of Henry

Henry’s earlier vision follows the shot into its aftermath. Philip and Mark do not recognize the figure in the grass as Henry; Clare, awakened by the scream and the calls of her name, runs into the Meadow in her nightgown. Henry signals her not to reveal that she can see him. As her father approaches, Henry turns away and watches Clare return to the house with him. She waves back, and Henry remains beside the trampled ground, understanding that he is dying. The forecast thus includes a painful split in what the characters know: Clare can see Henry, but her family cannot, and the sight does not allow her to stop what is happening.

The date is also written as part of a dual chronology, paired with January 1, 2007, when Henry is again 43 and Clare is 35. In that later-dated account, Henry experiences the shooting as it happens. He falls into the grass, is struck by a distant rifle shot, and calls for Clare. She and Alba are with him at the end; Alba whispers to him, and Clare leans over him in tears. The paired dates connect the adolescent Clare of the predicted scene with the adult Clare who witnesses Henry’s death, while preserving the novel’s distinction between the event’s calendar date and the date on which Henry narrates it.

Aftermath and significance

Clare’s account carries the scene beyond Henry’s final words. She holds him in the living room as Alba tries to rouse him, while those around them stand still; Gomez says they should call the police. The shift between Henry’s account and Clare’s does not undo the death, but changes the reader’s vantage: what Henry could only foresee becomes, for Clare and Alba, a present loss witnessed by the family.

The same date also resonates with other points in the book’s chronology. The novel marks October 27, 1984 as the date of Henry’s foreknowledge, while its other dated scenes include his first date with Clare on October 26, 1991, and Clare’s account of Henry arriving in bed in the early hours of January 1, 2007. These dates situate the Meadow scene within a narrative that repeatedly separates calendar order from the characters’ experience of time. Here, that formal pattern sharpens the tragedy: Henry’s death is known before it is lived, but knowledge offers no escape from the event. The final image of Henry watching young Clare wave back joins the future loss to the first years of their relationship, making the date both a death scene and an episode in their long, uneven story of meeting and separation.