They have all failed, haven't they? She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: So many. She thinks of his hands and his beard, the deep lines around his mouth. She pauses, standing in cold water up to her knees. The water is cold, but not unbearably so. She stands close to the edge of the river, which laps against the bank, filling the small irregularities in the mud with clear water that might be a different substance altogether from the yellow-brown, dappled stuff, solid-looking as a road, that extends so steadily from bank to bank. Even as she lifts it and forces it into one of the pockets of her coat (the fur collar tickles her neck), she can't help noticing the stone's cold chalkiness and its color, a milky brown with spots of green. She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig's skull. She works quickly but methodically, as if she were following a recipe that must be obeyed scrupulously if it's to succeed at all. There's a fisherman upriver, far away, he won't notice her, will he? She begins searching for a stone. She reaches the embankment, climbs over and down again to the river. The headache is approaching and it seems (is she or is she not conjuring them herself?) that the bombers have appeared again in the sky. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they've gone somewhere else. Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. Patches of sky shine in puddles left over from last night's rain. She is not a writer at all, really she is merely a gifted eccentric. As she passes him on her way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down again into the brown water. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a potato-colored vest, cleaning the ditch that runs through the osier bed.

The voices murmur behind her bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can't see them. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she'll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. To be published in November, 1998 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Excerpt from The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

The hours by michael cunningham