Martin Lee searches the psychiatric hospital at night and discovers Stephen Storey's body lying on a table in the drying room.

Eric learns at the psychiatric hospital that Stephen Storey died from an overdose of the chloral hydrate sleeping tablets Eric had prescribed.

Eric visits Alison at her house and gives her a packet of Enovid contraceptive pills after telling her about Stephen's death.

Rita visits the Parrys' cottage and she and Irene quickly bond over their shared pregnancies and mutual loneliness.

Bill returns to the farm and discovers that his pregnant cow Drusilla has given birth to a stillborn calf.

Alison gives Eric an engraved watch during a clandestine woodland meeting, and he fails to end their affair as planned.

Bill presents his secret airfield business plan to bank manager Harrison, who insists on finding a co-investor.

The Boxing Day party concludes and snow begins falling as Bill and Rita walk home across the dark field.

Snowed in with Irene during the blizzard, Eric confesses his role in Stephen Storey's fatal overdose.

Irene finds Alison's intimate love letter hidden inside Eric's tweed jacket while sorting his laundry.

Irene leaves the cottage to travel to her parents, and Eric returns home to find the house empty and the letter on the table.

Bill's father places £10,000 in a briefcase and handcuffs it to Bill's wrist in his London home.

Frank Riley confronts Eric with a longbow at Alison's house while his son John smashes the Citroën with a cricket bat.

Rita suffers a miscarriage at the farm and Bill runs across the field to the Parrys for help.

Irene reaches into the farmhouse toilet and retrieves the miscarried fetus, wrapping it tenderly in a flannel.

The novel opens with the suicide of a young psychiatric patient, Stephen Storey, which sets Dr. Eric Parry on a path of professional and personal crisis. Eric's secret affair with Alison Riley runs parallel to his growing guilt over Stephen's death, even as his wife Irene forms a genuine bond with their neighbor Rita Simmons over their shared pregnancies. The Big Freeze isolates the two couples and forces hidden tensions to the surface, culminating in Irene's discovery of Eric's affair and her abrupt flight from the cottage. Bill Simmons's secret trip to London to borrow money from his estranged father ends with an act of violent retribution when Frank Riley destroys Eric's car. The novel reaches its shattering climax when Rita suffers a miscarriage, bringing all four characters together in a moment of raw human need and unexpected tenderness.

The headline events that drive the story from Stephen's death to Rita's miscarriage.

Martin Lee sounds a fire alarm and walks out alone into the fog after finding Stephen's body.

Eric makes his morning house calls across foggy lanes and discovers a perfumed letter from Alison at his surgery.

Rita wakes late with morning sickness, feeds the farm hens, and reads a science fiction novel before deciding to visit Irene.

Irene examines The Arnolfini Marriage print on her bathroom wall and begins planning a Boxing Day party for her neighbors.

Bill secretly visits an abandoned wartime airfield and imagines converting the bomber hangar into a large beef cattle operation.

Eric argues with Irene after dinner and reveals that Rita's father, Martin Lee, is a patient at the asylum.

Irene and Rita see two science fiction films at a Bristol cinema, where Rita vomits and Irene holds her head.

Rita introduces Irene to Byron the Black projectionist and tells her that Bristol buses refuse to hire Black conductors.

At the Boxing Day party, Alison finds Irene alone in the Parrys' bedroom and asks which side of the bed Eric sleeps on.

At the Boxing Day party, Gabby Miklos recounts his family's Holocaust experiences to Bill, who mentally withdraws from the conversation.

Irene and Rita meet in the snow-covered field between their homes and joyfully build a snowman together.

After the blizzard clears, Eric returns to work and discovers his terminally ill patient Peter Gurney has died in his bed.

Charlie crashes his car on a snow-covered narrow lane while driving Bill and the handcuffed briefcase back toward Somerset.

Eric attends Stephen Storey's sparsely attended funeral at the same cemetery where Eric's own father is buried.

Eric and Irene see the existentialist film Vivre sa vie in Bristol, and Irene has a powerful emotional awakening on the drive home.

These events trace the textures of ordinary life in rural Somerset before and during the Big Freeze, revealing the social and emotional undercurrents running beneath the novel's main action. Rita's isolated mornings at Water Farm, Irene's domestic restlessness, and Bill's secret ambitions at the abandoned airfield all illuminate the quiet desperation animating the four central characters. The Boxing Day party brings the community together in a charged social gathering where class tensions, marital secrets, and unspoken traumas surface through small but devastating exchanges. As the freeze deepens, rare moments of connection — a shared snowman, a film trip to Bristol — become more meaningful against the backdrop of broken intimacies. The final events of this pool track the aftermath: sparsely attended funerals, a slowly disintegrating marriage, and an unexpected encounter with art that begins to crack open something new in Irene.

The quieter but crucial scenes shaping the characters' daily lives and social world.

Rita feigns sleep when Bill quietly enters the bedroom to check on her, avoiding any real connection between them.

Bill struggles to repair a broken gate and fears his impulsive decision to become a farmer was a serious mistake.

Irene becomes tearful while looking at a UNICEF photograph of an African mother unable to feed both her twin babies.

Rita slips into the downstairs bathroom at the Parrys' cottage and silently endures abusive auditory hallucinations before returning to Irene.

Bill lies to Rita when she asks about Drusilla's calf, falsely claiming the birth has not yet happened.

Eric attends Stephen Storey's post-mortem but excuses himself and leaves before the pathologist begins to open the skull.

Rita is overwhelmed by traumatic memories of a past pregnancy termination on the train to Bristol with Irene.

Rita puts on Bach's St. John Passion at the Boxing Day party and Eric immediately removes the record from the player.

Irene's train brakes sharply in deep snow and stranded passengers are forced to walk to a nearby school for blind children.

Bill and his estranged father sit naked together in a converted steam room while his father beats Bill's back with twigs.

Rita crosses to the Parrys' empty cottage and sees the opened love letter propped against the fruit bowl through the kitchen window.

Gloria comforts Rita in her Bristol flat and firmly forbids her from considering another termination of the pregnancy.

Bill and an injured Charlie drag themselves through deep snow and discover a railway embankment with a green signal light in the distance.

Martin Lee appears outside the psychiatric hospital to hand Eric a wooden box of handmade spinning tops intended for Rita.

Inside the rescue helicopter, Rita hallucinates she is aboard a spaceship rising peacefully above the snow-covered landscape with Bill, Eric, and Irene.

This pool focuses on the concealed interior lives of the four protagonists — the moments of self-deception, hidden suffering, and sudden clarity that mark the novel's emotional turning points. Rita's auditory hallucinations, her past trauma, and her growing psychological fragility are revealed in private moments she carefully hides from those around her. Bill's inability to confront failure honestly — lying to Rita, seeking his father's money, accepting a morally compromised inheritance — exposes the gap between his idealistic self-image and his actual choices. Eric's clinical detachment from death and his passivity toward his own moral failures are dramatized in scenes both intimate and harrowing. Irene's journey from tearful domestic prisoner to a woman capable of genuine agency plays out through a series of internal shifts that the cold exterior world mirrors at every turn. The pool ends with Rita's transcendent hallucination, transforming the novel's most brutal event into a moment of dreamlike release.

The key decisions, hidden truths, and emotional shifts that define each character's inner arc.