The Land in Winter

On December 7, 1962, Martin Lee, a patient at a psychiatric hospital, wakes and wonders what roused him. The hospital lies hushed in fog. Martin moves silently through the building, passing an office where Ian, a night nurse, sleeps, and steals a Woodbine cigarette.

Martin discovers Stephen Storey’s bed is empty. He proceeds through unlocked passages to the drying room, where he discovers the young man’s body lying on a table. An envelope addressed to “whom it may concern” is clipped to Stephen’s tie.

Martin considers covering Stephen with a sheet, but concludes there is “nothing indecent” about the body. Seventeen years earlier, Martin was a war photographer, and the dead man bears no resemblance to the atrocities he witnessed in Germany. He bows to Stephen and leaves. At a fire door, he smokes the stolen cigarette, then smashes a fire alarm box. As alarms sound, he walks out into the fog.

Dr. Eric Parry proudly drives his Citroën ID through foggy lanes toward his first house call. He reflects on whether his decision to leave London and become a country doctor was the right one. Although glad to escape the company of his upper-class in-laws, Eric has noticed his wife, Irene, seems discontented.