But that night Violet Dene Gordon, surrounded by the safe Victorian comfort of a bedroom in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, lay beside her husband and could not sleep. All through the last months she had felt the tug of Dene’s Court like an obsession, had gone upstairs in the midst of a conversation to add an item to a list for Annie, and then sat forgetting why she had come, only wanting to think and remember, playing the past like a game of solitaire which must “come out,” for if it did, all would be well with the future too. She set the small concrete details, names of flowers in the garden, children’s books they had read with their father, Barbie’s collections of insects and butterflies, set these out and looked at them with passionate attention as if they held the answer to huge questions and doubts. Would Charles really take hold and be happy there? Or would he be bored?

It was no joke for any man to be on the loose in his early fifties, cut off from the job for which he had been trained, to come back then to an England so changed that even in Lady Somerset’s house, where there was still a butler, the guests helped wash the dishes. Their English friends teased them about the luck of being Anglo-Irish in these times. “You can get servants, I’m told,” Lady Somerset said, “I’m mad with envy,” and her husband added “meat” Cooking rather like a cannibal, Violet thought). It was queer to feel oneself so naked, so orphaned, so cut off and yet in the eyes of one’s friends to appear as the inheritors of a stability which hardly seemed possible any more. So it had always been with Dene’s Court which had escaped burning when other houses of its kind were burned, which had stood since its building in a kind of aloofness which now appeared to be strength, some secret power of reserve, but was more likely luck, Violet thought—a matter of location, far from the centers of revolution and passion. For Violet suspected that the Denes had been neither better nor worse than other landlords.

Landlord. The word frightened her. It was as if she and Charles were asked to be fully grown-up for the first time in their lives. It suggested masses of children and servants. Children they did not have; Violet had never ceased to feel sorrow and guilt because of her miscarriage and the subsequent operation which destroyed all their hopes. Now in relation to the house, she felt the loss again and in a new way. She was not only fading Charles but all the Denes, coming back, barren, middle-aged, coming back as to a refuge to a house which had been designed not as a refuge at all, but as a perhaps arrogant statement of faith in a way of life, in a tradition. Beside this their life in Burma had been improvised—that indeed was its charm. Now they would enter a more severe frame. Charles would sit at the head of the long table—so much too long for two—under the eyes of all the Denes.

So Violet had held back, persuaded him that they must have a few months of real holiday before taking on their new responsibilities. She had held back as one holds back from meeting an old love, because she was afraid, because too much was at stake.

Now on this last night the house rose before her closed eyes like a fortress, its twenty dark windows gleaming in the moonlight; behind it, the sheltering outlines of the mountains, milky above the intensely black trees. Moved passionately by this evocation, Violet turned toward her husband and laid her cheek against his back. She breathed in the steady pulse of his sleep and wondered what it would be like after this in the great fourposter bed where her parents and grandparents had slept in the peaceful summer nights. He did not move.

And suddenly Violet felt a longing for her sister, Barbie, for someone who would remember and share. She thought of their mother playing Chopin while they lay under the piano, rather frightened, for the reverberations suggested some great animal imprisoned there; she thought of Miss Goddard, their governess, taking them out to pick bluebells in the woods; of the long fierce games of croquet that lasted for days; of the rainy afternoons cutting out paper dolls. But she could not rest in these memories and turned over as if to ward off nightmare. For the peaceful summers had finally mounted in a crescendo through Barbie’s violence, her escapes, her tantrums, her ambivalent feelings about this older sister who by her very presence had made Barbie feel deprived—till the final breaking off of everything and Barbie’s departure for America with her husband. It was all so very long ago, yet the wounds had never been healed. The final memories of the house had been cruel, violent and were perhaps another unacknowledged reason for Violet’s reluctance to go back.

There had been, after all, no reconciliation with Barbie, only the occasional letters at Christmas, the snapshots of Sally, Violet’s niece whom she had never seen. Now that we are grown-up and getting old, Violet thought, if only we could talk—but Barbie had become efficient, was busy on all sort of committees with queer names (Americans organized everything so!). Violet suspected that if they did meet again Barbie would judge her severely, a beautiful woman who needed above all to be admired. Barbie would judge her marriage, would judge Charles (Americans never understood the British). It might in fact be quite unbearable and Violet, who had a moment before longed for her sister, quietly closed her mind. One can’t go back, she thought—and then lay, rigid with apprehension, realizing that going back was just what she would have to do tomorrow.

“Charles!” She said sharply aloud, as if someone had knocked.

Charles turned in his sleep, groaned, and then sat straight up in bed, wide awake, cross. “What is it, Violet? What’s the matter?”

“I’m sorry, darling—a bad dream, I guess. Go back to sleep.” She folded her hand into his, as if she could lock away her anxiety there. And indeed she felt drowsy at last, as if their enfolded hands became an entity. “I could never do it alone,” she thought.