The next morning she did not, after all, play golf. Her knee was rather stiff. Instead she got Radio-Luxembourg on the powerful portable radio she had brought with her, and played jazz all morning. Downstairs Violet thought the house rejected this so violently that the very walls sent it back, echoing. She fled into the walled garden and weeded with passion, but even there strange wails and barbaric yawps reached her. The occupation, she thought with a grim smile, has begun.

When Maire came finally to do the room, Sally went down to the library and sat at the huge desk where her grandfather had studied his briefs. There she composed a careful letter to Ian. It was so careful that she copied it out twice.

O Ian, I am so far away and it is all so queer here. This morning I got La Vie en Rose from somewhere in Europe. This made it all seem stranger for a while, and now I am sitting at a very big desk in the library thinking about us. I have to keep thinking about us or I would die here, in this prison. My Uncle Charles teases me and does not understand anything, which is a great relief. He is still terribly in love with Aunt Violet. I wonder if you would think her lovely. She is trying to get at me, but I shan’t let her. You see, it’s the only way I can keep us safe from harm, from all harm, my darling, until we meet again. The worst of all is your kisses. Sally.

Her feeling was so intense that Sally could never write otherwise to Ian. She was reduced to what she considered an idiotic simplicity where he was concerned. Anything else seemed like lies and literature, the sort of letter she used to write to her English teacher at school, full of quotations from Keats and Shelley. The level on which she communicated with Ian was so different from any spoken language that she sometimes felt it useless to write and hardly read his letters except to see how he signed. They were always about himself, but sometimes they began “Darling,” and sometimes they did not end with just “love, Ian,” but dear things like “Keep hoping, love” or “You’re my best girl.”

She had forgotten where she was when Uncle Charles came in from behind and put two earth-smelling hands over her eyes.

“Oh,” she said, then quickly, not to yield to him even her surprise, “Of course, it’s you, Uncle Charles.”

“Not of course. It might be a strange young man fresh from Oxford.” Charles was feeling cheerful. The foreign occupation was putting them on their mettle. Even Cammaert had grumbled about the roses with new interest.

“A few days like this,” he said, squinting up at the luminous haze which suggested the presence of sunlight somewhere, if not precisely here, “and we might get some late bloom. Damn damp country,” he added as if he had gone too far.

Sally did not comment on her uncle’s fantasy about a young man who did not interest her even as a figure of the imagination.

“I shall have to get some stamps, Uncle Charles.”

“Leave it on the hall table,” he said casually. “The postman will see to that,” he said, as if, Sally thought, they had a special privilege of free stamps. Did the postman keep an account? But Uncle Charles interrupted her revery, the letter in her hand, “Come out and take a look at the day!”

“When does the postman come?” she asked. She would have liked to stand guard over her letter herself and lay it carefully in the postman’s hand. But she was afraid of Charles’s teasing, so she followed him slowly into the hall and laid the frail little envelope carefully on top of a small pile in Violet’s pronounced hand.

Charles noticed her backward glance as he held the glass door open for her to go through. This Victorian addition bothered his sense of style. Charles did not as yet love the house, but he respected it, as he respected good boots and well-cut old clothes. Sloppiness, lack of form bothered him. Sally’s blue jeans, too tight he thought, with an absurd boy’s checked shirt with the tails out over them, bothered him very much.

“You do look rather queer,” he said not unkindly. “Is that the usual thing?”

“Yes.” As a matter of fact, she had felt uncouth, standing by the great bed reflected in the oval mirror in the dressing table in her room. But she had put on these things deliberately. She was going to remain wholly and defiantly American.

They stood for a moment on the terrace while Charles lit his pipe, and asked with it between his teeth, “Do you think your knee would bear a walk up the hill? From there you really see the house, how it lies in the hollow.”

Sally stood there, her hands in her pockets, androgynous, remote as a sulky schoolboy. During the night she seemed to have changed or else he had first seen her in the rosy light of arrival, of drinks, and the solicitude caused by her fall. He did not, at the moment, find her attractive.

They plodded up the hill on the uneven ground where the frost had made bumps and the coarse grass crunched under their feet, and did not talk. It was high time O’Neil brought the sheep over, Charles was thinking. Sally, whose knee hurt rather a lot, was absorbed in the effort of the walk. She did not, he noticed, look back once at the house. Charles turned this indifference of hers over in his mind. The vagaries of women interested him. He imagined that he knew a good deal about them. Violet, who found this convenient, had never disabused him of the idea. Still, it was strange that Sally showed so little curiosity. After all, her grandfather had lived here. Her mother had spent her first seventeen summers here. He was puzzled.

They had now almost reached the rather straggly forest that circled the top of the bowl.

“There—” he laid his hands on Sally’s passive shoulders and forced them to turn round—“there’s Dene’s Court.”

To Sally it looked as ugly and unyielding as the prison she had found it at first glance. It was so complete in itself, planted flat against the trees, that even the beds of flowers and lawn to the right did nothing to soften it, and themselves looked only slightly out of proportion. She stared at it, fascinated in spite of herself, as if she and it were pivoted against each other. She could not have said that it was not alive. It was very much alive. For just a second she had one of those moments of illumination when time falls away, felt she was already nothing, melted into air, that in fact it had already won. To dissipate this vision which she could not accept, she took out a cigarette and tried to think of something rude but true to say. What she achieved was rather petty, after all.

“I don’t like it, Uncle Charles.” She frowned at the house as if she were trying to communicate her frown to its stone face, to evoke some response, so intently did she watch the open windows.

“Why not?” Charles asked. “There aren’t so many of these houses left you know.” He watched her, still frowning at it. “It’s rather a rarity. Most of them were burned in what the Irish call The Troubles.” He wondered if she had heard, and repeated his question, “Why don’t you like it, Sally?”

“It’s—” she searched for a word—“awkward,” she said, turning to him with the kind of defiance he supposed she called “mad.” “It’s uncomfortable. It looks like a stranger here.”

She looked away from the stone face with relief, looked at the repose of the hills, the reconciliation of the trees with the hills behind it. And so she was not watching when Violet, who had caught sight of them from her window on the second floor, leaned out and waved.

“There’s Violet!”

Sally, instead of waving, turned to watch Charles wave, feeling again the connection between these two magnetic poles; she was moved now by the smallness of the fair head in the window, leaning out, by its frailty against all that stone, and by the pleasure Charles clearly took in this moment of childish communication.

“My mother, I suppose, minded Violet being so beautiful,” she said when Violet had disappeared, leaving the window strangely empty and lonely without her.

“I suppose so.” Charles was not going to yield up his wife’s secrets to this queer little niece.

“But she married before Aunt Violet did?”

“Yes, some time before, so actually, I never knew your mother…”

That was all Charles had to say, Sally felt, so she turned down the hill again, this time towards the left to come out on the drive and spare her knee the uneven descent through the humpy grassbed.

When they reached the drive, Charles said in a low voice as if he was very conscious of Violet somewhere near-by, “I wouldn’t say much about the house to Violet, Sally. She might be hurt. You see, the house means a great deal to her, and after all,” he added, “we have to live here. We have to make the best of it.”

To this plea Sally made no reply. She was not going to be part of any pact with anyone here. But she made a note of it, as a weapon she might one day wish to use.