IN ONE’S OWN HOUSE

“I HOPE we didn’t wake you, Miranda,” Constance said.

Miranda had come downstairs in her dressing gown, forgetting that her mother-in-law always appeared at breakfast fully dressed. And there she was, Constance, in a linen dress and a green sweater, pouring out coffee. This early rising and dressing on Constance’s part was rather uncharacteristic. She herself readily explained it to her guests as the necessity of setting a good example. “In one’s own house,” she would then add—it was an expression she was particularly fond of.

In other respects, Constance affected a charming disorder, which turned to downright vagueness in the face of other people’s difficulties. Of independent mind and means (“a widow with a little money” was another of her favored phrases), she repudiated, shrewdly or selfishly, untidy elements in the lives of others. Within her own controlled variety of moods, coy or unfeeling, she maintained a handsome serenity—like a country that, suffering no extremes of climate, remains always green. Her affection was largely reserved for her younger son, James, now seated beside her at the breakfast table, holding his coffee cup in both his hands and resting his elbows on the edge of the table. With her other son, Miranda’s husband Russell, she had never felt at ease. She saw him seldom—when he and Miranda visited her here in the country, or on her own rare trips to New York. She thought him sarcastic, intense, unknowable; his attitude toward her seemed to be one of continual reproach, and she could not help wondering what, in his mind, he accused her of. She was distressed, but not surprised, that he had managed to have a nervous breakdown.

Miranda said: “Oh no, not at all,” and seated herself opposite James. At the other end of the table, a fourth place had been laid for Russell.

“Of course, time is getting on,” Constance continued, “if you want to go to church.”

“Church?” inquired James.

“Miranda does go to church,” Constance rebuked him, the soul of open-mindedness.

“I went once,” Miranda told him, “when we were here at Easter. I was the only woman without a hat. I felt like the Infidel.”

“I’m sure, my dear, you get credit for good thoughts.” Constance took Miranda’s cup. “Like Abou ben Adhem,” she added kindly.

“The sermon was very dull,” Miranda said, placatingly.

“I don’t doubt it.” Having filled the cup, Constance passed it back. “I always think, don’t you, that Catholic churches must be much more interesting than ours. So much more going on. Protestants are so docile—turning up in pairs on Sunday, like animals entering the Ark.” After an insufficient pause, Constance went on: “Well, Miranda dear, you must go to church just as often as you like—if you really do mean to spend the summer here.”

Miranda, unresisting, drank her coffee.

“Isn’t Russell coming to breakfast?” James helped himself to the last piece of toast without waiting for the answer to this question.

“He’s still sleeping,” Miranda said. “I’ll take a tray up to him when we’ve finished.”

Constance felt—and not for the first time—that Miranda was indulging Russell. Which may well be the cause of his trouble, she added to herself. Aloud, she pointed out that there was still hot coffee in the pot. “If you want to call him now,” she suggested.

Miranda almost sighed. “No,” she said. “I think he should sleep. He has a long journey ahead of him tomorrow.”

“My dear, he gets on a plane in New York and gets off it in Athens. That isn’t so strenuous, after all.”

Miranda thought it sounded utterly exhausting, but said nothing.

James said to Miranda: “Are you going to New York with him?”

“No. I’ll drive him to New Haven and see him off on the train.”

“Why don’t you go to New York?”

Miranda said bravely: “Because he doesn’t want me to,” and began to collect the empty dishes within her reach.

Damn Russell, thought James; everything connected with him led to trouble and hurt someone’s feelings. Rather, hurt Miranda’s feelings—and that’s all I care about, he said to himself—looking at her briefly, so that his mother wouldn’t notice, but seeing everything: her meekly attentive face, still faintly smeared with night cream and dominated by her wide, now colorless mouth, the straight black hair she had already brushed into a careful line along her shoulders, and the rose-colored dressing gown that opened on the white curve of her breast Damn Russell, thought James.

Oh Russell, my darling, why must you do this, Miranda wondered, grieving above the plates and cups. Is it really going to help you to be away, to be without me? Will you really come back? She pushed her chair out from the table and wrapped her dressing gown about her, resting her hand for a moment against her body. It’s strange, she thought, that these trite expressions should have such meaning—“My heart bleeds”; “It cut me to the heart” … One does feel it here. Something to do, perhaps, with circulation or breathing.

“A very good color for you, Miranda, that pink,” Constance declared. She had a proprietary way of admiring other people’s possessions, as if all good taste were in some measure a tribute to herself. “Yes, an excellent color,” she repeated, in this flat, confiscating manner of hers, as Miranda trailed out of the dining room toward the kitchen. Then she looked adoringly at James, who was still eating his breakfast.

Constance’s husband had died in the war, shortly after James’s birth. The fact that she had, unaided, raised this remarkable young man was a daily source of gratification to her. James’s strong and subtle personality, his intelligence, his good looks would have more than met her own requirements. That he should, into the bargain, have turned out to be charming and kind was an unlooked-for bonus that, as far as Constance was concerned, simply vindicated his gifts in the eyes of a jealous society. He was so attractive, she sometimes thought, that he was really entitled to be a bit nasty; instead—magnanimously, she felt—he was very nice. He would go a long way—always in the right direction; they all said so, his professors, his college friends, even Russell. Russell himself had done well enough, until now, but James would do more. James was more singular, his talents less diffuse. If only, she prayed, if only he would get over these grotesque notions about Miranda. (Thank God Miranda herself hadn’t noticed yet.) It really couldn’t be worse, if the two of them were to be in the house all summer. “Poor little Miranda’s looking rather drawn, I thought,” she said.

“Seemed all right to me,” James replied. “Perhaps she’ll cheer up after Russell goes.”

Someone will cheer up anyway, Constance thought grimly, watching him. “She’d be better advised to cheer up beforehand. It only makes Russell worse to see her subdued like this.”

“Russell’s not exactly clamorous himself,” James pointed out. He wiped his hands on a paper napkin and left it in a ball on his plate. “And never has been.”

“All the more reason for Miranda to provide a little contrast … Proust, if you recall, says that Swann was instinctively repelled by the very women whose depth of character and melancholy expression exactly reflected his own.”

“I don’t, no.”

“Don’t what?”

“Recall.” But James was pleased to note that his mother had inadvertently credited Miranda with a depth of character she usually managed to deny her.

Constance got up from the table, picked up James’s empty dishes, and followed Miranda to the kitchen. She found her daughter-in-law leaning one elbow on top of the refrigerator, waiting for the toast to be done. A set tray stood on the kitchen table.

“May I take the paper for Russell?” Miranda asked.

“Oh of course. I’ll see it later.”

“Oh, not if you’re not finished with it.”

“My dear, I’m sure there’s nothing of interest in it. I can very well wait.” Constance watched Miranda buttering the toast. “Though I must say, Miranda, I don’t think you ought to pander to Russell quite so much.”

Why must you say it, Miranda wondered. “Constance,” she said, carefully putting butter at the corners of the slice, “Russell is very sick.”

Sick, Constance repeated to herself, now thoroughly exasperated. Sick. People seem quite incapable of using straightforward words these days. My son questions, as well he might, the very nature of our existence, and they discuss him as though he had German measles. Sick—that’s the word they use now when people become exercised over the human condition. Sick, indeed. “Do you have any idea, Miranda darling, how all this started?”

Miranda put the toast on the tray and took the coffee off the stove. “It’s a long story,” she said.

When one says that it’s always something fundamental that could be explained in a single sentence, Constance remarked to herself. She pushed the door open for Miranda to pass through.

Turning back into the room, she saw that Miranda had left the newspaper on the table.

 

When Russell had finished his breakfast he lay in bed with his hands folded under his head and watched Miranda making up her face. He could see that this unnerved her, from the attention with which she handled the succession of little jars.

“Why do you need all of those?”

“Oh, they’re all different, you see.”

“They can’t all be different. It’s ridiculous. An obsession.”

She thought with mild resentment of the equipment he carried on his own person. He was always looking for his lighter, running out of cigarettes, forgetting his glasses. She, who did not smoke or wear glasses, would not have dreamed of complaining of these things. But his irritation, she knew, was not concerned with the jars on her dressing table: directed at herself, it was the antithesis of love.

“Oh—perhaps you’re right. It’s probably silly.”

“I hate the way you keep saying ‘Oh.’” He saw, in the mirror, her eyes deflect. “And the way you keep agreeing.”

“Agreeing?”

“Humoring me. Backed like a weasel. Very like a whale. How true, my lord.”

She lowered her head, defeated, and began to put the contents of the dressing-table drawer in order. These onslaughts of his were like outcroppings of rock in the surface of her day. Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing more for him, that he had overdrawn on her endurance: then she would stay silent for a while, almost at peace, beyond his reach, not knowing whether she had been utterly vanquished or become completely invincible. However, it required merely some slight attention on his part to restore all her apprehensions—for these extremes of feeling only existed within the compass of her love.

Russell, still watching her, experienced the sensation of being abandoned that always accompanied such victories, as if he had lost the one person who connected him to reality, whose very pain was a guiding thread in the endless labyrinth of his anguish. He thought with despair of her selfishness, all her anxiety for him originating in her own need for his love. She imagines, he thought bitterly, that I could simply be nicer to her; that I could easily be kind if I wanted to, treat her better if I would only try. She had completely failed to realize how far he had descended into this dark place from which no consoling speech could deliver him, no outstretched hand—even hers—bring him back. While she, at one word from him, could be fully restored to life and power and thought. What could she complain of, then, he demanded of her inclined head. Her misery was vicarious, almost parasitical; she knew its cause precisely. It might, in fact, be said of her that she stood continually at the brink of utter happiness. Why, she should count herself among the most fortunate of mortals—blessed art thou among women, Miranda Richmond.

But occasionally he did feel her suffering—as it were, through the screen of his own. The night before, they had lain down in silence, immensely remote from each other in this comfortable bed in his mother’s best guest room. He had behaved so cruelly to Miranda all day that he knew he could not decently approach her (here he made a mental note to be more careful this evening), and they slept without touching. But that morning he had wakened very early and watched her sleeping—her grief showing even then, for her closed fist was pressed against her mouth as if she had fallen asleep stifling her sobs. For a moment he had wanted intensely to awaken and reassure her, to take her out of sleep back into his embrace before she could recollect what stood between them. For that moment he had lain wanting her to know that help was at hand. But the moment passed, and with it the impulse to rescue her. He could not face her surprise, her pleasure, her tears. He could not face his own inability to sustain this moment of sanity, and the absolute certainly of her disappointment.

“I must say these things, you know,” he told her, in a fairly pleasant voice. “I don’t care for them either, but they do come out, ugly as they are.”

She turned round on the stool and looked at him. “Russell, tell me why.”

He lowered his eyes from the ceiling and looked at her again, still with his hands behind his head. “I suppose they represent me at the moment—I mean, that I am ugly. Wouldn’t you think? Something like that?”

“No.”

“I tell you yes, Miranda. That’s the way it is. Envy-and-calumny-and-hate-and-pain , darling—the bloody lot.” He smiled at her. “Where’s the paper?”

“I didn’t bring it up. I think Constance wanted to see it.”

“Oh, she’s turned nasty again, has she? God, darling, I can’t see you sticking out the summer here. Even the city in a heat wave is better than Constance.”

“She’s not so bad. You have to know how to handle her.”

“Which, as it happens, neither of us does.”

Miranda laughed. She took off her rose-colored gown and started to dress.

“Could you hand me those folders.” He sat up and took a bundle of travel leaflets from her. She sat on the bed at a little distance from him, buttoning her dress. Between them, over the blanket, he spread a topographical map of the Greek peninsula and the islands. “You understand that I have to do this?” he asked her, for the twentieth time. “That I have to be away—be alone?”

For the twentieth time she responded: “Oh yes.” She subdued the folds of the map with her fingers. She bent her head over the fantastic pattern of blue sea and green islands with an assiduous show of interest, like a child examining an invitation for a party to which she has not been asked.

“I may go to France later,” Russell remarked unsparingly. The studied absorption of her attitude and his awareness of her unshed tears could not touch him. He felt again that she was obtruding her trivial, untimely demands on to a scene of disaster, and he felt justified in setting her down. Being away from all this, and from her, was now the only prospect that gave him pleasure; tomorrow could not come quickly enough. And yet—the idea of anyone else receiving this tender, faultless love of hers, or being subjected to its relentless self-denial, was unthinkable. Even if he never came back to her—though he supposed he would—he must be able to think that she wanted him, always. “Was James around this morning?” he asked, discarding one pamphlet after another.

“He was having breakfast,” she said.

“Is he going to hang about here all summer? Really, Constance indulges him. I always had to work at least part of the vacation.”

“She does spoil him, of course. It’s the gap in your ages, don’t you think?” Russell was fourteen years older than James. “Still, James is turning out rather well.” Miranda cast about uneasily for a means of turning the conversation. She felt it would be the last straw if James’s interest in her, ridiculous as it was, were to come to Russell’s attention now.

Russell could only hope that James would get over it soon. It was better, he had decided, not to mention anything to Miranda. But she really was impossible—any other woman would have noticed such a thing immediately. She lives in a world of her own, he thought, as he looked at her innocently sorting the papers on the bed. “I suppose it’s time I got up,” he said.

 

“Where’s Miranda?” James asked, when Russell appeared alone in the bright garden.

“She had letters to write.” Russell walked on down the path, nodding to his mother, who sat, sewing buttons on a shirt, in a cane chair beside James. James’s effrontery, the ineptitude of Miranda now ceased to interest him. He walked along the flagged path, onto which the flood tide of his mother’s flowers had overflowed, fully engaged in maintaining his own equilibrium. This required an effort so intense that it became, at times, almost, physical and he walked like a person under a strong sedative, slightly stupefied, his body braced against the return of pain. In so far as he noticed at all, he saw only a threat in the brilliant delicacy of the flowers, the smooth sweep of grass, and the light shredded through trees and shrubs at the end of the path. These were things—unlike his relations with Miranda, or his inability to work, which were matters inextricably entangled with his life—offered gratuitously by fate to impede his struggle for sanity. He felt that if he did not soon reach a place of shelter and darkness he would have to turn and go back inside. He crossed the foot of the lawn and pushed his way into a small wood with the instinctive haste of someone who, at the point of suffocation, seeks fresh air.

“This seems to be one of Russell’s bad days,” remarked Constance, looked troubled.

“I can’t make out what’s wrong with him,” James said.

“He’s just dreadfully depressed, dear. He feels we’re all doomed—which is, after all, no more than the truth, though one can’t afford to give it undivided attention. These things happen to people—they say he will get over it. It’s as though the Life Force has been temporarily cut off.

“You make it sound like part of the utilities. In the meantime, how awful for Miranda.”

Constance’s frown deepened. “Well, my dear, she must take the rough with the smooth, as the marriage service says.” After this somewhat loose quotation, she paused to examine the rest of the buttons on the shirt, and attacked one with her needle. “Marriage is like democracy—it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with … Given the best of circumstances, it’s exceedingly difficult. I suppose, if Dan had lived”—Dan was Constance’s husband—“we would have had our difficulties too.” Constance only said this to make her point: nothing would have made her believe, particularly in retrospect, that she and Daniel might ever have quarreled.

“What will Miranda do with herself while he’s gone?”

“I’ve been wondering about that. Perhaps she might get out her things and do a little painting again. If we were nearer to a town, she might have taken a little job.” All Miranda’s accomplishments seemed to be diminutive ones. “If she had been more conclusively religious—and I must say she is just the type for it—it would have been a splendid opportunity to make a Retreat.” She snipped a thread, and then added: “As though one ever makes anything else.”

 

Miranda was writing to her mother. She had just put “Russell is very excited about his trip” (since this was another person whose abundant sorrows left no room for Miranda’s), when the door opened. She looked up quickly, expecting her husband’s haggard face to give her words the lie, but it was not Russell who came into the room. “Oh, James,” she murmured, her elbow on the table, her pen in the air. He might have knocked, she thought.

“I thought you might like the paper.” He laid it on the bed and then sat down beside it. He crossed one foot over his knee and leaned forward, grasping his ankle.

She went on writing and, after a pause, said dismissingly: “Thank you.”

He continued to sit there on the edge of her bed. He saw Russell’s two suitcases, half-packed by Miranda, on the floor near the door; Russell’s jacket over a chair; Russell’s black leather slippers near his own feet. He looked about the room, repelled by all these implications of Russell’s presence, all these reminders that Russell was privileged to enter at any moment—without knocking and without incurring Miranda’s frown. It pained him to think that Russell and Miranda were so much together, so much alone; he was appalled by the idea that they made love.

He got up and wandered first to the windows, and then to the dressing table. This at least seemed to be entirely Miranda’s. He picked up a bottle or two, and set them down with an unpracticed hand. “Is this your scent? … How fascinating—all these little jars.” Miranda glanced up briefly but did not speak, and he sat down again on the bed. “Dearest Miranda,” he said. “I would do anything to comfort you.”

This time she did not look up. “Stop that,” she said. She signed her letter, and took out an envelope and addressed it.

“Anything,” he repeated.

“I don’t need comforting,” she told him. Unconsciously giving a more gentle echo to Russell’s savage denunciations, she said: “I have nothing to complain of. It’s Russell who needs to be comforted.”

“What’s the matter with him anyway?” James asked this in a tone of anticipatory disbelief, but Miranda looked up from. a fresh page to give him a serious answer.

“He is in despair,” she said. “Not the sort of despair that you or I might have, for a day or two, to be shifted by circumstances or surmounted by an effort of the will, but something that seems to him, I imagine, almost—like a discovery of the truth.”

“But why, Miranda? What could be wrong with him? He has a good life.” James, indeed, felt that Russell had cause for perpetual rejoicing.

“Young as you are,” Miranda began heartlessly, “you must already know that the ebb of meaning in life is unaccountable. I’m sure Russell is going to get over this. But I saw it approaching for a long time … No, I can’t tell you why. Some of it may be my fault.” Because this was unbearable to her, she had to add: “Though they say not.” She went back to her writing, and James allowed a decent interval before he reverted to what was for him the main topic.

“Do you know—you’re more yourself with me than with anyone else. I mean, in talking, that kind of thing.”

This was so irrefutably the case that after a moment she simply said “Yes.”

“Why is that?”

“It must be,” she said, “because you have nothing I want.”

“That’s cruel.”

She thought that yes, she was being cruel. But it was the truth. She wanted Russell’s love, Constance’s approval, and her relations with each were pervaded with constraint and supplication. James’s reactions were of practically no interest to her—or was it, she wondered, more complicated than that: that she knew he would, for the present at least, go on caring for her no matter what she said to him?

James continued: “I, on the other hand, am better with anyone else than with you.”

“Goodness, why?”

“I suppose I can’t think of anything good enough to say to you. Anything worthy of you. And then—you make me feel that I’m young.”

Heavens, she thought, studying the paper before her. He thinks I am a woman of the world. She gave an inward smile of astonishment. “I’m ten years older than you.” she said. “Ten important years.”

He said suddenly: “Miranda, I love you so … Now what’s the matter? Can’t I even say the word?”

“It seems rather like taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

“In vain? What do you think this is, then, if not love?”

“Oh—something to do with the spring,” she said lightly, “The regenerative process.”

He said sullenly: “I’m not thinking of the regenerative process.”

She smiled. “But it may be thinking of you.”

“But I do love you. You must feel something.”

“Why?” she asked coldly, addressing another envelope. “Why must I? I have been your age and in love—we all have. And had nothing from it.”

“Then—what happens?”

“What happens?” she looked up, again with large serious eyes. “Why … it just hurts and hurts until it wears out.” They stared at each other in dismay for a moment, and then she went on: “James, don’t you feel any loyalty to Russell?”

“You mean, in connection with you? He treats you so badly.”

“That isn’t for you to say. I meant—because he’s fond of you.”

“Well, it is all rather biblical, I must say.”

“It might be, if it were serious.”

“But it is serious. Miranda, it is.”

She leaned back a little in her chair. “James, don’t be absurd. What could you possibly hope for from me?”

“It’s what I wonder myself, of course—I see there isn’t anything … I suppose I hope that you would like me a little, and show it—would say something I could remember and be pleased about … And then—these are my wildest imaginings—I think we might go away together for a while.”

She kept calm. She said, with a faint smile: “Your mother would be displeased.” (And with reason for once, she added to herself.)

“We could go away separately, and meet.”

It would be frightful, she thought, imagining it all in the space of a second. Everyone in the hotels would see the difference in our ages. We would run into someone we know. I would have to pay—I would hate that. “That’s enough. Now leave me alone,” she said.

“Let me stay.”

“No.” She went on writing, annoyed at last.

“I shan’t bother you. I promise.”

Glancing at him, she saw that his face had altered and was full of pain. He unclasped his hand from his ankle and extended it a little toward her. “Let me stay,” he said again. “You don’t have to say anything to me. It’s simply to see you. To know what you’re doing. Be in the room with you.” He stared at her, his hand opened in that artless appeal.

She stopped writing and, still holding the pen, rested her brow on her hand and shielded her eyes in what he took to be a gesture of exasperation. It was, instead, that she felt suddenly touched. To make oneself completely vulnerable, to offer one’s love without reserve—even Miranda had long since lost that capacity, before she met and married Russell. You learned—it was all understood—that you must not forfeit any advantage, and that love itself was a subtle game of stoutly maintaining or judiciously yielding your position … She was all at once ashamed of this seedy knowledge, and envied his ability to declare himself. From behind her arduously constructed defenses, she felt she had now no way even to pay tribute to his generosity, his innocence; to love itself. She sat still, with her hand over her eyes.

 

“James? I think he must be studying,” Constance said.

Russell removed James’s book from the chair, dropped it on the grass, and sat down. He looked sideways at his mother, and then shifted his position so that he could see the garden. Constance went on sewing, apparently unaware of his restlessness. Finally he lay back in the chair and looked at the sky. After a moment, however, he turned his head again, and said abruptly: “Be kind to Miranda this summer.” He felt a little awkward, delegating to his mother the task he had been incapable of performing himself.

“Well of course,” replied Constance, too readily. “It’s why I suggested she come here. You know I’m devoted to her.”

You’re a hard, frivolous woman, Russell thought. “You’re very kind,” he said.

“Not at all. It was the least I could do.”

And therefore you did it, he observed. “Miranda’s unworldly,” he said. “She has no idea of looking after herself.”

If he’s worried about James, Constance thought with justifiable edginess, he should stay here himself; how could I possibly interfere in that? “Don’t you worry,” she told him. “We’ll take care of her.”

How can I leave Miranda to this, Russell wondered. He said: “I’ll write as soon as I get there.”

“Russell.” Constance laid down her sewing and looked at him. “Is there anything I can do for you? If you aren’t going to work for all these months, you may need some money.”

Oh Christ, Russell thought, she’s not going to take it into her head to behave well. His antagonism to his mother was too deeply rooted to allow her any act of disinterested kindness. He said aloofly: “Thank you, Mother. No.”

“If I can give you anything,” she went on, “you would only have to ask.”

But you would have to ask, Russell noted remorselessly. He would not meet Constance’s earnest look Of all her expressions, it was the one with which he was least familiar. He preferred to think of her more usual aspects—arch, superficial, peremptory: those moods of his mother’s which he now found all the more infuriating because he had, as a boy, so greatly admired them.

No less defeated than Miranda, Constance took up her sewing. “I hope you’ll get what you want from this trip.”

Russell, relenting, gave her a wry, intimate smile he could never have given Miranda. “The main thing seems to be to get away … since all the things I should face up to are here. I feel like a fugitive from justice.”

Constance was herself again. She sighed. “We are all that,” she said.

 

“Do you think you’ll be able to get out of here?” Russell asked, having parked the car, miraculously, in a short space outside the station. He turned off the engine.

Miranda nodded. Reversing the car and driving home belonged to afterwards, when she would be alone. She would not think of that. How disproportionate, she marveled, were the varied limits of human endurance: she, who got sick if she sat in the sun, or fainted if she had to stand too long in a crowd, would survive this devastating morning without any appreciable loss of physical control and would, in fact, conclude it with a twenty-mile drive. She began to gather up Russell’s papers from the floor of the car.

It will be better for her when I’m gone, Russell thought. He really meant, It will be better for me—because he could have no peace in the presence of Miranda’s pain. Once out of sight, her suffering would quickly become bearable to him. He pictured her driving home, putting the car away, going up to their—her—room, and closing the door. His imagination refused the next scene, where she lay down on the bed and wept.

Holding his books and magazines in her lap, she looked up at him and then away. He touched her white cheek with his hand. He said, with what was at that moment total irrelevance: “You’re so beautiful, Miranda.”

Without turning to him, she opened the door of the car and got out. He came round to the curb and unloaded his luggage from the back seat.

“Give me those,” he said. He took two books from her and stuffed them in the pockets of his raincoat, which he laid on top of the suitcases. Then he stood still, between the car and the steel mesh fence of the parking lot, looking at her.

“Better watch the time,” Miranda said. She had not lifted her eyes.

“I have plenty of time.” Now, as he put his arms around her, her anguish communicated itself to him at last. He could feel it pressing onto his breast as she leaned against him, weightless, submissive. For an instant he wondered, with genuine mystification, What have I done to her? Will she ever get over this? He released her a little, and passed his fingers over her eyes and mouth in a curious, sightless gesture. “Don’t come to the train,” he said.

“Let me.” She drew away from him. When he bent to pick up his luggage, she brought a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her eyes. They walked into the station side by side.

A train was coming in, at another platform, slowly obliterating the further wasteland of tracks, shunted locomotives, and spiritless grasses. As soon as it stopped, businessmen jumped off, holding newspapers and brief cases. Hands and handkerchiefs waved from windows and doors. Old people were helped down by the conductor, and young people sprang into each other’s arms. The entire train was emptied in a matter of moments. One or two couples greeted each other silently, with an abrupt kiss, and walked away, scarcely speaking, not holding hands.

How will it be when he returns, Miranda wondered, watching them from the other platform; how will we greet each other? Will we be silent too? And if we speak, what will we have to say?