Strings in Hollow Shells

‘It’s divine to be here again,’ Sandra said, tossing her pill-­box of a hat on to a table and burying her face in a bowl of roses. She seemed to be eating them with her greedy carmine lips. ‘I’m so tah’d, Mrs. Prideaux. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tah’d in my life. God knows why one lives in London, when there’s all this.’ She opened her arms to the view, as if she would gather it to her breast. ‘Oh, those hills!’ she said, ‘and the larch-­wood, and the pattern of the fields like a Paisley shawl.’

‘Have some tea,’ said Mrs. Prideaux, drily.

‘Nothing has changed,’ said Sandra, looking about her. She knew the room so well, the shiny white walls with a shinier satin stripe in the paper, the shiny chintz, the pewter and lustre jugs on the chimneypiece, the faded water-­colours—a pleasant, rather characterless country-­house drawing-­room, with a patterned carpet and fat armchairs.

‘To think,’ she said, stroking her delicate arched brows with a pink-­tipped finger, as if to smooth away some small twitching pain, a trick of hers, ‘how much water has flowed under bridges since I was last here!’

There was one person in the room who interpreted correctly the implications of her remark. He knew, the unobtrusive person in the background who had not yet been introduced, that what she had really said was—‘How I have lived and suffered, while you have been existing tranquilly in your backwater!’

Indeed, her next words were—‘What I love about Closters is that nothing ever seems to happen here. One feels so safe . . . like coming home to haven from the high seas.’

‘Except love and birth and death,’ said Mrs. Prideaux, crisply, ‘the usual adventures. After all, the house has been standing for two hundred years.’

‘But it has such an atmosphere of tranquillity. Good, peaceful people have lived here. No one has died at Closters of a broken heart, no one has been betrayed or forsaken. Oh, I know!’ said Sandra. ‘I am very sensitive to atmosphere. The very smell in the hall as one comes in—I don’t know what it is, but it’s been there ever since I was a child, like the Doré engraving and the red lacquer cabinet and your golf-­cape on a peg, a smell of new wool, like fresh fluffy blankets, and wood-­smoke and camphor—so comforting. When something appalling happens, one’s natural instinct is to turn to Closters.’

‘Appalling?’ said Mrs. Prideaux. ‘My dear, I hope not.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I seem to be a person things happen to.’ Sandra’s eyes were dark with her mysterious sorrow. ‘Not that I wear my heart on my sleeve, or anything like that. I’m pretty tough, really. Let’s not talk about me. I just adore being here.’

‘There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea after a journey, I always think,’ said another figure in the background, making her first effort to project herself into Miss Pellew’s consciousness. ‘I don’t suppose you know who I am.’

‘Oh, don’t you know Etta—my sister-­in-­law?’ said Mrs. Prideaux, surprised. ‘And my cousin Simon, Mr. Hart? I am so sorry. I always imagine that people have met before.’

Sandra’s eyes flickered over them, while her face wore its vacant look.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said, vaguely.

‘I’ve never known anyone forget Simon. People ask after him years later. And sometimes I hear that he is getting letters from people he has met here who have long ceased to write to me. And yet he is a dry sarcastic man—rather a brute,’ said Mrs. Prideaux, smiling tenderly at Mr. Hart, who sat looking at the toes of his shoes with an inscrutable expression.

‘Really?’ said Sandra, uninterested.

‘Men are two a penny to her,’ remarked Etta to her other self, catching at a loop with her crochet hook. She named a certain fashion paper to herself, referring not to Sandra’s clothes, which were modish enough, but to that expression of ennui and faint disdain which, even more than their exquisitely tailored suits, their pearls and sables, proclaims the sophistication of fashion models, and vaguely suggests, to such as Etta, unplumbable depths of worldly wisdom and experience.

‘Have you read anything nice lately, Sandra? You must give me a list of the new books,’ Mrs. Prideaux was saying.

‘Darling,’ said Sandra, ‘I don’t believe you ever read a word of anything I recommend.’

‘You sent me the stories of Tchekhov for Christmas. I liked them very much. I don’t know why, but they made me feel that I’d been listening to a very nice concert.’

‘I think that was an inspired thing to do,’ said Simon Hart, speaking for the first time. ‘I can see now that Tchekhov would suit Mrs. Prideaux admirably.’

Sandra’s eyes focussed on Mr. Hart. They took in a thin man with a brown bird-­like face and eyes like buttons of onyx. She was surprised that he had read Tchekhov. Dickens, she thought, and perhaps Gilbert White, would be more his cup of tea. He looked like a country solicitor or something of that sort and was most probably quite abysmally dull. As for Etta, she was one of those gaunt virgins with sad, top-­heavy hair that had once been beautiful and a large, empty face.

What colourless, uninteresting people Mrs. Prideaux gathered about her! But it was just as well. One didn’t want to be bothered with personal relationships. One wanted a rest from all that.

One had known such wonderful people, people so rich in temperament that they seemed to cast pools of amethyst and sapphire at one’s feet, like a rose-­window. One wore a golden cloak in their company and pinned orchids at one’s breast and walked on tip-­toe. But always something happened, some cruelty, some perfidy, and one’s heart was cracked in two.

‘But I would rather life broke my heart than passed me by,’ thought Sandra. She looked compassionately at the three other occupants of the room; at Mrs. Prideaux, particularly, who had so little self that her friends were her friends not for any affinities she felt between herself and them, but for quite other reasons—because she had known them since they were children, because their aunt had been at school with her, because she had been asked to befriend them, or merely because they were her neighbours. Their faults might exasperate her, their virtues win her approval, but neither eventually affected the quality of her friendship, in which they were safely enclosed for good, as in a soft aspic-­like substance, cool and impermeable. One was all of a piece to her—Sandra Pellew, an idea in her mind. Whatever she had conceived one to be in the beginning, that one remained for her. So safe, so soothing. But how pathetically unaware she was! ‘Poor sweet!’ thought Sandra. ‘You have been married and you have lost your Herbert, but have known neither exaltation nor agony. I would rather be poor tragic little me.’

‘Darling,’ she said aloud, ‘I’m going to play the gramophone all day in the garden and read poetry. You won’t have to bother about me at all. I am going to soak myself in the view.’

She was as good as her word.

Snatches of a Beethoven quartet would come floating intermittently to Simon reading at a respectful distance, to Etta going about in gardening gloves and a large straw hat such as French cows wear, to Mrs. Prideaux laying flowers in a shallow basket, passing from bed to bed with a pair of secateurs.

In a cool green dress and with corals in her ears, she would descend on them, with that look on her face as of returning from another world, and be silent and distraite, so that both Simon and Etta were made to feel themselves in the presence of a superior being. Only Mrs. Prideaux entertained the angel unawares. ‘I always think the very nicest thing one can have for tea is cucumber sandwiches,’ she would say.

‘Heavenly,’ said Sandra, absent-­mindedly helping herself to yet another. She ate a great many of them and somehow made the act poetical, reminding Simon of a roe or a young hart feeding among the lilies. But from his wooden face and expressionless eyes one would never have guessed what Simon was thinking.

‘I wonder, Sandra,’ said Mrs. Prideaux one day, ‘if you would be very kind and receive Lucas Silverthorn for me to-­morrow. His train arrives at five, and we,’ she took in the other two with a smile that somehow managed to convey to them the information that although this was the first they had heard of it, she had arranged for them to take part in some project she was about to disclose—‘we have to go to a bazaar at Wold. Etta is to help with the tea, Simon is in charge of the shooting-­gallery—Oh, but Simon, you must! I promised, and it’s too late now—and I am opening the bazaar. So, you see . . .’ She spread out her hands palms upwards with her serene and confident smile.

Lucas Silverthorn turned out to be a tall reedy youth with flaming hair and white eyelashes.

‘I’m afraid you’ve got rather a governessy little room,’ Sandra said, flinging open the door. ‘It’s reserved for the young. I used to have it myself till a few years ago. But now I’m nearly thirty.’

‘I don’t mind. I like governesses.’ Lucas looked about him. ‘I like it. It rings my bell,’ he said, sweeping his hand over the room and touching with antennæ-­like fingers a Spanish coffer of which Mrs. Prideaux had probably forgotten the existence. Many an object of virtu blushed unseen and unpolished in odd corners of Closters, Mrs. Prideaux setting little store by the taste of by-­gone Prideaux and reserving her affections for the pieces acquired through her own or her late husband’s percipience.

‘Books about governesses are enthralling, don’t you think? I am rather a governessy sort of person myself. I am demure and say nothing, but I have my thoughts. What by the way is your name?’

‘Sandra Pellew.’

‘How romantic! Nearly as romantic as mine. I do hope you are staying as long as I am. Paying visits is such a strain.’ He heaved a sigh and sat down on the bed.

‘Oh, I don’t know. When one’s at a loose end. . . . And the country, of course, is quite divine. Of course, I nearly go crackers sometimes with boredom. Mrs. Prideaux is divine. I adore her. But there’s no one here who talks the same language.’

‘Mrs. Prideaux and my mother sewed the same sampler and all that. I never expected her to talk my language. But I’m going to like you. I’ve never met a woman with a heart-­shaped face before. If one were a sculptor. . . .’ He began to weave his preternaturally long fingers about an imaginary bust.

Like a wolfish child which assimilates every detail of a strange face and takes it away into its private mind to gnaw, Lucas was given to dissecting the personalities of all on whom his pale gaze fell. He had his own peculiar labels for the pigeon-­holes into which he tossed the results of his investigations. The most mysterious of these pigeon-­holes was one inscribed ‘Byzantium’. It contained very few dossiers.

‘You won’t know what I mean, but Byzantine is the adjective I should choose to describe you.’

‘Why wouldn’t I know? I have read Yeats. He is my favourite poet.’

‘But this is too thrilling!’ cried Lucas, weaving his hands together. ‘I am going to adore you. I have always dreamed of an inconsequent but terribly sophisticated woman into whose hands one could put one’s naked heart. I like your lipstick and the French way you do your hair and the subtle scent I remark in the atmosphere.’ He sniffed voluptuously and turned up his eyes.

‘You absurd person! said Sandra, considering him dispassionately. ‘I think you are really an orchis . . . pretending to be a human being.’

‘Am I? I have always been afraid that I wasn’t quite a real person,’ said Lucas, sighing.

‘But people like you and me who care about beauty and have an inner life are the only real ones,’ said Sandra, kindly.

That evening she put on some records. ‘Ondine!’ said Lucas, clasping his hands. They smiled at each other like two people who share a secret. Simon Hart was playing chess by himself in a corner and seemed to be lost beyond recall in some realm of thought so remote as to be inaccessible to the rest of them, except perhaps to Mrs. Prideaux who was watching him; and Etta had abandoned her crochet for a piece of church embroidery. She knew about music, too, and intended to let them know that she had a perfect right to be included in their magic circle.

‘Who is the pianist?’ she asked in an interested voice, leaning forward with an intent look on her face.

‘Musicky,’ said Sandra, quickly, in the voice of one who gives information perfunctorily because she does not expect it to mean anything to the enquirer.

Musicky? it couldn’t be. She hadn’t bothered to articulate the name distinctly. But Lucas muttered ‘Musicky’, too, in the same sort of preoccupied voice. Nonplussed, she nodded her head wisely. It was fortunate that she didn’t commit herself in any way, for when she contrived to get a look at the record, she found that the name, after all, was Gieseking, which of course she knew quite well.

She was helping them to put away the records when Simon Hart said quietly from his corner—‘Etta, I should like to take you to Glyndebourne. You would enjoy it so very much.’

She gave him a pop-­eyed startled look. ‘I should love it above everything,’ she said.

‘Good. That’s settled then.’

Sandra looked across at him, too, and met his eyes. She had an odd, disconcerting feeling of having been weighed in a pair of invisible scales and found wanting. So he had not been completely lost in his game after all.

Only malice, it seemed, ever lit a spark in his eye, or jerked his features into his rather wicked smile. And Etta, of all people, was the one most likely to cause this sudden illumination of Simon’s face, which in repose might have been carved out of a redwood tree. But to-­night he was not smiling. ‘Don Quixote and his Dulcinea,’ thought Sandra, curling her lip.

She was saying to herself a week or two later that of course he adored Mrs. Prideaux. One had never thought of her as having charm or even a distinct personality until that morning when she was packing tulips to send to the hospital, and she said suddenly to Mr. Hart—‘I always think that flowers go to a sick-­bed like conspirators, to give one back one’s self-­respect. They seem to whisper that one’s soul, at least, is one’s own.’

He put his hand over hers. ‘Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir Of strings in hollow shells,’ he said, with a bright bird-­like look, like a robin breaking into a little stave of appreciation.

Bother! Where did that quotation come from? They had both spoken out of their parts, and hitherto Sandra had supposed poetry to be the prerogative, in that house, of herself and Lucas, who was by way of being a poet himself, and quite a good one. His private symbols were most intriguing.

Simon Hart was looking at Mrs. Prideaux as if she were a kind of Naiad. One saw suddenly that there was something very compelling about him, that his face was not after all wooden and that his eyes, which one had thought were like nothing so much as two little buttons of onyx, were in fact curiously soft and deep. What was he like? A dark, burnished ’cello over which a master-­hand had just drawn a bow. The table was heaped with tulips, long, cold, pointed buds, flame-­colour, pink and palest yellow. They rustled like watered silk under her shiny hands, and one could imagine from across the room their cool breath as not so much a fragrance in the nostrils as a very delicate sensation behind the breast bone. He was wearing, as it happened, a brown jacket with a grey shirt and yellow tie, and the light from the flowers seemed to be refracted in some mysterious way on his person, as if his clothes were enhancing the colour of the tulips and they lending his clothes a significance that a painter might have seized on.

Sandra had the oddest feeling of falling for a moment outside the whirligig of time into the timeless sphere that moves with ours like a shadow. The moment seemed unreal but to belong in some strange way to eternity, as if for ever and ever those two would stand in the sunlight and be to each other something too rare to put into words, too tenuous to be described in terms of ordinary human relationships. Never until this moment had she suspected the room of an ambience that could make it what it now seemed, a reflection of a room in a world outside time.

June slipped into July, and pink and white receded from the garden to give place to red and blue. One never got to know people any better at Closters. One had always thought that it was because they lived so much on the surface of things that there was nothing to know . . . but now Sandra had a feeling of being shut out. It was because of the way Simon Hart and Delia Prideaux sometimes exchanged glances as if each knew what the other was thinking. One had the impression that they were their real selves only when they were alone together. Not that there was love, in the ordinary sense of the word, between them. It was something much more subtle and enduring. Heaven knew what qualities he saw in her that years of familiarity had never disclosed to oneself. And one had always considered oneself such a perceptive person, so aware of spiritual values.

She would never get through to them, thought Sandra, without some kind of explosion. It was Lucas, that quaint but responsive youth, who caused the explosion. He had his part in the plot.

It wasn’t of Lucas that Sandra was thinking in the little copse on a slope above the garden, when suddenly like a candle carried down a cathedral aisle she saw his flaming head wavering in the gloom. She sat very still, hoping that the green of her dress would serve as protective colouring. But Lucas was looking for her, softly calling her name. There was something so lost and pathetic about him, his eyes searching this way and that, that at last she was constrained to answer him. With a look of intense relief, he advanced upon her.

‘Thank God!’ he said, sinking down on a mat of pine needles. ‘I had a most urgent desire for your company. Etta is all very well. She is a worthy woman and her face intrigues me. She has that archaic smile that the early sculptors couldn’t get rid of, and the pop-­eyes, too. She makes me want to pluck out the heart of the mystery hidden beneath all that tallow. Yes—it’s a face made by a primitive sculptor out of old candle-­ends.’

‘Mystery?’ murmured Sandra. ‘I don’t find her at all mysterious; or the least interesting,’ she added, stifling a yawn. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

‘Ah! But that’s where you’re wrong. You can’t get much out of Etta, I grant you—nothing but platitudes; but that’s because she had such unspeakable thoughts to conceal. I daresay, if she chose, she could make sophisticated people like you and me feel like the Babes in the Wood. I have been holding out my hands for her to wind wool on the whole blessed afternoon, dipping first this one and then that.’ He suited his actions to his words. ‘Drinking in her face all the time and thinking my thoughts. And then, as I say, I had a most urgent longing for your exquisite presence. I simply had to get away and find you. You see, I dreamt of you all last night. Sandra, I dreamt . . .’

‘My goodness—what?’ asked Sandra, faintly alarmed. He had come so close to her that she could almost feel his breath on her face. She sat up hurriedly and found herself looking into the two blue flames that were his eyes. His long pale eyelashes flickered above her cheek.

‘Sandra,’ he said, in a shrill, excited voice. ‘I kissed you in my dream, and I’m damn well going to make it come true.’ His fingers wound themselves about her face.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she managed to bring out, calmly. ‘Let me go, please. I don’t like it.’

But he held her in his long thin arms, and she had to submit to his moist young kisses and the thumping of his heart against her breast.

‘This is not only unpleasant, but ridiculous,’ she thought, struggling to free herself.

He let her go at last, and to her dismay flung himself down and burst into tears.

‘I am a beast, and you’ll hate me. But, oh! Sandra, you had no right to say I was an orchis pretending to be human.’

‘Don’t cry, Lucas . . . don’t, my dear. I had no right whatever to say such a thing, and I’m sorry. But you don’t care about me, you know. I am years older than . . .’

‘What does that matter? It’s part of your fascination for me, your sophistication, your experience. You know about life,’ said Lucas, sadly, clasping his hands about his knees.

‘Life,’ said Sandra, looking mysterious, ‘can break your heart.’ She smoothed her eyebrows and did something to her hair that made it fall back into its burnished sweep.

Lucas sat hunched up, watching her.

‘What it must be like to have the right to brush your hair!’ he said, wistfully, in his reedy voice.

‘Listen. The last thing I expected when I came into this wood was to take part in a love scene. I came here for peace and quiet, and to sort out my thoughts.’

‘Your thoughts? I bet,’ said Lucas, with a sudden flash in his pale eyes, ‘they were about Simon Stink. You mayn’t know it, but he’s beginning to have some sort of power over you.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked Sandra, with a look of apprehension.

‘Oh! I notice things, you know. At first he was no more to you than a chair or a table or the grandfather clock. You never listened to a thing he said. It was Etta who swooped on every word and hid it in her secret nest. She’s a regular old squirrel where he’s concerned. But lately there’s been a tenseness in the atmosphere. You come into a room and if he’s not in it, your face goes kind of slack. You sit with your ears pricked, listening for his footsteps on the stairs. And when he comes in, it’s as good as two glasses of sherry.’

‘Really, you are being absurd!’ said Sandra, vigorously brushing pine-­needles from her skirt.

‘It isn’t that I’m jealous of Hart. I don’t think you even like him. One doesn’t like people who don’t appreciate one. But he puzzles and intrigues you. You wonder all the time what’s behind that mask of his. I do myself. I feel quite nervous when he’s about. He might think me a kind of tiger-­lily, for all I know. I do hope not.’

‘How tired I am of this boy!’ thought Sandra. She made her escape.

Mrs. Prideaux was writing letters at her bureau. Simon, lost in the depths of an armchair, was deep in a book. He rose half-­heartedly when Sandra came in and sank back when she took up the morning paper.

‘In a way, it’s nice to be ignored,’ thought Sandra, ‘so calm and peaceful.’

Mrs. Prideaux lit a candle and sealed her letter. The acrid, pleasing smell of melting wax mingled with the flower scents. One can tell people’s age by their handwriting. Mrs. Prideaux wrote like one’s aunts. If she were writing to an intimate friend, she made great use of initials, and the word ‘nice’ occurred frequently.

And then the door opened, and Etta appeared on the threshold.

‘Tallow—but the wax is melting!’ thought Sandra. Etta’s face seemed to be disintegrating under the stress of some horrible emotion.

With a vague feeling of alarm, Sandra half-­rose from her chair. Simon was so withdrawn that he had not heard the door open, and for once Etta was unaware of his presence.

‘You needn’t go,’ said Etta, pointing a finger. ‘What I have to say, I shall say to your face. Delia, you’ve got to know. I saw her and that boy locked in each other’s arms . . . in the wood. A few minutes ago. I’ve never seen anything more abandoned, more disgusting. One has heard of women who seduce boys, but one didn’t think to meet one in your house. A mere child, the son of your greatest friend . . .’

Mrs. Prideaux had risen from her chair. She stood there, very cold and shaken, as if her favourite word had exploded like a bomb, wrecking the surface of things and exposing something very ugly underneath. Her hand went to her heart. Mrs. Prideaux’s heart was like a shell, a delicate, hollow heart that informed her whole being with a silvery lustre, so that the glaze on her skin and the coolness of her voice seemed to be manifestations of something nacreous in her innermost self. Her heart had been jarred in her breast. Her lips were blue, and a faint stain had appeared on her neck. When moved to anger, she never blushed as others do, but her blood made this fantastic map, as though in violet ink, on her throat.

‘Delia—it isn’t true!’ Sandra called out to her, imploringly. (Oh! what had they done to her little fastidious self in this horrible house.)

‘Faugh! I saw her with my own eyes. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. I was on my way to the Vicarage. I couldn’t go. I felt so sick, I had to come in.’

It was then that Simon rose from his chair. Etta’s jaw dropped.

‘You needn’t look at me like that, Simon . . . as if I was dirt.’

‘Poor little Lucas lost his head and kissed Miss Pellew. I don’t blame him,’ said Simon, with a glint in his eyes. ‘He is a man, after all . . . neither a boy nor a child. About Romeo’s age, I should say. But you wouldn’t know about the poetry of young love, I’m afraid. And you certainly know nothing of Miss Pellew. If I were to take you in my arms and kiss you, Etta, I hope you would not be sick—as perhaps I shall one day. Who knows?’ He advanced towards Etta with a diabolical grin, and she, with a strangled cry, fled precipitately from the room.

‘Sandra,’ said Mrs. Prideaux, faintly, ‘tell me the truth.’

‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ said Simon. ‘Miss Pellew scarcely believes in a corporeal existence at all. She is all sensibility. When she likes people, it is for some strange, poetical reason that has nothing to do with their reality, and that alarms them. I am afraid she is often let down, often hurt, poor little thing . . . always looking for something she can never find. She poses, Delia—even to herself—as a tragedy queen. But she is as innocent as the day, my dear. You needn’t turn her out of the house.’

‘What a brute you are!’ said Sandra, her chin trembling. ‘Don’t be angry with Lucas, Mrs. Prideaux. He’s rather sweet.’

‘He’s a very silly boy, and so affected. I think he’d better go home,’ said Mrs. Prideaux. ‘You have all surprised me this afternoon. It has been most disagreeable. As for you, Simon, I think you have behaved outrageously to Etta.’

‘I have virtually kissed her,’ remarked Simon, complacently. ‘If I were to die now, she would consider herself a kind of widow—my widow in God. It’s rather wonderful to lead a full life wholly in the realms of the imagination. You needn’t pity Etta.’

‘I must go and see about her,’ said Mrs. Prideaux, putting her hand to her head. ‘She is probably packing her trunk, feeling she can’t look you in the face.’

Simon opened the door for her.

‘I know you are going to have me on the mat later on. I am a brute, of course,’ he said.

He closed the door after her and leaned his back against it.

‘Yes, a brute, and a bit of a prig, too,’ said Sandra, ‘sitting in judgment on us all, as if you had the gift of omniscience. But I ought to be grateful to you, I suppose. At least you didn’t believe the worst of me. In your own peculiar way, you took my part.’

‘At a cost,’ said Simon, quietly. ‘I am not exactly proud of my behaviour to Etta, and I have cut a pretty poor figure in Delia’s eyes, not to mention yours.’

‘Mine? What does it matter about me? A rubbishy creature, a poseuse. Oh, you’ve made your opinion pretty plain. I shall have an inferiority complex for life.’

‘You flatter me. Who would have thought I had so much power!’ he said, sardonically.

‘Please, don’t. I can’t bear any more,’ said Sandra, twisting her handkerchief. Suddenly she was aware that he had crossed the room and was standing beside her.

‘And yet, you know,’ he said, in a different voice, very quietly, ‘I adored you the moment you came into my life, with your airs and graces, wearing your broken heart on your sleeve. Your pity and your disdain, I found them enchanting. I always shall.’

‘What are you saying?’ cried Sandra, her eyes wide and dark with amazement. ‘It isn’t possible. Oh, you queer person! I believe you are trying to be most terribly kind to me. But you needn’t . . . you needn’t. You know everything about me, so you must know I’m fathoms deep in love with you, though God knows why! But you don’t have to care for me.’

Simon’s face seemed to wrinkle up like a pool when the wind blows on it. ‘Don’t be humble with me, my darling. I cannot bear it,’ he said. He knelt down and put his arms about her.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Sandra, touching his lips and eyes curiously with her fingers, as one touches a remote and haunting thing brought suddenly within one’s reach.