NEITHER Edmund nor Anne mentioned their anniversary the next morning: Edmund because he had forgotten, and Anne because she thought Edmund liked to keep any celebration of it until the evening. This formula had persisted ever since their first year, when Anne had put a packet on the breakfast tray and wept when Edmund had not seemed – as indeed he had not – to notice it. He had then, with great presence of mind, said no, no, it was not that he had forgotten – how could he? – it was simply that he wanted the festivities to be when he came home from the office and could really enjoy them. In London, he had rushed to Harvey and Gore and bought an eighteenth-century paste necklace of peacock blue, and then, in Fortnum’s a bottle of Mitsouko and a jar of caviare. He had then told his secretary that she must always remind him of Anne’s birthday and this particular anniversary on the mornings of these dates. All subsequent secretaries had been faithful in this respect and Edmund preferred to buy presents under the pressure of time: it made him more generous and inspired. On her birthday, he took Anne out to dinner; on their anniversary she cooked him a feast. This morning, however, both were in any case preoccupied: Edmund wondering what on earth he could say to Clara if Anne and Arabella didn’t get on; Anne because she realized that she would have to dash into Henley for a third sole because, of course, Arabella was going to be there, stopping it being the kind of evening it usually was …

‘… let Mrs Gregory get her breakfast for her,’ Edmund was saying.

‘Oh – I don’t mind doing it.’

‘You’re a saint: you don’t mind anything.’

‘Anyway, Mrs Gregory doesn’t get here until ten.’

‘Well, she can wait till ten then, can’t she?’

‘Don’t worry about it, honestly.’

‘I’m not worrying; I just don’t want you to.’

‘Well then, I just won’t. Have a good day, darling. Thank Sir William for those loathsome flowers.’

‘You know, I rather like your hair when it hasn’t been set. You look like some Victorian waif – a Pip or an Oliver.’ He picked up a lock of it and let it fall back against her forehead. ‘I’ll tell him they are your favourite flowers.’

‘Don’t! He’s so kind, he’ll keep giving them to me.’

‘My dear, he doesn’t remember anything. He forgot about you yesterday. Kept on about me having a jolly good affair with somebody.’

‘Horrible old man!’

‘No, no, no. Dear old deaf creature. He simply thinks he’s the only person in the world who’s had a perfect marriage. He bent to kiss her. ‘Little does he know.’

He was gone: she was alone – except for Ariadne, who lay like a creature stuffed, so full that her eyes were glassy at the end of her bed. And, of course, except for Arabella.

Arabella woke to find herself alone in a strange bed. It did not take her long to remember where she was, only about a second’s fear; no bed was strange after the first night. She lay, perfectly still, trying partly to remember, partly not to remember what it had been like yesterday. Pretty awful: she thought of some other awful days in her life to see where it stood, and discovered that she was really only thinking of particular awful bits of days; sometimes just moments that had pounced on her, revelations, things she had half not been meant to know, but had found out, people who suddenly turned into somebody else, being stranded in places where she knew no one, starting to feel ill and having to disguise it, trying to find out what people, or any person, expected of her; thunderstorms when she was alone, being sent for to be talked to by Clara and so on: one didn’t remember whole days for long; only the landslides in them – the peak, or falling-off-the-peak, moments as it were. Among days she could remember, yesterday stood pretty high for awfulness. In her experience, awful times were usually followed by a dull calm: nothing very much happened, or if it did, one was simply blinded by some preceding dazzle of catastrophe and didn’t notice it. It was amazing, how you stretched and shrank to and from occasions, and how you seemed always to be handed just the right amount more than you could stand; in fact that, hating it, you could stand. She decided that she must spend the day being the perfect guest, and also finding out whether she wanted to be a guest of any kind. The less she wanted that, the easier it would be to be perfect. Instant perfect worked with a surprising number of people, and nearly everybody could be it: chronic perfect was being a saint, and they, like dragons or angels, were simply mythological kicks for the imagination. She was just deciding to get up and go to the loo, when there was a knock on her door. She pretended to be asleep, and after two more knocks, the door was opened and somebody came in with a tray: Anne, she saw, through nearly closed eyes. While Anne deposited the tray and drew the curtains, she went through the motions of waking up.

‘Here’s your breakfast: I hope you slept well.’

‘Marvellously.’ She sat up. ‘It’s awfully kind of you. When you said breakfast in bed, I never thought – ’

‘Of course you didn’t. But it’s quite all right. We have to start early because of Edmund getting to London.’ She had moved Arabella’s bedside table so that it swivelled over the bed. Sunlight filled the room, and also showed that it was covered with slightly unpacked luggage. Arabella saw Anne seeing this and said quickly, ‘I was so tired last night, I couldn’t even remember where my night things were. That’s why it’s such chaos.’

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and then said, ‘Actually – that’s barely true. I’m always chaotic, and so I’ve got awfully good at thinking of reasons why I’m like that. I must go along the passage. Please don’t go – won’t be a minute.’

So Anne waited while Arabella put on the sort of dressing-gown that fearfully fat opera singers wear for evening love scenes – a huge, apparently shapeless but trailing garment of sea-green wool – and disappeared for a long time. At least it seemed long to Anne, who felt a mixture of curiosity and discomfort at the girl being here at all. When she returned, Anne saw that the dressing-gown – or whatever it called itself – was, in fact, mysteriously attractive, or at least Arabella had got the secret of wearing it: with her single plait of hair and colourless face, she looked like some majestic, and at the same time touching, invalid. She threw the wrap aside and climbed carefully back into bed.

‘Edmund said you’d been ill.’

‘I don’t know why he said that. I haven’t been exactly ill. What a lovely breakfast.’

‘Perhaps it was just that Clara – your mother – said you needed a rest.’

‘She always says something like that. I need rests, and she needs new men.’ She drank some orange juice and began pouring out coffee. ‘And an egg!’ she exclaimed, with what seemed to Anne simulated gaiety. ‘Goodness! You are kind to me.’

‘You look as though you need feeding up a bit.’

‘Oh – I always look like that. Even after huge meals in French restaurants I look like an advertisement for Oxfam. So don’t worry. I’m the kind of person who doing good to doesn’t make the slightest difference, and doing bad to …’ Her voice trailed off. They looked at each other. ‘Makes the slightest difference,’ Arabella finished. There was a short, charged silence.

‘Eat your egg before it gets cold,’ Anne said gently. She felt as though she was dealing with some foreign child, and for someone who had never cared about or wanted children, this was strange.

Arabella ate her egg and indeed everything else that was edible upon the tray while Anne smoked and talked to her. Their conversation actually consisted of them asking each other questions; neither felt able to comment upon many of the replies; each felt a certain constraint, or shyness, with the other. Each had a genuine desire to know about the other’s life, but Arabella felt that hers had been too improper for Anne, and Anne felt that hers had been too dull for Arabella for either to enlighten the other very much Their day was therefore fraught with half-truths embedded in much goodwill.

‘Goodness, what a lot of marvellous clothes you have!’ Anne had exclaimed during the hour that it took her to help with the tremendous unpacking. ‘Did Clara – your mother – give them all to you?’

‘Well – some. She’s always buying new clothes because she’s always changing her size and she hates waste, so she makes Markham alter them for me. Markham’s her creepy maid. Whenever she has a new honeymoon, I come in for a lot of junk. Don’t wear it, though. But due to my Scottish blood, I suppose, I don’t throw it away, either. Except that dressing-gown. I do wear that. It’s Dior, and it wasn’t actually made for her – she just bought it off the top floor.’

‘The top floor?’

‘Where they sell off the actual models. Frightfully cheap; in a way.’

‘Don’t you have any clothes that were yours to start with?’

‘Some: not many – but some. Jeans and things. I usually buy a lot of one thing while I’m at it. Like that suitcase. It’s full of shirts that I bought in Rome. Haven’t worn most of them.’

There must have been dozens of them, Anne thought, as the case was carelessly opened to display the neat Cellophane envelopes each containing a different-coloured shirt – all made by Pucci, she noticed.

‘How beautiful!’ Anne was particularly fond of shirts: Edmund liked her in them, especially with men’s trousers that suited that part of her figure so well.

‘Have some!’

‘Oh, no!’

‘Please do. Please choose whatever you like. I haven’t worn them, honestly.’

‘It’s not that. I wouldn’t mind that in the least. They wouldn’t fit me. I’m – I’m much larger than you.’

‘Try one on. They’re quite loose on me.’

‘Well, I will, some time. That’s very sweet of you.’

‘No, now. Otherwise, we might forget. What’s your favourite colour?’ She was sitting on her heels in front of the open case, rummaging among the collection of packets. ‘Blue! I bet it’s blue.’ She held up a turquoise silk shirt, and before Anne could stop her, she had pulled it out and was undoing the buttons.

Anne was wearing a trouser suit, navy, with a sleeveless top and white shirt. She had taken off the sleeveless top and received the shirt that Arabella held out to her before she realized that undressing further in front of the girl was going to embarrass her – so much, that she could not possibly do it. This shocked her, and for a minute she could not think what to do to get out of the silly, entirely surprising, but impossible situation. Finally, she gabbled something about wanting to see what it looked like in her own glass and escaped to her bedroom.

What’s the matter with me? she thought, but really, she knew. Her breasts had always been too large for the rest of her: she had suffered agonies as a schoolgirl, and all her life she had worn heavily built brassières that were a little too tight. Since she had married Edmund, she had been able to afford to have them specially made for her, but nobody but Edmund – or the lady who made the bras – ever saw her in or out of them.

She shut the door, took off the white shirt and thrust her arms into the delectable turquoise silk, but, of course, the two edges did not begin to meet in front. She got out of it quickly: she could not have borne to do that in front of Arabella.

When she went back to return the shirt, Arabella was standing by the window. She was wearing a pair of white jeans and nothing else at all. She turned to face Anne with total unselfconsciousness.

‘No good?’

‘I’m afraid not. Thank you all the same.’ Oh God, she thought; she’s like I’ve always wanted to be. Small, and firm, and perfect.

‘Chuck it over, then. I might as well wear it.’

‘How old are you, Arabella?’

‘Twenty-two.’

Anne was thirty-nine, but she had never looked like that – not at any age.

Arabella was buttoning on the turquoise shirt. Then she pulled off the elastic band holding her plait and ran her fingers through her hair. In the sunlight, it was the colour of tobacco.

‘Did we unpack my brush?’

‘Yes. I put it on the dressing-table. What about the rest of your cases?’

‘Let’s leave them. Do one or two a day.’ Her head was tilted to one side as she vigorously brushed hair down on to one shoulder. ‘What would you be doing if I wasn’t here?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Well – I hoped I could help you to do it – whatever it was. I went to a finishing-off place where they even taught you to do housework. And wait at table. I’m a marvellous parlourmaid. I was awfully bad at the housework, though. Another girl used to do it for me. You don’t have any servants, do you?’

‘We have a very nice daily woman who cleans everything. But otherwise, no, we don’t.’

‘Oh goody. It’s much more peaceful – and free. What would you be doing?’

Anne explained about the anniversary – ten years of marriage – to be celebrated that evening.

‘Golly! Ten years! How marvellous! Wouldn’t you like me to go out, or something? I mean, I could go to the cinema and have a Wimpy or whatever they’re called. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a bit.’ She was rubbing cream from a tiny pot on to her face. ‘Or I could dress up and pretend to be the parlourmaid. No. That would be silly and ghastly. Forget it. I often have ideas with no discrimination about them. But I’ve never met anyone who’s been married for ten years and pleased about it. You should see Clara after eighteen months with anybody. Like a rogue elephant in velvet.’

‘She’s not fat, is she?’

‘No: but elephants aren’t fat. Just overpowering. Mammalian juggernauts. That’s like Clara.’

‘Do you – find her – difficult?’

‘Difficult? Yeah – that’s about what I find her.’

She was stuffing the clothes she had worn yesterday into the wastepaper-basket.

‘That’s not a dirty clothes basket!’ Anne said, wondering how on earth Arabella could think that it was.

‘It’s a trash basket, isn’t it? I don’t want these clothes, you see. Ever again.’

‘Oh.’

They went downstairs to the kitchen; Anne carrying the breakfast tray in spite of Arabella’s protests. The kitchen was a large country one: slate-floored, with an Aga and pine dresser that occupied one whole wall. It looked out on to the kitchen part of the garden. There were geraniums on the window sill, in front of which was a round pine table where Ariadne sat watching the flies that skittered and zoomed above her head.

‘Is that cat yours?’

‘Yes. Ariadne. She’s half Greek, and about to produce a huge family.’

Arabella sat on the edge of the table and stroked the cat’s head. Ariadne rose to her feet, arching her neck in acknowledgement, but her attention was still upon the flies: she knew that sooner or later one of them would make a mistake and fly too low; nothing could distract her from this eventuality.

‘What will you do with them all?’

‘Find homes for them,’ Anne answered more lightly than she felt. Ariadne’s procreative life was as regular as it was prolific, and all obvious oudets for her progeny were long used up. ‘Why? Do you know anybody who would like one?’

‘I hardly know anyone in England. I mean – know. I would love one all to myself.’ A picture of her living in a tiny, thatched cottage on the edge of some moor with a cat came to mind.

‘But you travel so much, you couldn’t really have an animal, could you?’

‘It might pin me down. There!’

A fly had come down, Ariadne had caught it with one, neat movement, and crunched it up almost before she had resumed sitting on the table.

‘Isn’t it bad for her?’

‘It doesn’t matter what it is for her. She just does as she likes.’

‘All the time?’

‘I think all the time.’

‘Goodness! I wish I was a cat. Even if it meant being demoted from the reincarnation point of view, I think I should prefer it.’

Anne was clearing up everybody’s breakfast. ‘Don’t you like – ’

‘Being me? No. Hardly ever. I simply haven’t got the hang of it at all. I just don’t know what – ’ She stopped and stared at the bare foot she was swinging against the table leg.

‘What? What don’t you know?’

‘What to do with myself, I suppose.’ Her hair hung down so that Anne could not see her face.

‘What are you going to do?’ she added almost at once. (To stop me asking anything more, Anne thought.)

‘Pick raspberries for dinner. Like to come?’

‘Oh yes! I haven’t done that since I was in Scotland when I was four.’

What an extraordinary thing to be able to say and remember, Anne thought.

They took a colander and a chip basket and went out of the back door to the kitchen garden. The fruit cage was at the end of it. It was already hot, and the air smelled of lavender and warm box from the miniature hedges each side of the cinder paths. Arabella was barefoot.

‘Don’t you mind no shoes?’

‘Not really. Anyway, we didn’t get to the case with the shoes in it. No – honestly, I like the feeling.’

When they reached the cage, there was the usual adventurous and panic-stricken bird inside, making short spluttering flights up to the chicken wire and down again, then bustling and clucking about the bushes and canes of fruit.

‘We’ll leave the door open for him, and he may have the sense to find it.’

‘Supposing he doesn’t, he’d still be all right, wouldn’t he, with so much to eat?’

‘He’d start fussing about his family.’

‘Do all birds have families?’

‘I think so; most of them. At this time of year, anyway.’

‘Lucky them.’

‘To have a family? Or just to have a family for part of the year?’

‘Oh – both, I should think. Where shall I start?’

‘Let’s do a row each. There won’t be an awful lot yet, as it’s rather early for them.’

‘You mean “Don’t eat any or there won’t be enough”?’

Anne, feeling rather caught out, laughed, and said, ‘Something like that.’

They picked in silence until Arabella said, ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’

‘No. I’m an only child.’

‘I’m one of them too. I hate it, don’t you?’

‘I’ve never really thought about it. My mother died when I was born, so I was brought up with an aunt and her child.’

‘What became of it, the other child? Do you see him or whoever it is?’

‘She was a girl, and the moment she was old enough, she emigrated to New Zealand. She’s married there, now.’

‘Still – you had someone to be a child with. That must have been fun.’

‘Well – in a way.’ Anne thought, as she had not done for some time, of the bleak and run-down rectory in Leicestershire where nothing had been fun, really, but one had always known, with dismal certainty, where one was. ‘It was the kind of house where one was always eating the stale bread to use it up and never having new. And the garden. You could see everything in it from everywhere – it wasn’t at all exciting: just safe. I don’t know whether that constitutes a happy childhood, do you?’

Arabella sat back on her heels and thought. ‘I simply don’t know.’

‘What about yours? Your childhood, I mean?’

There was a long pause. ‘I moved about so much, you see. I never had time to have any friends, or haunts – you know, like apple trees or favourite chairs for reading in – because we were always going to some other place.’

‘That must have been exciting.’

Arabella said flatly, ‘Yes; I suppose it was.’ She thought about some of it, trying to choose something about it that Anne would be shocked by but in an understanding way. ‘All those stepfathers. Sometimes they made passes, and sometimes they didn’t, but they never really liked me.’

Anne rose to this. ‘But that must have been when you were older.’

‘You’d be surprised. I was ten when that began. Well, anyway, I hadn’t even started the curse. The kind of men Clara goes in for are pretty decadent, if you ask me. Horrible casual old Humberts: they weren’t in the least obsessed, just experimenting.’

There was another pause, and then Anne said softly, ‘Poor Arabella. How awful for you.’

Somehow, that had been too easy: she wanted Anne to be too sorry for her to be able to say so. ‘It didn’t matter at all, in fact. I soon got the hang of things. I used to steal back money that Clara had given them. Even if they found out, they couldn’t say.’

‘I suppose you went to school?’

‘I went to – let me think’ (she didn’t need to, in the least – this was routine) ‘ – fourteen schools in different places. Not always different countries: sometimes I ran away, or got expelled. I speak three languages and I can’t spell in any of them.’

Whether this was meant to be a boast, or a derogation, there was something dull, or stock, about it; it sounded as though Arabella had often made it before. But then, Anne considered, if one kept moving about and meeting new people, one would be likely to go through the same hoops with them. She licked the juice off her fingers and got to her feet. ‘I’ve finished, and I should think we have enough.’

‘Let me see yours. Far more than I’ve got.’

‘I’ve just had more practice. I don’t suppose you were an expert when you were four.’

‘I ate most of them. Has the bird got out?’

‘Can’t hear him, so I think he must have. Remind me to find out how he got in.’

‘Do you do all the gardening?’ Arabella asked, as they walked back up the path.

‘A very old man called Leaf comes once a week. Otherwise I do.’

‘Is he really called that? Mr Leaf?’

‘Well, people who’ve known him for more than forty years call him Ken, but I’m not in that privileged position. He’s very good at fruit and vegetables, but otherwise he only likes dahlias and chrysanthemums the size of soup-plates. Size is what he goes in for.’

They had reached the kitchen. It was completely tidy and there was the sound of a Hoover from upstairs. Ariadne had gone.

Anne explained that she had to go to collect some fish (tact forbade her saying ‘a fish’); she would not be long, she said, implying that she did not wish Arabella to go with her, and Arabella, whose manners for all occasions of this kind were excellent, said she would love to go and look at the books and records in the sitting-room, if that was all right. Mrs Gregory, upstairs, was apprised of Arabella, and Anne set off for Henley with feelings of some relief. It was oddly tiring, being all the time with somebody whom you did not know at all. In a way, you were forced to find out too much about them too fast. But then, I am used to and happy about being alone, except for Edmund, she reflected.

Mrs Gregory left quite soon, and the moment that she had done so, Arabella rushed to explore the house properly. She started upstairs on the basis that Anne would not get back for at least another twenty minutes, and she could presumably be anywhere on the ground floor with impunity. But not in their bedroom. This was the place that she most wanted to see, and she found it easily – it being the opposite end of the small house to hers. The walls were covered with a Morris wall-paper of tiger lilies: the curtains were pale-green raw silk, the carpet looking like gros point of fleur de lys. They had an enormous bed, covered with a patchwork quilt, and very pretty, if sparse, furniture. There was a photograph of Anne, in trousers, on some sort of yacht, on what was clearly Edmund’s chest of drawers, and a picture of Edmund, looking incredibly inexperienced, sitting in a deckchair with a drink in his hand, on Anne’s dressing-table. The bathroom led off the bedroom, and this was a little den of luxury, Arabella quickly observed. Thick white carpet, sunken bath, shower, mahogany and gilt fittings, and a shelf of books by the loo. She looked: Diary Of A Nobody, The Specialist, Giles’s cartoons and a Penguin book of crosswords: the stock shelf for lavatories, she knew. There was a Venetian blind over the window, and a huge, old print of Oxfordshire hung on the wall over the bath. There were also some dull, cautiously green, plants on a shelf near the window. There was Guerlain soap and Weil oil and an electric toothbrush. On the back of the door hung white and blue peignoirs of rich towelling. There was a basket rocking-chair covered with the same Morris pattern of lilies as the paper in the bedroom. What did she expect to find? Because all of this was neither surprising nor unsurprising: it didn’t tell her anything, and she had told herself that her curiosity was not idle: she needed to know what they were like, these people she was going to live with. Back in the bedroom, she opened a few cupboards and drawers. Everything lay or hung in perfect order. Anne seemed to go in for conservative, rather mannish clothes, and Edmund just for Englishmen’s suits: dull and expensive and well cared for. No powder was spilt, no dirty clothes tucked away, each shoe was shining, the drawers were all lined with flowered paper or felt; everything was comfortable and all right. She thought about Anne. Small, boyish, except for her breasts, very short hair, little make-up, pleasant, not a sexy character at all. She thought about Edmund. He had the slightly haggard, unfinished appearance of somebody who ought to be twenty years younger than he was. Did they have a smashing time in bed together? Perhaps they had neither of them ever considered that there were lots of different kinds of people, and so, once committed, they had simply settled down with each other. Perhaps that was the way to make the best of anything. A kind of desert island outook – only first you choose the island: living in that sort of geographical emergency, you would have to make the best of it. She tried to imagine being on a desert island with Edmund … Then she heard the car, and ran quickly downstairs to the sitting-room.

While Anne drove to fetch the fish, she found herself thinking exclusively of Arabella. Poor child! The idea of her being molested by a series of spiderish old stepfathers filled Anne with protective revulsion. It was a wonder the child wasn’t a neurotic wreck: stuck in the amber of some interminable analysis. Clara must – apart from anything else that she was – be a really wicked woman, or at least a wicked mother, which, if you had a daughter, came to much the same thing. Arabella’s offer to go out on this particular evening was especially endearing: after all, she had hardly arrived, and had clearly spent most of her life feeling that she was not wanted. ‘Casual old Humbert’, she had said. Anne read a good many novels, and this allusion to Lolita had not escaped her. Obviously, Arabella must read novels too. It was something they had in common. She shall have a lovely time with as, anyway, Anne decided, almost reaching the flesh-on-her-bones colour-in-her-cheeks attitude. People could be helped, or changed.

She remembered what a tense, panic-stricken wreck she had been when she had first met Edmund. She had only been on her own for about three months, sharing a dark, beetle-infested flat in Earl’s Court with two other single working girls. The relief of getting away from Waldo, of his really not knowing where she was, and therefore unable to manifest at any old hour, drunk, aggressive, maudlin or often just plain frightening, had been so great at first that the very dullness/simplicity of life with two bachelor girls had seemed wonderful. But they were all short of money: the other two vied with each other for getting taken out in the evenings, and there seemed to be an unspoken rule that if this was happening (to them, not Anne at that time), whoever it was could borrow anything from the others, could have the only hot bath the flat grudgingly afforded its occupants every twenty-four hours, had the run – later on in the evening – of the only sitting-room (the others would have gone to bed or pretend to be out), and could expect breakfast made for her in the morning because she would have been so late the night before. After a few weeks of Diana and Mary taking turns with these privileges (and clearly despising her for not seeming able to compete), Anne had grown to dread coming back from her dull job as an assistant’s assistant on an eccentric magazine devoted to warning people of the dangers of chemicals in all fields of life, to either eating a chop with whichever envious flatmate had not got ‘something on’, or boiling an egg entirely alone and listening to the indifferent radio. Sometimes, she wrote letters to the Aunt in Leicestershire, saying how all right, or much better, she was without Waldo. The flat had really been a kind of displaced persons’ camp: that is to say that nobody intended staying there a moment longer than they could help, and meanwhile it had all the air of temporary marking-time squalor. Furniture that managed to be uncomfortable, rickety and hideous: people’s smalls always hanging in the dank bathroom or steaming readily in front of the only efficient gas fire – in the sitting-room. She used to live on novels from the public library, on the vicarious excitements of the evenings spent by the other two, and occasionally, on going to the local Odeon by herself.

She met Edmund because he had been brought back to the flat by somebody who had obviously not dared face it alone with Mary. Edmund had been very shy: had sat on the edge of a chair that all three girls knew was on the last of one of its precarious legs, twisting a glass of lukewarm beer in his hands and smiling when anybody looked at him. He had been at school with Mary’s dinner partner; but once this fact or explanation had been exposed, nobody had very much to say. It was clear to Anne that Mary had not wanted him to come back at all: had meant to have her Noel all to herself. This made her embark upon a highly coloured and completely untrue account of what mad times the three girls had in the flat together – the never-a-dull-moment, who-knew-what-would-happen-next stuff – with Diana loyally supporting her, Noel feeding the right questions, and Anne neutrally silent. She had not known either of these girls before: her joining them had been the result of an advertisement. Eventually, exhaustion, boredom and embarrassment had made her decide to smoke one of tomorrow’s cigarettes (the ration was ten a day). Instantly, Edmund began to get up to light it for her, and as he did so, the leg of the chair broke and he and it subsided ungracefully on the floor. This caused a disproportionate fuss of several kinds. Edmund apologized without stopping while Noel plied him with the kind of badinage only tolerated by people who have been forced to live together in an institution, Mary giggled uncontrollably, and Diana exclaimed incessantly how furious the landlord would be. Anne began telling Edmund that it wasn’t in the least his fault, discovered that her voice was trembling with the strain of disliking her flatmates, and finally fled to the bathroom just before she burst into tears.

That had been the beginning of several things. The start of her realizing how awful she felt about the break-up with Waldo – how hopeless, how guilty, how despairing. Plenty of people had had far more to bear than she and for far longer: she was weak, ungenerous, and incompatible. No wonder she had failed: had left someone badly in need of help because she was too selfish to care enough to help them. But it had also been the beginning of a relationship with Edmund. He had arrived two days later with another chair – far better than the one that had collapsed under him: had caught Anne in one of her blackest and uncontrollable moods of depression: had been kind enough to her to make her cry and had then spent weeks of evenings trying to make her feel better. In the face of her unhappiness, his shyness left him: able to comfort, he became unafraid in her company. Discovering that he always seemed to know what was best for her was the best thing that could happen to either of them: she admired and depended upon him: he relied upon her admiration until he was sure that he could only marry a girl of such discernment. The romance grew to this point and Edmund proposed in Boulestin’s restaurant after a performance at Covent Garden of Rosenkavalier. Anne’s divorce was on its way, Waldo having obligingly provided her with straightforward means, to this end, but it was not through, nor would it be for several more months. Anne, who by then longed for Edmund with a violence that both delighted and frightened her, began to propose in her turn that they should, sexually speaking at least, anticipate her freedom, but Edmund would not hear of it. Passionate embraces in cabs, outside front doors, even in cinemas were as far as he would go, and it was some difficult weeks later before Anne began to understand why. He was actually afraid. He had told her repeatedly that he had never loved anyone else, and she realized that if this was indeed so, then he had almost certainly never been to bed with anyone. This touched her in a completely new way; the dimension of a protective tenderness was added to her desire. It was then that she really fell in love with him, and by the time they married, understood how to seduce him without his knowing it. They had lived together now for ten years in a state of comfort and harmony that – judging largely from what she read about them – few people seemed to enjoy. If she could change from what she had been ten and a half years ago (and, after all, she had been through some pretty shocking experiences during her Waldo period), surely if she was loved and understood, if she really felt that they were concerned about her, Arabella could also be helped. She was much younger now than Anne had been when she met Edmund. They must unite in helping her. She drove back from the fishmonger’s with that slightly priggish feeling of euphoria that very general, benevolent decisions are inclined to produce.

‘… the one thing you can’t expect with nomadic peoples is a sense of responsibility about land. Land is simply something you rove over, and when you feel like it, depredate – sorry – a little bit sensitive there, are you?’

Edmund, stifled by rolls of cotton wool, a tube in his mouth that was loudly dehydrating him, and terrified that if he made any sound, the high-speed drill would zip through his tongue, at least, rolled his eyes in a confirming manner.

‘Let’s have a look and see how we are getting on.’

(For heaven’s sake, thought Edmund with hatred and terror, if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything.)

‘Quite a bit more to do, I’m afraid. You’ve let this cavity get rather out of hand, you know. I really think a little prick would be the thing,’ he added – for the third time that morning. When Edmund was able to speak, he had explained that novocaine ruined his taste buds and made his face feel like a huge, painfully mobile boulder. He did not wish to spend his anniversary with Anne in this manner. Now, however, worn down by time and fear and pain, he sullenly agreed. Mr Berkshire swabbed his gum with ether – witheringly cold – filled his syringe and stabbed Edmund with all the finesse and consideration of a professional torturer. Edmund felt as though the skin on his gum was being inflated beyond endurance, but this was quickly followed by a swelling silence, as though size was simply taking the place of pain.

‘… it’s just something that people who don’t know the Arabs cannot understand. The wandering Jew stuff is all nonsense. Jews only wandered when they were forced to. But you try and keep a Berber or a Kurd pinned down to one spot, and you get trouble at once. How are we getting on?’ He massaged Edmund’s gum with a white, muscular finger. ‘I think we’re just about ready.’ He unhooked his drill and Edmund watched his foot ready to press on the lever to set it going. ‘You know what my solution to the whole Middle East problem would be?’ Just as Edmund decided that it would be unwise to shake his head, Mr Berkshire began high-speed drilling again. ‘I’d give the Israelis the whole of North Africa, and let them get on with it. It would be the end of the desert in half a dozen generations. The Arabs wouldn’t like it, but they never know when they are well off. That’s what I’d do: rinse would you, please.’

Edmund sluiced water round what felt like the inside of a football, and spat feebly into the bowl with its miniature whirlpool – or rather let the water come out; his muscles for spitting had vanished.

‘I don’t know what you think, but to me, it’s a perfectly sound and logical solution.’ He stood poised with the drill again, while Edmund feverishly agreed. He always found himself in this situation with Mr Berkshire, whose interests were wide and whose opinions were many. Mr Berkshire had fixed his life, he thought with vicious weakness, so that nobody could disagree with him – about anything.

‘Just a little more. I think this will be the end of it. Not feeling anything, are you?’

Edmund indicated, God knew how, that he wasn’t.

‘I once crossed the Sahara in an old Ford that belonged to my wife’s mother. That’s a wide open space for you. It made a very nice change. Bit of an eye-opener, too. The wife didn’t care for it – just a little wider, please – but there’s nothing like getting first-hand information. The world’s made up these days of vicarious experience – and we all know what that leads to. Rinse, please.’

‘Don’t we?’ he continued, stuffing new rolls of cotton wool into Edmund’s football mouth. Edmund’s eyes, on these occasions, became, he felt, about as hammily expressive as a star in an early silent film. Mr Berkshire began mixing something tiny on a glass plate. ‘Everybody thinks they know what life is like for everyone else these days, and if you ask me, they have less idea than they ever had. Public communications are nothing but a snare and deception.’ He blew some hot, or cold, air into Edmund’s empty cave. ‘It’s all a question of scale,’ he continued; he really enjoyed talking, and at home his wife interrupted him. ‘One gets into a rut,’ He was ramming cement home into the wide open space he had created for the purpose: ‘Whenever I feel like that, I go off and do something I’ve never done before: it makes a diversion: stops one asking what on earth one is doing with one’s life. Just stay as you are.’ He was using the miniature battering ram to drive the cement home: this felt to Edmund like dwarf, distant thunderbolts. In front of him was a picture of two poodles wearing pink and blue ribbons and unbearably anthropomorphic expressions. ‘Boy meets Girl’, the picture was tided. He wondered whether Mr Berkshire’s house was full of such things. Mr Berkshire was washing his white, clever hands, and drying them on a lilac towel. ‘That’s fixed you up for a bit, I think,’ he said.

‘Wha you doagh this ear?’ Edmund heard himself trying to say.

Mr Berkshire laughed genially. ‘Just popping over to Corsica for a couple of weeks. It’s the wife’s turn, you see. We take turns. Next year, I’m taking her to the Cape Verde Islands. If you don’t like it, you can lump it, I’ve said – because between you and me there would be a lot to be said for married couples having separate holidays. We all need a real change from time to time.’ He began removing the cotton wool and dehydrating tube from Edmund’s mouth. ‘We’ve had fifteen years of an exceptionally happy marriage, but you’ve only got one life, haven’t you? Rinse now, if you would. It isn’t, of course, that one wants another woman, but one doesn’t like to feel that one can’t have onf. If the occasion arose, that is. Well,’ he finished sincerely and kindly, ‘I hope I shan’t have to see you for many a long day.’

Edmund tried to smile with the rubber earthquake that was presumably his face.

‘Thang you,’ he said.

Later, in Bond Street, wandering, waiting for inspiration about Anne’s present to strike him, Edmund wondered fleetingly what it would be like to be buying a present for a woman he hardly knew. Much more difficult in some ways: he probably wouldn’t know her taste or even her size (he was here seized by a spasm of what he refused to admit was excitement), but then again, much easier in others: if she hardly knew him she would probably like any present, or at least couldn’t say that she didn’t. Eventually, after looking at several pieces of jewellery which he either didn’t like or couldn’t afford, he settled for a shop that sold expensive and pretty sports wear. Here again, he seemed unlucky – the suede waistcoat was two sizes too small, the sweaters much too thick for the time of year, and a royal blue silk shirt again too small. In the end he found something that would fit Anne and thought would do, but he didn’t feel the usual glow of triumphant kindness that he associated with these occasions.

Anne and Arabella lunched off salami and salad in the garden. They sat, or rather lay upon the lawn close to the herbaceous border that Anne worked so hard to make. Bees and butterflies were busy or happy according to their natures; the sky was that heavy, pale blue that goes with hot and humid days in England, and there were the merest breaths of wind. Arabella had tied back her hair; her white jeans were stained with raspberry juice. When they had finished the meal, she produced two Mars Bars from nowhere in particular and offered one to Anne.

‘I can’t. I have to think of my shape.’

‘Poor you.’ In the end Arabella ate them both, and then lay on her front and said, ‘Would you mind if I took off my shirt?’

‘Of course not,’ Anne said immediately and dishonestly. (But why should she mind? What difference did it make?)

As Arabella lay there, Anne, looking, realized how extraordinarily beautiful a young, bony back could be. The colour, the texture and the curves, the delineation of bone and muscle suddenly made her wish that she was able to sculpt or in some way fashion this position, age, and quantity of shape that was alive, and changing, and there.

‘I know this is an awkward question.’

‘What?’

‘Do you, by any chance, have some of those god-damn-awful sanitary towels?’

‘I don’t, I’m afraid. I’ve got Tampax.’

‘I don’t think I can cope with them yet. I had an abortion yesterday. I’m still bleeding like a pig.’

‘Arabella! Oh! Poor girl! Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’ She had made an instinctive move towards the prone figure, and when she touched her, Arabella sat up. ‘Sorry – I didn’t think. Also, honestly, I didn’t know you well enough to ask you when you went out this morning. Also – I didn’t think I’d need them. Perhaps that bloody man was a charlatan. Could I borrow your car and get some?’

She was sitting, three-quarters facing Anne. Her nipples really were like the raspberries.

‘I’ll get them for you. You have a rest, and I’ll get them.’

And that was how they both spent their afternoons. Arabella slept on the lawn, while Anne, having cleared up the lunch, went back to the chemist in Henley to buy what was needed. She was full of anonymous indignation and the warm and faintly exciting sensation of being needed by someone other than Edmund.

When Anne got back, there was no sign of Arabella on the lawn. She hurried into the house and called, but there was no answer. Unaccountable anxiety (she might simply be asleep on her bed, after all) made her run upstairs to Arabella’s room. The door was open and there were a whole lot of new clothes all over the floor, but still no sign of Arabella. She called again, and then, from the window at the end of the passage, saw her in the vegetable garden. She was walking slowly about, examining things and occasionally picking them. She was wearing her shirt again, which was just as well, in case old Leaf took it into his head to come and water something – a useful whim that seized him on hot evenings. She opened the sash window and called, and Arabella turned at once to the window.

‘I’ve done a surprise for you.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll come in and show you. Don’t go into the sitting-room until I come.

‘I do hope you’ll like it – them actually. You see, I’m not much good at cooking, so I thought at least I could do these for you.’

She opened the sitting-room door and preceded Anne into the room, turning so that she could watch her face. ‘Do you like them?’

‘They’ were two flower – or rather vegetable and plant – arrangements. One was almost entirely of runner-bean flowers, the scarlet and white set off by pieces of ilex. This had been arranged in Anne’s only piece of Dresden – a china basket embossed with clove carnations. The other arrangement had been made in Edmund’s much-prized and extremely valuable Sung jar. This consisted of artichokes and sprays of Albertine roses and some white phlox that Anne had been meaning to keep for seed. The jar, which Anne knew leaked slightly, was on Edmund’s inlaid chess table. Then she noticed Arabella watching to see whether she was – not just pleased – but amazed and delighted.

‘They’re lovely. Tremendously unusual,’ she added, feeling inadequate.

‘I thought you’d like them. After all, you oughtn’t to do flowers for your own anniversary.’ She looked so anxious to have pleased, and so pleased at having tried, that Anne felt awful to have to start worrying about a mat for the jar and the risk of Mrs Gregory next morning. Mrs Gregory, as Edmund had remarked, broke only the best.

‘They’re marvellous, and it was kind and sweet of you to take the trouble. Now. Supposing you have a rest and a bath while I get dinner under way and then we’ll both be ready for drinks when Edmund gets back?’

‘All right. You do like them, don’t you? You don’t regard the whole thing as a presumption? I so love doing it, and usually they’re just awful shop flowers that you can’t.’

‘Yes, I do.’ More reassurances, and Arabella went upstairs. Anne fetched a deep soup-plate for the Sung jar and dried the table that fortunately had only begun to be damp. My artichokes, she thought: six of them! Goodness knows how many runner-beans had been left. But why should it matter? Poor Arabella, not feeling well at all, had tried to be helpfully surprising. Nobody could resent that. She was not much more than a child. I’m nearly old enough to have been her mother, she thought, rubbing away at the chequered satin and ebony woods. But not quite. Heavens – that would make her feel old.

Edmund had had a really fearful day. The heat in London had been the worst sticky, breathless kind, where any gust of air reeked of diesel fumes or hot people. His face had gone on seeming to be a large, different, alien part of himself: he had not wanted lunch: Sir William had sent for him with some crackpot suggestion of going to Greece – to Greece of all places – to look at villas for rich, nomadic clients, a proposition that Edmund had said he would consider, meaning that he would allow time to elapse before turning it down. He had also found himself obliged to look at a huge and horrible house near Ladbroke Square (Mr Hacking, who usually did this kind of thing, being on holiday) which was inhabited by an old, mad, midget-sized widow who was so demented by loneliness that it took him the best part of two hours to see the property while she pattered and chattered after him. All the windows in the seven-storeyed house were tightly closed so that everything smelled of dust and sweat and old clothes. The widow insisted on making him a cup of tea that he had neither the heart nor the spirit to refuse, but with which, due to the partial paralysis of his mouth, he scalded his tongue. There were also some rock cakes – most rightly named – they reminded him of tiny, flyblown crags: these he managed to reject. By the time he escaped, he had just decided to take a taxi to Paddington and blow the expense, when he remembered that he had left Anne’s present in the office, and if he wasn’t very careful, it would get locked up there. This meant abandoning the taxi and queuing for a call-box and getting Miss Hathaway to wait for him. He finally caught his train and had one, irritable, wish that that girl was not going to be there interrupting his quiet, soothing anniversary, before he settled down to his paper. At least he wasn’t going to have to struggle with hundreds of pieces of purple luggage.

While Anne cooked the dinner, Arabella did some more unpacking. She felt that both Edmund and Anne should have presents, and this meant a pretty thorough search through everything that hadn’t been unpacked in order to find suitable objects. Then she decided that she ought to appear in a festive manner, and this, too, took some time. She was feeling distinctly better and the challenge of being a success with two people whom she hardly knew always made her try – about her appearance and her behaviour. By the time she had dressed and gone down to the sitting-room, Edmund and Anne were already there. Anne was wearing a blue silk dress and Edmund was opening some champagne. Arabella wore a trouser suit made of brown pleated chiffon: her hair hung silkily about her shoulders, and in a thin, wandering fringe on her forehead, and she had put on some heavy, dark brown eyelashes that matched her brown velvet slippers. She carried two very badly packed boxes and reeked of a peppery scent. She did not exactly make an entrance: rather threw open the door as though she had not expected anyone to be there, and then, finding that they were, became shy – almost coltish.

‘I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ is what she said.

‘You’re just in time for some champagne,’ Edmund said.

Anne said, ‘What a marvellous dress, or outfit, or whatever you call it.’

‘Mummy gave it to me for my birthday: I haven’t worn it before.’

Edmund had got the cork out of the bottle and poured the first fizzy bit into the glass that Anne held out to him. All three glasses were filled, and then, holding hers near her mouth, Arabella said, ‘Well – jolly good luck, or whatever.’ She drank and then added, ‘Not that you seem to need it.’

‘Why don’t we?’

She turned to Anne. ‘Well – everything seems so marvellous, and usually people drink toasts when they expect everything to be awful.

‘These are for you,’ she added, and presented them each with a box. Everybody became, in different ways, embarrassed. Edmund did not want her to give him a present at all; Anne was terrified that she wouldn’t like whatever it was and find herself unable to lie about it, and Arabella was seriously concerned that she might have chosen the wrong things.

And so she had, in a way. Edmund’s present was a snuffbox, enamelled in green and set with crystal and rubies. Anne’s was a caftan of peacock silk heavily embroidered in silver.

‘My God – this looks like Fabergé!’

‘It is, actually. One of my stepfathers came by it and then I came by him and subsequently it. So it isn’t at all kind of me.’ She watched Anne now, who had opened her box and was pulling back the tissue paper.

‘This is beautiful.’

‘You ought to put it on now,’ Edmund said, thereby destroying Anne’s picture of herself, and also making it impossible for her not to change.

‘I will.’ Anne disappeared with the caftan obediently.

Edmund offered Arabella a Gauloise which she accepted as he said, ‘You’ve rather taken the wind out of my sails, at least. I haven’t given Anne her present yet, but it certainly doesn’t match up to yours.’

‘Oh dear. Oh well. I’m not nicer, or anything, I just have more. You know how it is. Damn: it’s gone out, I’m hopeless with Gauloises: could you light it, please?’

Because she smelled so delicious, he tried to ignore that: this made him notice that she had a long, curving mouth, and Italian forehead and those very simple arched eyebrows that made him think of some painting he knew well. He could not remember what colour the eyes had been or were, but he could not, come to that, determine the colour of Arabella’s.

‘Thank you for my box. It really is a beauty: you shouldn’t have given it to me.’

‘You can’t say that to people! You can say that you don’t like something, but you can’t say that people shouldn’t give you – anything!’

There was a silence while she gulped the rest of her champagne before saying, ‘Giving people things is nothing. It’s usually some kind of indirect bribe. Have this, and don’t be a nuisance for a bit.’

‘Is that why you gave me this box?’

‘No.’ She was blushing, he noticed, and wouldn’t look at him. ‘I just felt like it. But of course I hoped you’d like me more if I gave it to you than if I didn’t. Or are you chock full of moral rectitude?’

‘Of course not.’ Like most people, Edmund liked to feel that his moral rectitude was a decently chronic, but unflamboyant, affair.

‘Oh good. I haven’t got any. I should think I’m probably the most unmoral person you’ve ever met.’

‘I very much doubt it.’ Gallantry, and slight resentment at his supposed inexperience combined here, but before he was able to enlarge upon either, Anne could be heard coming uncertainly down the stairs. I suppose she talks so much, poor girl, because she hasn’t had enough people to talk to, Edmund thought, his mind still confusedly upon Arabella.

‘It’s a little too long for me,’ Anne said, and indeed it was. She could not walk without holding it up, and this did not suit the dress. It was also too shapeless for so small a woman, making her look as though underneath it all, she was probably pregnant. But Edmund admired her in it, and poured them all more champagne: Arabella glowed with successful generosity, and both Anne and Edmund worried and wondered about their private presents to each other. These were, as they had always been, duly presented before dinner. Anne had a pair of eighteenth-century cufflinks of purple foiled paste for Edmund. Edmund’s present was a very thin, chiffon shirt embroidered with cornflowers and tying round the waist. Arabella exaggerated her admiration for both presents, which embarrassed Anne, who realized this, and charmed Edmund, who did not. When the champagne was finished, they went in to dinner.

The dining-room was small and rich and dark, and Anne had lit candles round which tiny moths were hopelessly riveted. On the round rosewood table lay three plates of hors d’oeuvre: tomato, anchovy, some kind of egg, and two or three huge prawns. A bowl of creamy roses lay in the centre: these were Anne’s – she had explained about Arabella’s touching extravaganzas and begged Edmund not to mind about his Sung jar.

As they sat down, Arabella looked expectantly from one to the other. They saw this, and Edmund said, ‘Well? Do you want me to pass you the salt, or are you wondering what you are going to drink with this?’

‘I was wondering what you were – what we were – going to talk about. I mean, it’s not like a restaurant, where either someone is trying to seduce you or get you to buy something silly, and isn’t like dinner with Mummy and whoever it might be, because she often plays Scrabble through meals, and I get heavy looks from the current stepfather and I sulk. So I just wondered.’

Anne, who, by now, thought she understood that Arabella must be used to so many and such varied parties where people talked all the time, said kindly, ‘What would you like to talk about?’

‘Well – the state of the world?’

‘Very bad for the digestion,’ Edmund said promptly.

‘The arts: religion: social progress. What happened to you today. Then,’ she added.

Anne said, ‘I can’t talk about the arts. I love reading, but I don’t know enough about all the arts to talk about them. I don’t believe in God. You know what happened to me today. That pretty well rules me out.’

Edmund said, ‘I went to the dentist. But not unnaturally, he did all the talking. I was cowed and gagged into agreeing with every single thing he said.’ Then he turned to Anne and said, ‘Are you sure you don’t believe in God? I don’t mean any particular established Church, but just God?’

‘I’m not sure, I suppose. I don’t think I like thinking about it for long enough to come to an opinion.’

Arabella seized on this. ‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? God has got pre-empted by so many awful people who make a society out of Him that you haven’t a hope of finding anything out for yourself. But I bet there’s a God, all right. And I think He’s pretty malevolent if you ask me. Nobody agreed with Him enough, and that always makes organizers angry. They’d rather you didn’t know and cared, than didn’t care and knew. What about politics? Are they a topic?’

Edmund said, ‘Anne and I agree about that. We’re both Tory to the bone.’

‘But doesn’t that mean that you talk about it more, rather than less? I mean if you disagreed, I can see you’d have one whacking argument, but if you agree, don’t you keep on worrying about details? Details in politics are enormous.’

She picked her prawns to pieces with delicate, sharp fingers and sucked the heads and tails with animal enjoyment.

Anne said again, ‘What would you like to talk about, Arabella?’

‘Well, if I’m not very careful about it – and I hardly ever am – I end up talking about myself. Often simply to myself, but that doesn’t make it any more interesting.’

Anne said to Edmund, ‘But you often do talk about the state of the world. When you’re very tired and have had an awful day.’

Before Edmund could reply, Arabella remarked cheerfully, ‘But then, there’s other things; like malnutrition and sex and what people smell like and whether it matters whether you’re brave or not.’

Edmund fetched a bottle from the sideboard, and began pouring wine. ‘I talked about the train strike rather a lot, because it was such a damn nuisance to me. Perhaps that comes under the heading of talking about myself?’

‘Well, darling, it was natural: it was awful for you.’

‘You probably talked about it a good deal to yourself as well, I expect. Golly – what super wine. Sancerre. One of my best wines.’

‘You mean Edmund thought about it to himself.’

‘No; talked. That’s what people do nearly all the time. They call it thinking. In my opinion, hardly anyone thinks at all. I expect financiers and novelists and scientists and that crowd think a bit in their baths, but ten to one, when they do get any idea about anything, they haven’t the slightest notion where it came from.’

‘You think most of the inventions and ideas in the world have been accidents?’

Anne was collecting plates. Everything else, being cold, was in the room.

‘Not accidents, exactly. More like dandelions. There’s such a terrific amount of seed that some of it’s got to get rooted. Like sperm and children.’

This last observation unhinged both Anne and Edmund: Anne because of Arabella’s earlier confidence that day, and Edmund because he spasmodically, and uncomfortably, wondered whether Anne didn’t have any children because she knew he didn’t want them.

Anne laid on the table a silver lustre dish of cold sole covered with a sauce that she had almost invented, of sour cream, chopped walnuts and horseradish. There was a large salad in an olive-wood bowl that Edmund began dressing. Arabella finished the wine in her glass and said, ‘What I really meant, was please do talk about whatever you would talk about if only I wasn’t here. I just meant that I don’t want to change, or spoil anything.’

Anne put another dish of beautifully made new-potato salad beside the fish. Edmund passed the bottle to Arabella. ‘Help yourself.’

As Edmund watched Anne helping the fish, he said, almost belligerently, ‘Of course you can talk about the arts, Anne darling; you love pictures and music and far more poetry than I do.’

‘Loving or liking isn’t knowing.’

‘But God’s trewth, hardly anyone knows what they are talking about, do they?’

Anne passed a plate to Arabella, and said, almost maternally, ‘I suppose knowing is a relative business. I live on such an island, that I don’t feel I know anything outside it any more. Not that I mind,’ she added, seeing Edmund’s face, and at the same time choosing the best piece of fish for him. ‘I couldn’t wish for anything more: you know that.’

‘What a marvellous dinner.’ Arabella had helped herself to the salads and begun upon her fish. She had decided to coast a bit, and also discovered that she was ravenously hungry.

Edmund met Anne’s eyes and raised his glass. They drank to each other silently while Arabella’s silky hair was bent over her plate.

‘The thing is that of course you’re not spoiling anything, but you can’t expect not to change it.’

Arabella looked at her. ‘I suppose not. But this is family life, isn’t it? I’m totally inexperienced about that. I had a kind of nursery life until I went to schools, but after that – ’

‘After that?’

She gave Edmund a look that was not really describable – or that, anyway, he would not have attempted to describe. ‘Oh – after that. Nothing. You know. Moving around. Night-clubs. Restaurants. Hotels. Rented villas. Millions of schools, of course. Nowhere you could take for granted. All places where people had to take you for granted, if you know what I mean. Or not, as the case might be. Often not, in fact. I should think I’ve been a howling failure most of the time, but you bet, I made sure of it being howling while I was about it. “Could not do worse if she tried”, is what I aimed at in school reports, but nobody had the wit for that kind of nutshell.’

Edmund, who found his curiosity about her proliferating, said, ‘What would you like to do?’

‘Have some more fish.’ She passed her plate. ‘Oh – find some cause, I suppose. It is so awful finding that nearly everything that people say are the best things in life aren’t. I don’t care a damn what they cost, I mind what they turn out to be.’

‘What sort of things?’ Anne handed back her plate.

‘Oh – drink, and freedom, and things being beautiful, and sex. A total frost, if you ask me. But I suspect that that is because I’ve been so damnably brought up. I’m frigid I think, and they tell me. And I don’t know what to try for. It’s like any serious experience: hardly anyone can describe them: they simply bore you by going on about whatever it is being unique. I wouldn’t mind if all my best things were everybody else’s, as long as they really were mine too. The opposite of Mummy, in fact. She can’t bear having a dress that anyone else has got. Well, I wouldn’t care a damn if a million people were wearing it, so long as I liked wearing it. But somehow, nothing works out that way. I don’t like whatever it is, and people keep saying that it’s an exception to some bloody rule. What would you do about that?’

Edmund, rather dazed, said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Could I have some more of that delicious potato salad, do you think?’

A moment later, her mouth full, but without, mysteriously, seeming to be so, she said, ‘Of course, food’s a very good thing in life, but I suppose when one gets to be thirty – or old, anyway – you can’t eat what you like because of fatness or middle-age spread. My mother fights the battles of her bulges from morning till night. You quite quickly reach a conflict between vanity and greed, don’t you? Which would you go for?’ She had turned to Anne.

‘Greed, I think. I don’t think I have enough to be vain about.’

Edmund looked prim, which meant, Anne knew, that he was displeased.

‘You have me. I don’t want you to get greedy and shapeless. I like a little vanity in women.’

Arabella turned to Anne. ‘You see? It is a man’s world. He really thinks he ought to be able to choose your pleasures or vices or whatever they are.’

Anne answered with a hint of tranquil disapproval. ‘I don’t mind a man’s world, you see. I seem to have a very good life in it.’

She was getting, with difficulty, to her feet, in order to change the plates. Her dress was so long that all movement was tricky if one had to use hands to carry things. Edmund sprang to his feet to help her. Arabella put her elbows on the table and said vehemently, ‘Well, I hate a man’s world. There’s absolutely no valid reason for it any more. Men hide behind us menstruating or having children (which, incidentally, neither you nor I are doing) to try and make us do all the dull things, calling it protection. It’s the biggest confidence trick of all time. They’ve done their level best to stop us doing anything interesting, and now they say we couldn’t do these things. It’s as bad as people being against Jews in the eighteenth century for being moneylenders, when that was all they were allowed to be.’

Edmund said mildly, and therefore, to Arabella, maddeningly, ‘Women don’t seem to have written much poetry or music. You don’t get women sculpting much, or conducting orchestras or being architects.’

‘You get awful houses because of men being architects. And you do get women being poets and musicians and Prime Ministers or Presidents. And look at Elisabeth Ney.’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘There you are! A woman sculptress. Granddaughter of Maréchal Ney.’

‘But surely, it’s a point in my favour, that I haven’t heard of her?’

Anne said, as though to two children, ‘Have some raspberries. And stop quarrelling.’

‘We’re not quarrelling, but I do hate being wrong about things. No. I do so like being right about them. And if I didn’t think there was some cosmic social reason for me being such a frost, I couldn’t bear it.’

Here the telephone rang. Edmund went to answer it, and Arabella said, ‘It’s my mother: I know it is.’

Anne gave her the cream bowl and said, ‘You aren’t a frost, of course you aren’t. You simply haven’t had time to find out what you really want. Of course it’s not your mother,’ she added soothingly.

But it was. After what seemed a very long time to Anne, and no time at all to Arabella, he came back into the dining-room saying, ‘Clara. She’d like to speak to you.’

Arabella left the room without a word.

‘Does she know where it is?’

‘If she doesn’t, she’ll come back and ask. Edmund!’

‘Yes?’

‘She’s been having an awful time. She had an abortion yesterday.’

‘Good God! Is she all right?’

‘Seems to be. What I mean is she hasn’t talked about the man or anything, but I think she’s feeling pretty bad, and we ought to be kind to her.’

‘I’m not being unkind to her, am I?’

‘No. I just thought you ought to know.’

He walked round the table and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Good, kind Anne. You always think about other people. You are being so nice about her.’

‘I think she’s fascinating – very interesting – I mean one doesn’t often meet people of her age, and they’re quite different.’

‘I don’t think that they’re all that different from us – ’ But at that moment Arabella returned. Her face looked as though someone had taken a handful of soft snow and rubbed it in. She was still pale, but glowing with – fright? – indignation? – resentment? Something certainly unknown to both Edmund and Anne. She said:

‘Look here. She wants me to go to Paris and to Nice. She wants me to go on her horrible yacht, and hang about in Paris until I can go on her horrible yacht with her ghastly friends and one particularly ghastly one who she’ll try and get me married to.’

Anne and Edmund gazed at her, separately unable to deal with this situation.

‘It’s not that she wants me in Paris. She just wants me to go to bloody old Cartier and collect her emeralds they’ve been resetting so that she can wear them at least once in Paris. Can you imagine that?’

Anne said, ‘What did you tell her?’

‘I didn’t tell her anything. I can’t, you see.’

Edmund said, ‘Well, really, I should have thought that Cartier could arrange to send her necklace or whatever it is to her themselves.’

‘Yes,’ Anne said, ‘and then you could join her much later if she wants you to go on the yacht.’

Arabella, who had been standing in the doorway, now turned to its post and without the slightest warning burst into wracking sobs. ‘Can’t! You don’t understand! Hates me – just wants to spoil anything that looks like being all right!’

Anne said gently, ‘But I’m sure you needn’t go tomorrow, just because she says that. Why not agree to go in a week or so when you feel better? A yachting holiday would probably do you good.’

Arabella turned towards them – tears were streaming down her face like rain on the window of a car with no windscreen wiper. ‘I don’t – oh! well I promise I won’t stay here more than a week – or ten days at the most? Would that be all right?’

Edmund, who had got to his feet when she re-entered the room, now went towards her. ‘You shall stay here exactly as long as you like. Of course we don’t want to turn you out. Do we, Anne?’

‘Oh no! I never meant that. We shall both love having you.’

‘You tell her that you are perfectly happy where you are, and that we don’t want you to go,’ Edmund said firmly.

‘Oh please! You tell her. Tell her that you want me to stay. She might believe you. She never believes me. Unless you don’t?’ She looked frantically at each of them.

‘Is she still on the telephone, then?’

‘Yes, yes. She’s waiting to be told. Something – by someone. I just don’t want it to be me. She’ll stop my allowance – well, that’s what she’d start with – you don’t know what she’s like.’

Anne said, ‘You tell her, darling.’

‘What?’ He was clearly uncomfortable at having to take both such a firm and distant line.

‘Tell her that Arabella wants to stay with us, and that we want to have her.’

Edmund squared his shoulders. ‘Right.’

When he had gone, Arabella flew to Anne, knelt by her chair and said, ‘You’re so kind – you don’t know how kind you are.’ It was extraordinary how she could stream with tears and go on looking beautiful and not have to blow her nose, Anne thought. She wanted to feel ‘poor little thing’, but there was something about Arabella’s appearance and state that went well beyond that. She put out her hand to stroke Arabella’s hair, and touching it, felt vaguely frightened.

In their bedroom, Edmund said, ‘You shouldn’t have tried to make her go on the yacht. She clearly didn’t like the idea, and it made her feel unwanted.’

‘I didn’t try to do that. I honestly thought that it might be good for her.’

‘She obviously finds Clara impossible as a mother, so how could it do her good? Do you mean that you would really rather that she went?’

Anne had been struggling out of the huge caftan, which now fell in Tiepolo-like folds to her feet. ‘Of course not. No: I was trying to think for her.’

‘Of course you were. You don’t know Clara as I do. That robe is too big for you.’

‘Don’t I know it!’

‘Don’t sound so ungrateful: it was a very sweet gesture.’

Anne said – crossly – for her, ‘After all, it was I who told you what to say to Clara.’

Edmund came behind her and undid her brassière. ‘Don’t let’s talk about Arabella,’ he said as he pulled the straps off her shoulders and marvelled and enjoyed how he could not encompass her breasts with his hands. Her faint, but to him erotic shame that he could always sense from his touch at these moments made it easy not to give the girl another thought.

‘Oh, darling. I’ll get into bed.’

He turned off all the lights, except the usual one, and stripped back the bedclothes. She lay on her side, half turned away from him, waiting; her short, dark hair ruffled: none of her skin white except her breasts and the soles of her feet: she lay with one knee raised and tucked under the other so that the curves and the straight parts of her body were as clear as a good drawing.

‘I have always wanted to say, “Have you met Mrs Cornhill? She is at her best without any clothes.”’

‘Do you really find me – all right?’

He lay pressed to her back. ‘You’ve never asked me that since the first time.’

She was so easy, and he wanted her so much that both of them could torment and delight themselves with time. It was strange that, after everything that he had said and done, the thought of Arabella, alone in her bed, came to Anne, infiltrating the sated, familiar contentment.

‘I do hope she is not too unhappy,’ she murmured, but Edmund did not reply: he was asleep.

In Paris, the Prince said peevishly, ‘I am not responsible for this daughter of yours. But if she is to recur in whatever conversations we may have, naturally I am made provident about trying to settle the situation.’

Clara was in a bath – surrounded by marble and expensive-smelling steam. ‘Well – why did you make me call about her? Why ask her on the yacht? Why ask – beg for trouble?’

The Prince, who hated being in bathrooms when fully dressed, and was far too old and experienced to appear in any other way before Clara except at carefully prearranged moments, answered, ‘To have her on the yacht was not for pleasure, but to get her married. That is what any parent must have in mind. She will soon become too old, too rich, too self-assured – an impossible combination for any man of taste and discretion. Ludwig would be a match, at least.’

‘He hasn’t got a penny!’

‘There is no need for him to have a little of what she will have so much. We were at school together: his castle is virtually uninhabitable: it would give her something to do.’

Clara did not reply. The fact that Baron Potsdam was a contemporary of Vani’s, and therefore several years older than she herself admitted to being, was not something to bring up. It was true that she would prefer Arabella to be married, and therefore morally, if not financially off her plate, but the Prince’s notion of parental discipline was fearfully outmoded, like so much of the rest of him, and nothing but the sternest and most old-fashioned methods would ever get Arabella to the altar with Ludwig, who had absolutely nothing to recommend him except his mouldering estate, and a title that was hardly recognized outside his own country and deeply resented within it. The trouble was that anybody whom Arabella might want to marry and whom Clara would regard as being suitable would almost certainly turn out to be somebody she wanted herself, and would therefore probably take. Fortune hunters were out, unless they had such striking compensations that she would prefer Arabella not to be struck first, so to speak. She yawned.

‘Give me my towel and tell Markham to tell them to bring the drinks next door. We’ll revise the guest list. Dear, dull Edmund seemed charmed to have her under his roof.’

She stood up, and wound the pale pink towel round her like a sarong. She was wearing a turban to match, and held out a tiny, freckled hand with silver-tipped nails. The Prince received it gallantly enough, but he, too, yawned, and wished for the third time since arriving in Paris that he was dining alone or with some congenial member of his own sex at The Travellers’.

‘Have who?’

‘What do you mean, Vani?’

‘What I have been meaning is who would Edmund be charmed to have under his roof?’

‘Oh Vani! Please do not bore me like that! Arabella, of course.’

‘Sometimes I have noticed that it is as a pig that you treat me.’ He was at the bathroom door, gazing at her with the elaborate reproach that reminded her of a large and stupid dog.

‘Not a pig, darling – never a pig. And I am sure,’ she added with her spasmodic candour, ‘that sometimes I must bore you also. That is what is so dreadful in life – this continual choice between being lonely and being bored.’

The Prince again lifted her hand – this time to his thin, dry lips. ‘Of course, you are incapable of boring me, my darling.’ He did not believe in candour – never had.

They lay in the same bed together in the dark, each one rightly sure that the other was awake, each pretending that they were both asleep. Earlier, he had tried to make love to her – even just to have her – to try and wash some of the guilty, miserable defeat out of their systems. But it hadn’t worked. He couldn’t even get started: her hair smelled of cooking oil; her body felt both undernourished and flabby, poor and unresponsive to his hands. But it made her cry all right: anything, anything could do that, he thought viciously, if I come into it. It seemed insulting to him that she should cry, when he was so much – so far more unhappy than she could have any idea of. And, when feeling like that, he should pluck up any courage at all. He gave up fairly soon, said he was sorry, told her not to cry, wiped a bit of her face with the – not very clean – sheets (Christ – you’d think she’d think of that, when he’d said he was coming home) and then abandoned himself to his private, dull, endlessly repetitive despair.

Janet lay rigidly apart from him: she was cold, her head ached, and what emotion she felt was anaemic outrage. Surely, he could have had the sense and feeling not to try that – straight from one bed to another: surely he must see that it would take time and affection (the words sounded like pieces of period costume as she thought them) for anything ever to be all right again. So he was simply trying to prove to her that it wasn’t – never could be. If he loved her, if he cared about her, if he felt anything for the children, surely he would not attempt anything so important as their lives together with such mechanical unzest? I don’t understand him, she thought: but that thought had no effect upon her at all. I wish I was dead. That, at least, had the element of gesture about it. She lay under the stiff, felty blankets, hugging this endful possibility and wringing comfort thereby. People would be sorry then: they would have some inkling of what she must have been through. He would be sorry. I hate that young, rich, selfish bitch. Hatred was like brandy, or adrenalin: it did not make her sleep, but almost glad when Luke started crying and she had to get up to him. She was careful about not waking her anyway wakeful husband.

Arabella lay in bed, with the black cat, Ariadne, beside her. She, the cat, had been in the bedroom, and on the bed at that, when Arabella went upstairs. Arabella had removed as much of the bedspread as it was possible to do, and Ariadne’s umbrage at being moved at all had quickly died down. She now lay with her body under the clothes and her head leaning heavily against Arabella’s neck. She was purring with the professional smoothness that denoted both years of practice and incessant vibration. Arabella was smiling in the dark, that suited them both. Saved, she thought: and, This time yesterday – or the day before that … If Ariadne was thinking, it could only be, Any minute now – as Arabella could feel the minuscule thumping and writhing within her tightly stretched for. ‘You have them with me: I don’t mind; I would like it,’ Arabella whispered, and Ariadne washed a paw briskly and then Arabella’s neck. No offence meant, but nobody likes being told what to do when they will be doing it anyway. They’re awfully kind, nice, different people. I hope they will love me.

An owl was near them outside in the garden. The windows were open, and the scent of stocks and tobacco and jasmine and roses could be smelled. The evening silence allowed the night noises. Moonlight fell in one delicate shaft across the littered carpet. Arabella lay, with the warm fur next to her, absorbing the extraordinary pleasure of being at home in a strange place.