The next day when she awoke she didn’t understand anything. She telephoned her office to say she had an emergency and couldn’t come to work. Then she brought Emma to her mother-in-law’s; she was a likable woman fatter than Rebecca who couldn’t stop being grateful to her for having gotten her son out of the clutches of a woman who ate only vegetarian. Rebecca said she would be back in the afternoon and added that if she happened to be late she would let her know. She kissed Emma and went home.
In the silence of the empty rooms she picked up Rode’s book again. And she forced herself to think. She hated puzzles and was aware that she didn’t have the right intelligence to enjoy solving them. She wasn’t even so sure she wanted to reopen a story she had thought was dead and buried. But certainly she would have liked to be sure that that book had truly been a gift for her—the loving touch she had missed in that farewell of so many years ago. Just as, undeniably, she was attracted by the possibility of uncovering, on her own, as far as she could, the infinite strangeness of Jasper Gwyn.
She sat thinking for a long time.
Then she got up, took the folders with the portraits, removed from the pile the one with her portrait, and put all the others in a large purse. She dressed and called a taxi. She was driven to the neighborhood of the British Museum, because she had decided that if there was anyone in the world who could help her, it was Doc Mallory.