Three

The Greens’ large, brown clapboard house in Amagansett was in woods, and Nancy, in the morning, went in her light nightgown and barefoot from her bedroom to the trees. The tall, thin trunks went up to high branches, where the early sun shone; she stood in the shadows below, among ferns. She walked among the ferns on dead, damp leaves. She saw the house, with its porch and wicker chairs, through the tree trunks. Her mother was at the screen door.

In the dining alcove, her mother poured out a glass of orange juice for her and said, “The Kenners are giving a party this evening.”

“A party?”

“Don’t you like parties anymore?”

“I guess I do,” Nancy said.

Her mother put her hand on Nancy’s head. “Are you all right?”

Laughing, Nancy said, “Why shouldn’t I be all right?”

With her mother and father, she went into the Amagansett center for the Saturday shopping, and, as she had done as a little girl, stopped in the drugstore to buy her father a newspaper and look over the magazines in the rack; she chose two or three she once thought fun. With her parents she had lunch in a small restaurant, and in the afternoon they lay on chaises longues in the sunshine by their pool and, while her father read the newspaper and her mother dozed, Nancy flipped through the magazines, which were no longer fun. Lowering a magazine, she looked around, then looked at her parents, who, she knew, wanted both to protect her and to allow her all the freedom in the world, but Nancy felt no freedom was open to her.

The party at the Kenners was at dusk on a lawn behind their house. Kerosene torches burned, the flames wavering pale yellow against the pale gray sky, on stakes along the picket fence at the back of the lawn and down along the flagstone path to the pool. As Nancy, feeling her lightly sunburnt body sensitive to the small, shifting movements of her dress, approached the people, she felt revive in her, just a little but enough for her to be aware of it, her old pleasure at going to a party. As soon as she got her drink, from a bartender in a white jacket behind a long table covered with a white cloth and bottles and glasses, she turned away from her parents to look around at who was at the party. One of the torches was smoking.

She saw a man standing alone under an apple tree near the house, his hands on his hips, looking around. He wore white flannel slacks, a white shirt, and a dark blue blazer, and his smooth black hair was combed back flat from his high forehead.

Nancy went to her old friend Eugenia Kenner, and, indicating the man in white flannels, she asked “Who’s he?”

Eugenia said, “I don’t know. But let’s find out.” She introduced herself as the Kenners’ daughter, and he replied that his name was Tim.

“And this is Nancy,” Eugenia said.

He was tall, with a large nose and a narrow face, his forehead high because his hair was receding. He appeared very neat, the collar of his starched shirt sharp-edged, and one button of his blazer buttoned. When he held Nancy’s hand, he half-frowned, half-smiled. He was British.

Eugenia said she’d get him a drink, and, turning away to go, raised an eyebrow at Nancy.

She asked him what he did, and he said he was in law.

“A lawyer?”

“Oh, my ambitions are much greater than that.”

Nancy noted how his tall body beneath his neat clothes appeared to be regularly exercised.

“Are they?” she asked.

As he was explaining to Nancy the difference between a solicitor and a barrister and a Q.C., Eugenia came back with the gin-and-tonic he had asked for, then, again raising an eyebrow at Nancy, left her to Tim. He was from London, in New York on a visit, and had been invited to the Kenner party by a mutual friend, Simona Morrow, who said she’d meet him here at the party, but he didn’t see her, so he dared say he must have arrived before her.

Nancy said, “I went to London with my parents when I was a girl.”

As if from a height, he asked, “And what do you remember?”

“I remember a soldier wearing a red uniform and a tall fur hat, standing at attention in the rain.”

“One of the Queen’s Foot Guards. Standing at attention in the rain is their duty.”

Simona arrived, her hands raised palms out. Out of breath, she said, half to Tim and half to Nancy, that one of her children had suddenly become ill, but her husband had said he’d take care of him and insisted she come to the party to see Tim. Then she kissed Nancy on both cheeks and said, “Please excuse my agitation, Nancy dear. It’s so lovely to see you again.” She had become, Nancy thought, very British.

Simona and Tim began to talk about friends in London, and Nancy left them to find Eugenia. She said to her, “He sounds severe.”

“Maybe that’s just what we both need,” Eugenia said.

As people were leaving the party, Nancy was standing silently with her parents when Tim came to her. She introduced him to her parents; hearing his name, Tim Arbib, Mr. Green asked him what sort of name Arbib was. He replied that it was a Jewish Egyptian name. Then Mrs. Green asked him what he did for amusement while he was visiting, and he said he liked to take long walks along the wide Long Island beaches. But before any more conversation could involve him, Simona called him away.

Sunday afternoon, while her parents visited friends whom Nancy found boring, she stayed at home. The sky was cloudy, the air moist. She became restless. She refused to think about Yvon. She telephoned Eugenia, but Eugenia had a date, and Nancy thought, we must grow up. When the idea of walking along the beach occurred to her, she realized it gave her a sense of possibility, one that had not come to her since she left Yvon, when all possibility had shut down on her. She drove to the ocean and walked where the surf spread out on the sand, among people walking their dogs. Beyond a long wall of boulders that Nancy climbed over, she saw Tim Arbib, his hands on his hips, looking out at the Atlantic. Though he might not have had any interest at all in meeting her, might have even been annoyed by it, she approached him, smiling so that when he turned to her he would find her smiling.

His reaction to seeing her was as matter-of-fact as though he had been waiting for her. “Join me for a walk?”

She swung her head so her hair swung. “Sure.”

On a blanket among the low dunes of the beach were a man and woman in swimsuits. The man was kneeling over the woman, who lay on her stomach, and he was spreading lotion over her shoulders and back. Around them were pieces of driftwood, smooth roots of trees and broken planks, in puddles of water.

Nancy said, “I guess, after foggy, rainy England, the sun comes as a nice change.”

Tim pursed his lips, then said, “That’s not an altogether original view of England.”

Anxious, Nancy said, “It rained all the while I was there, but I was there only a few days.”

Tim said, “England is very often sunny.”

“I guess I was there at the wrong time.”

His eyes narrowed, he kept looking out at the ocean, and she thought he had lost interest in her because he thought her unoriginal. But he said, “Shall we sit on the beach?”

She followed him to where the sand rose into a dune grown over with dune grass. With apparently thought-out gestures he drew off his polo shirt with its little emblem embroidered near the shoulder. His chest muscles were narrow and taut and distinct, and his skin was matte white and his chest covered with curling, shiny black hair.

A young man, swinging his shirt and whistling, walked past them, and a vision of Yvon came to Nancy, a vision of him laughing and about to get into bed with her. And she thought: forget about him.

Tim sat on the sand, leaned back on his elbows, and looked again at the ocean, the tendons in his neck taut. Nancy sat beside him, her legs crossed like an Indian. Squinting, in the same way he had studied the horizon, he now studied her as he lay back and put his hands behind his head.

She looked away from his eyes to the blue sky, where the sun and the full moon both shone, the sun bright yellow and the moon pale white. Nancy didn’t look back at Tim, but, aware of him staring at her, she said, “How strange.”

“What’s strange?”

“The moon and the sun out together.”

His voice was a little hard. “What do you mean by ‘strange?’”

Embarrassed, Nancy faced him and, laughing at herself, said, “I’m not sure what I mean.”

“Are you an American mystic?”

“A what?”

“An American mystic.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“If you’re an American you’re a mystic.”

“And what makes an American mystic?” Nancy asked.

Tim said, “To think that the moon and the sun out together must have some strange meaning.”

“Well,” Nancy said, “I’m American.”

“So was my wife.”

“Was?”

Then, very matter-of-factly, he said, “My wife is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

He laughed a laugh from deep in his throat that might have been a cough. “Sorry for a thirty-year-old widower who doesn’t really know how to run his life on his own?”

She wondered about this, but she laughed. “Yes, sorry for that.”

“Thank you.”

Nancy was wary of him but at the same time he roused in her some kind of amused, wicked spirit. She asked, “What strange things made your wife a mystic?”

“Everything had a strange meaning to her.”

“Everything all together?”

“Everything all together.”

Nancy lowered her eyes to take this in, then she raised her eyes to again see him staring at her.

She said, her voice high, “You’re strange.”

He said, “Look me straight in the eyes.”

She did, and she saw that he was smiling a little, and she sensed her lips rise at the corners.

He said, “Don’t look away, keep your eyes on mine.”

She opened her eyes wide to fix on his.

He said, “I’m the least strange person you’ll ever meet.”

“Oh?”

“But I don’t mind if you don’t take me seriously. In fact, I would prefer if you didn’t. I never like being taken seriously.”

“Then I won’t take you seriously.”

“At Eton, we called this Eton bantering.”

“Well then, teach me Eton bantering.”

“You may be a good learner. My wife never learned. She was very serious.”

“I’ll try not to be.”

“Do try.”

“What did your wife die of?”

“Cancer—ovarian cancer.”

“No children?”

“None. She couldn’t. And I must confess, I would have divorced her but for the cancer. I’m not such a bastard that I would do that after she became ill. But I do want children. If I were to get married again that certainly would be a primary condition for marrying.”

Nancy kept thinking: this was bantering.

“But supposing your second wife couldn’t bear?” Nancy asked.

“I would have to divorce her and marry another.”

“What about this—what about getting someone pregnant, then marrying her?”

“To be considered,” he said lightly, “to be considered.”

There was, she felt, a sophisticated lightness to their bantering.

Nancy said, “If you’re alone and don’t have anything else to do this evening, come have dinner with my parents and me.”

Sitting up and putting on his shirt, he said, “It just occurs to me that if a middle-, or an upper-middle-, or, especially, an upper-class girl in England had said that, she would have put herself before her parents and said, ‘Come and have dinner with me and my parents.’”

He was demonstrating his knowledge of the British class system, and if this was meant to impress Nancy, it did.

That night Nancy told herself it was the insects beating their wings against the screen that kept her awake. In her nightgown, she got out of bed and went to the window to look at the insects, their antennae vibrating as they danced on the mesh in fast circles around one another. She examined a large, motionless moth with soft dark wings, its pale eyes seeming to stare at her.

Back in bed, she couldn’t sleep, and when, in the morning, still in her nightgown and bare feet, she went out onto the back lawn, a frightening longing rose up in her to see Yvon.

Her mother came out to her with a glass of orange juice.

“Will you be seeing Tim Arbib again?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Nancy said, and then, not to disappoint her mother, she added, “Probably.”

“I’ll invite him again to dinner if you want me to.”

Tears welled up in Nancy’s eyes, and when she blinked the tears ran down the sides of her nose. “I think I should go to Boston for a few days,” she said, “just a few days.”

“I understand,” her mother said.

“Has Dad already gone back to Manhattan?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll leave after breakfast.”

Nancy walked across the lawn to a lilac bush. She broke off a branch of lilac, and, the bush shaking, a mass of insects flew out and around her. The sprig of lilac in her hand, she stopped, or felt she was stopped, in the middle of the lawn, by the overwhelming feeling, occurring like a dark, arresting circle around her, of her deepening longing for Yvon. Looking at the sprig of lilac in a hand that wasn’t her hand, she felt that someone else, not herself, was standing where she was, longing for what she herself could never want, could never long for. The sprig of lilac appeared stranger than any plant she had ever seen before, the insects flying around her appeared stranger than any creatures she had ever seen before; the house and the woods appeared to her the strangest place she had ever seen before. There could be no stranger world than the world she stood in, if it was she who was standing in it.

She thought she would get out of that world, too strange to her, and live in a familiar world, even if this world were not very happy. And she would do this by going to Boston and seeing Yvon for the last time.

On the highway to Boston, a low-slung car with big tail fins passed her, the windows open. In the front seat were two young guys, bopping their heads to loud music. Two large soft dice were dangling in the rear window. They appeared to be so happy. She arrived in Boston as the sun was setting.

She had her keys to the street door and to the apartment on Beacon Hill, but, as Yvon had done when they were living together, she rang the bell at the street door instead of going in and surprising him. He didn’t appear. She opened the black door, climbed the bare wooden stairs to the landing, and stood for a moment at the door to her apartment, as if waiting for him to open, before she opened it herself.

Entering the hot apartment, the windows all shut, she startled Yvon, who, lying on the bed in his underpants, jumped up on seeing her and stood as if at attention. The unmade bed smelled of his body in the sun-filled room. As she stared at him, he slowly raised his arms and, as if to protect himself, crossed them over his bare chest and grabbed his own shoulders.

“I’m sorry, I thought someone made a mistake ringing the bell.”

She said, flatly, “I came up to Boston to get something.”

With the same flatness, he asked, “Oh?”

She had no idea what to tell him she had come for.

He asked, “Would you like some cold tea?”

“I would like some, yes.”

From the floor he picked up a pair of chinos, which he drew on, then he took a shirt from where it hung on the back of a chair and put it on and buttoned it.

“I was just resting before I go off to teach,” he said.

“You teach?”

“I got a job teaching French in a language school.”

“Then you’ve found a practical way of using your French.”

“I’m trying to be practical.”

He held out a hand for her to go ahead of him into the kitchen, where they sat at the table with tea in tall, thin glasses with patterns of flowers on them. She tried to center her thoughts and feelings away from him, on the rim of her glass, but she was drawn, and all her thoughts and feelings with her, to his lips, his jaw, the hollow at the base of his throat. She looked at him closely, at the lobes of his ears, his eyebrows, his sweat-moist forehead.

What did he think? Did he think that his mother killed herself because he went to New York and not to her in the parish? Whatever he thought, his dead mother now denied Nancy and Yvon any possibility together.

Rising, Yvon said, “I’ll leave you on your own to get what you came for.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

He remained standing at the other side of the table. “I should be going to school for my evening class.”

She knew in all her body that if she didn’t let him go now, she would do something to make him stay, though she had no idea what that could be. As strong as it was, it couldn’t be more than the desire to lie on the same bed with him, in those sheets saturated with his smell, couldn’t be more than the desire to lie next to him and fall asleep with him. Nothing more than that? She was very tired, more tired than she could stand, and at the same time she felt, in all her tiredness, a tightening of her muscles and tendons that made her hold out her hands, her fingers curled, to grab something, to grab him, across the small table and, knocking over the glasses of tea, pull him towards her and, oh yes, bite his lips, knock over the table by pulling at his shirt so he stumbled after her into the bedroom and onto the bed. No, no, not that, not that; but something more than that, something that sex could never realize; something that had to be fought for through flesh and bone if it was to be had at all. He knew what this something was, he knew it more than she did, more than she ever would, and she must have it in repossessing him. She felt, as she had never before in her life felt, a rush of passion for that something he embodied in his arms and shoulders, in his chest and thighs and legs, in his very smell, which she must have, which she would have.

But she sat still, and, though her feelings made little spasms pass through her, she held herself back from giving in to the impulse to reach out for him as she watched him, standing above her, place his hands on his cheeks and close his eyes.

He opened his eyes and said, “I need to go to school.”

She stood. “Let me lie on the bed next to you,” she said, “just that. I won’t touch you. I’ll lie next to you. That’s what I came for. That’s everything I came for.”

Yvon kept his hands to his face.

“Do I have to beg?” she asked.

He dropped his hands and turned away.

She sank cross-legged on the floor next to the chair, and, her shoulders slumped and her hands in her lap, she sobbed, but Yvon didn’t come to her.

Her whole body aching, she got up long after she heard the door to the apartment shut.

Before she left, she looked for the quartz and the fragment of meteorite, wanting to take them away with her, but they were gone.

At sunset, wide and gray-purple, cars along the highway switched on their lights, and as the dark deepened, the white and red lights flashing past her were all she saw. She was so tired that, after a moment of abstraction when the lights of the traffic appeared to drift up and away as though the cars were turning off in an unexpected direction, she left the highway to get a cup of coffee.

Twice more she stopped for coffee. She imagined that off the highway, in the nighttime woods, people were standing, illuminated by beaming car lights. She was still closer to Boston than to New York. She was sweating, and she felt that her clothes were dirty and twisted about her, that her hair was dirty.

Halfway to New York she stopped again, this time to eat. The restaurant was crowded, and she, at a small table next to the large table of a family with a baby in a highchair, couldn’t eat the food she ordered. Her head began to throb. She paid the bill. Outside, the cars in the parking lot glared in the floodlights. For a while she couldn’t find her car.

The expressions on Nancy’s mother’s face appeared to have been slowly thought out, and, with simplicity, she put a hand on Nancy’s arm and told her that Tim Arbib had left a message.

Nancy had never imagined that she, a free spirit, could be so emotionally and bodily constrained, with no sense of possibility. Standing long under a cool shower, cupping the water in her hands as it fell and splashing it against her face and body, she thought perhaps she understood the need for purification. She let the water pour over her head, down though her long hair that, dripping, flowed along her body as though her hair too were water, and her skin water.

Because she thought meeting Tim Arbib might confuse her, she waited some days. She dressed in a loose gray pullover, a gray skirt, and black pumps, her hair simply brushed back from her face, the simplicity meant not so much to protect her as to make her appear serious, because she was serious, and if he had any appreciation of her it had to be that she was serious, and that with her he was, too—not the bantering girl he had met, but a woman whom he must treat as a woman, a serious woman. If he did not respect her as she insisted on being respected, she would make every effort to protect herself against him; then, back in her room and on her bed, she would lie, a broken girl.

She held out a hand to him to shake, but instead of grasping her hand, he lightly pressed the tips of his fingers against hers and turned her hand as though to raise it and kiss it, a gesture she felt would be both formal and intimate, and respectful. But he didn’t kiss her hand. She smiled a smile that lifted only the corners of her mouth. It seemed to her a smile that made her invulnerable.

Though she knew the Hamptons better than he did, she felt directionless, and let him lead her. Five minutes into the date she found herself wishing she were in her room, lying on her bed in a dim room, the blinds drawn against the sunlight.

The restaurant, chosen by him, was in a large, white clapboard house with a massive fieldstone fireplace, their table at a window with a view of the sunlight on the ocean.

He said, “I do like a view.”

She hadn’t before noted the view as special, though she’d been to the restaurant often with her parents. She realized she had hardly spoken, leaving talk up to him and she responded briefly, distracted, but not able to say what distracted her. She must make an effort.

“Do you go to places for the views?”

As if incidentally, he said, “My wife liked views. When she was ill, I made a point of taking her to places she particularly liked for the views. We went to Scotland, to the Highlands, because she had a great desire to see the stark mountains. That was the last. Afterwards, she wasn’t capable of travel.”

“A longing to see the stark mountains.”

“A great desire. That’s what she said. I didn’t, and don’t, understand, but I sat with her on a bench outside the modest bed-and-breakfast where we were staying, about ten miles from the house of some good friends of mine, and I wondered what her great desire was in looking at the mountains ranging before us. I remember there was a deep valley between the mountains, and rivers and waterfalls in the valley.”

“And you were never able to understand her longing?”

“Longing? No, not longing, that’s a word I would never use. It was all I could do not to make a joke of her desire for views. She knew I wouldn’t understand, knew, I’m sure, that I would deride her, gently, I suppose, but deride her for her pretensions for such views.”

Nancy asked, “Pretensions?”

And he said, “Let’s order,” and they did, and as if he had intended to continue what he had been saying because it was important that she understand him, this elegant man from, maybe, Egypt, said, “I actually think she relied on me for my derision. I knew she didn’t want me to take her soulful longings seriously. I might say to her, when she withdrew as if alone with her vision, ‘Darling, let’s just have sex,’ and she’d laugh.”

“And did you then have sex?”

“Often.”

“You weren’t deriding her, I think, but teasing her.”

“No, I was deriding her.”

Nancy thought: he is warning me.

Surprising Nancy, Tim said, “Miriam is dead, and I am alive, and that is everything.”

“Everything,” Nancy said.

“You understand.”

“I think I understand.”

“Well, then I can tell you I feel that though I couldn’t have saved her against death, I should have, somehow. But I didn’t save her.”

“And you blame yourself for that?”

“I do.”

Nancy leaned towards him. “And that’s grief.”

“You know grief?”

“In a way, I do, yes.” She paused. “Yes, I do.”

“For someone dead?”

“Someone I was once involved with. I never understood him. He frightened me.”

“He threatened you?”

“I suppose he did.”

“If I had been there—”

“Thanks, but I think, in the end, he was more threatened than I was.” She spread her fingers out on the edge of the table. “In a way, it’s as though he were dead. He’s the one I grieve for. What you feel about your wife, your feeling you could have saved her though you knew you couldn’t, that’s what I feel toward him—that I could have saved him, though I knew I couldn’t have.”

“You stopped seeing him.”

“Yes.”

“Is your will strong enough?”

“You mean, against my will, will I see him again? I mustn’t, but I do need a strong will.”

“How?”

He was attentive to her with a slight—a slightly seductive—smile. She smiled too. “You tell me how.”

“Learning Greek? Learning to play the violin? Learning symbolic logic? They all require willing oneself to learn.” Now he laughed, and she thought, with surprise: I am actually enjoying this. He said, “Learning all the forms of law?”

They sat back from the table for a waiter to serve them. She asked, “Will you tell me more about your wife?”

“Anything you want to know.”

“She was Jewish?”

“Of course.”

“Where from?’

“Texas.”

“How Jewish was she?”

“Only in that she, from a rich Texan Jewish family, would have married a Jew, no more than that.”

“And you?”

“I would only marry a Jew. And yet I don’t go to temple. I go more often to Anglican services for weddings, baptisms, funerals, memorials. One can’t grow up in England without participating, over and over and over, in Anglican services. I sing out the hymns with the best of them, sing them out with more conviction than an Anglican, none of whom I know actually believes any more than I do. The hymns are simple, so simple and so transparent, and in their simplicity and transparency very beautiful.”

“Very beautiful.”

“Well, if you were to come to London, I’d have you singing full voice in church.”

“I’d like that.”

Then he said, with simplicity and earnestness, “I have to admit I am not a deeply feeling person, but I am honest and open and have no secret desires.”

And for the simplicity and earnestness of his words, Nancy thought she could rely on this man for his honesty, his openness, his having no secret desires. And she knew that he was confessing to her for her understanding, what he would never confess to anyone else. And this occurred to her: he was proposing to her.

As they talked, the light on the ocean lengthened until it appeared to be, itself, an ocean of light.

Tim’s lovemaking was intentional, methodical, and this was all right with her. She had had lovemaking that was out of control, and she was reassured by his control. With careful deliberation, he made sure she was as satisfied as he was. And, after making love, he surprised her by saying, “Thank you.”

He flew back and forth from London to New York to see her and they always stayed in a modest but good hotel. Mr. and Mrs. Green liked Tim, or they told Nancy they did, but she knew they would never invite him to stay with them, as if they considered her relationship with Tim a relationship apart, Tim more than a boyfriend to their daughter, whose independence they had always respected. When she told Tim she was pregnant, he proposed marriage in a very straightforward way, starting with, “Well now—.” She accepted, but she soon realized that to be straightforward was what she too had to be.

This seemed to be his principle: whatever there was in his life that he did not explain needn’t be explained, because it was obvious, and the obvious explained itself. He explained the practicalities she had not quite considered, and he took care of the practicalities.

Nancy wondered if her entire relationship with Yvon had been based on pretension, on the pretentious attraction to, oh, the strange. Tim would have made her aware of that pretension. She wanted now, if not the familiar—for Tim’s world was not familiar to her—the simple, even though rigorously defined. She needed rigor.

Tim wanted the wedding, in New York, to be simple. His parents came from London, and an old friend from Oxford days to be best man. After the wedding Tim returned to London with his parents to prepare, he said, for Nancy, and she, now a married woman, continued to live with her parents as if she were single. She took notes on an article she thought of writing about Henry James.

As Nancy walked around the reservoir in Central Park, she thought about Henry James, and she wondered how she could expand on the so-often-repeated word “everything” in his novels: how so often the consequences of a dramatic conversation rose to a level where one of the characters said, “everything,” though the summation of “everything” was never explained, yet, as James so often wrote, “hung together.”

And, she wondered, what could the word “everything” mean, because, in fact, the word only existed in itself? There was no having “everything” unless you had every single thing in the world. Still, within the world of Henry James, “everything” did “hang together.”

 As she entered the living room of her parents’ apartment, she saw them standing by the fireplace, he with a sheet of paper in his hands, a letter, Nancy supposed, because an envelope lay on a rug on the floor. Usually when she came into a room her parents were in, they immediately turned to her and smiled, and often enough her father held out his arms to her for a quick hug, but now they were both concentrating on the paper her father held, and as she approached she saw her mother’s eyes magnified with tears. Alarmed, Nancy asked, “What’s the matter?” but her mother simply looked at her. Her father, with a deep frown, folded the piece of paper and Nancy reached down to the rug for the envelope to hand it to him. He slipped the paper into the envelope, closed the flap, and said, as a fact, “After all, the search has been abandoned,” and he put the envelope into the side pocket of his jacket. In a low voice he said, “We’ll go have dinner now.” Nancy’s mother, her hands to her cheeks, followed him into the dining room. Her father, at the doorway, called Nancy to come, in a low voice.

At the table, Nancy noted that her mother’s eyes were red. Hilda came in with a tureen of soup and placed it on the table, and Nancy’s mother served the soup.

She asked Nancy, “Do you ever hear from that Yvon?”

“I don’t, no.”

“I suppose he was strange.”

“Yes, he was strange.”

“But I liked him,” Nancy’s mother said.

“I did too, I liked him, but he was not for me.”

Her father asked, “And you’re sure Tim is for you?”

“I’m not really sure of anything, Dad, but I think I have a better chance of getting along with a Jewish man.”

“That’s for you to see.”

Nancy repeated, “That’s for me to see.”

She thought how everything that was said seemed to sound within a vast empty hall.

Hilda cleared away the soup plates and served the main course.

Nancy asked, “What search was abandoned?”

Her mother answered, “For my mother.”

Her father said, “It was no surprise, because we waited so many years to learn what we already knew.”

Nancy tried to keep her voice in accord with the silence of the vast, empty hall. “And you don’t know in what way she died?”

“We tried, we tried,” Nancy’s father said. “And maybe, after all, it’s better that we don’t know. The search is abandoned.”

“How can you bear not knowing how she died?” Nancy asked them.

Nancy’s mother answered, “We bear it because we have no choice.”

After the silent dinner, Nancy, sitting up in bed, tried to read, but she couldn’t, and often dropped the book to her lap and stared out.

“Everything,” she said, just the word, “everything.”

When she knew her parents were in their bedroom for the night, she went to them. Her father was in the bathroom, her mother lying in bed; Nancy lay down next to her and her mother drew her close and Nancy rested her forehead against her shoulder. In his pajamas, her father came from the bathroom and sat on his side of the bed. Nancy moved to get up, but he said, “Stay with us,” and she lay with her head on his pillow, and he lay by her, and by his breathing she knew when he had fallen asleep.

“You should go back to your bed,” Nancy’s mother said.

“Let me lie here a little longer,” she asked.

“A little.”

But her mother reached out to the lamp by her side and switched it off, and Nancy fell asleep with her parents.

In the taxi into London from the airport, Tim looked out of the window at his side and Nancy had the sense that whatever he was thinking about, it was not her.

Finally she asked, “Are you thinking deep thoughts?”

He turned to her slowly. “Deep thoughts? What rubbish,” he said playfully.

And yet she found herself apologizing.

“I was thinking about the champagne, ready for us in the fridge to celebrate.”

She laughed and put a hand under his elbow and leaned closer to him. “That’s thinking deep enough for me.”

He placed an arm across her shoulders and kissed her temple.

Maybe, she thought, he was teasing her.

She expected Tim’s house to have a wide white façade, front steps leading up to a wide black door, with, of course, a brass knocker, and on either side of the door, maybe, pilasters holding up a pediment. The front garden would have grass and, in tubs, shrubs on either side of the steps. There would be an iron gate in a white wall along the pavement and a gravel path to the steps. And the inside shutters of the wide, many-paned windows would be closed, or half closed; she would open them. She expected simplicity and spaciousness, bare, shining parquet floors, and a large mirror above the marble fireplace. She saw what she imagined to be such houses from the taxi.

On a side street in Hampstead the taxi stopped in front of a narrow brick house with narrow windows and a high, stepped gable. An iron scroll-work gate in a low brick wall opened onto a brick pathway and a red front door. Gravel covered what couldn’t be called a front garden. Tim carried his briefcase, followed by the taxi driver, Nancy behind the driver. The driver deposited their two suitcases on the brown-tiled stoop, was paid, and left. Around the red front door were little multicolored glass panes.

Nancy realized that she had known, without having to be told, that Tim could not have afforded the house she had imagined, and that he, who would never apologize, had not described the house because describing it might have sounded like an apology. He would not apologize for himself.

He held the door open for her and she walked down a narrow hall, a stairway at the end, and as she went along paintings on both sides of the hall appeared and disappeared, small paintings in heavy gilt frames: camels and an oasis of palm trees, a veiled woman sitting on a cushion, a pyramid against a sunset.

She turned to Tim, who, having brought the cases inside, was closing the door. She had never before heard herself sound so affected. “What are these lovely paintings?”

“Nothing more, really, than picture postcards.”

“Where do they come from?”

“They’re a collection I’ve been putting together.”

He was being elusive, and so, too, would she be. “Oh.”

He opened double doors, dark and paneled, into the living room, and stood aside for her to enter, and she saw, in a blur, not simplicity and spaciousness, but unexpected complexity and clutter. This couldn’t be Tim’s living room, not the Tim she was married to, the Tim she thought she knew for his personal sense of order. There emerged from the blur a leather Chesterfield sofa and leather armchairs, the kind she imagined were in men’s clubs, and paintings—camels striding across a desert, a moon shining on an oasis, three pyramids of diminishing sizes in a sunset. How odd his taste in art was. Nancy walked slowly around the room and noticed tiered shelves on which were displayed brass water jugs, rows of ancient terracotta oil lamps, small clay or faïence statuettes, dull glass vials, fragments of marble. On the floor was a large Oriental rug, the pile silky, and on a large round embossed copper tray supported by a stand were ceramic bowls patterned in blue and green; hanging over the edge of one was a strand of Muslim prayer beads in red amber with a red tassel. A Scottish plaid throw rug, folded neatly, lay on the seat of one armchair and before the armchair a pouf upholstered with an old embroidery on canvas, a long fringe hanging round the bottom edge.

Tim stood in the middle of the room.

“You collected all of this?” Nancy asked.

“I suppose it’s my way of trying to reproduce the world of my parents in Alexandria before they left.”

“Why did they leave?”

He frowned. “You don’t know?”

She tried to dispel his frown by saying lightly, “I’m afraid I don’t.”

He frowned more. “All Jews were expelled from Egypt.”

“Why?”

Tim was, she saw, disappointed, and she felt that she had revealed something about herself she shouldn’t have, revealed that she was a stupid American who didn’t know history, or so he would think. “Don’t bother your head about that.”

“But I want to know.”

“Leave it.”

“I won’t leave it. I want to know.”

His face tensed. “We arrived in London, refugees, and that’s enough to say. You needn’t know more.”

And she did know him well enough to leave it. For a flash, she wondered if he was putting her in the place where he wanted her to be, and where she would accept being. She didn’t have to know. She pointed to a room beyond the living room, to which double doors were wide open. “What’s in there?”

“My study.”

Still dazed, she went in. Books lined the walls, even on either side of the chimney breast, where there was an elaborate fireplace and, over the mantel, a framed page of Arabic script, black on gold.

She thought she wouldn’t ask what the script meant, but, singling it out by gazing at it, let him assume she had her own appreciation. She said, “Really lovely.”

“Thank you.”

She pointed to a table in the center of the room piled with books, and among the books, standing upright, a gleaming silver case embossed with swirls surrounding small tablets with Hebrew letters in gold and topped with what looked like a delicate crown, within it tiny gold bells. To either side of the crown slender silver posts supported elaborate globes from which hung, all round, more tiny gold bells. Wanting him to know she was not entirely stupid about Jewish matters, she said, “I’ve never seen a Torah cover like this one.”

“Sephardi. You would be used to Ashkenazi covers.”

She would be as stupid as he wanted her to be about everything, but at the same time she would try to make him think she wanted to know everything he had to teach her, if he wanted to.

“Where is it from?”

“It belonged to my great-grandfather, who was chief rabbi in Aleppo, Syria.”

“It’s too much for me to take in right away, but I will—I shall—take it in, all of it. It’s all so great.”

Nancy thought to herself: make the world as real as real as can be. Then she felt like a fake for thinking this. Holding Tim close to her, she pressed her pelvis against his, but as she did she thought: I’m acting.

She drew away and jerked her shoulders as if dismissing everything, real or unreal, and said, “What about that champagne?”

“Go upstairs and look around and make yourself at home. Our room is the one overlooking the back garden. I’ll bring the champagne up to our room and find you already bathed and in bed.”

“Resting?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “not resting, but wide awake.” And to Nancy this sounded vulgar.

She said, “I’ll be waiting.”

And she lay waiting, as he had asked, in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar bedroom that was not to her liking.

She heard him in the bathroom splash in the bathtub, and heard him sing as he dried himself, and heard a cork pop; and she sat up when, naked, he came into the bedroom, two flutes crisscrossed at their stems in one hand and the open bottle of champagne in the other.

He climaxed, shouting, “Fuck!”

Why did this shock her? It shouldn’t have. He was frank about sex, as he was frank about everything. She wanted to like this frankness. He rolled off her and said, as he always did, “Thank you, darling, for that.”

She sat up and, looking about at the room, said, “I’m going to redecorate this room.”

“You can have this room,” he said, “but not the sitting room or my study. You won’t touch those rooms. Promise?”

She promised.

The next morning she woke alone and saw that rain was falling in the garden, and she went to the window to see the rain so heavy on the roses that the petals opened and dripped, and she felt very alone. In her robe she wandered about downstairs, thinking, this is my home now, but at the double doors to Tim’s study she hesitated, listened, then quietly opened the door.

She saw first the Torah in the middle of the room, and then, beyond, Tim at his desk, and she stepped back. Leaning forward, he said, “Nancy, Nancy, come in,” and he smiled.

“I suppose I was curious,” she said.

He rose from his desk to go put an arm about her and draw her to him, and she leaned against him.

She said, “I watched the rain fall in the garden, making the roses so wet that the petals opened and dripped.”

“Beautiful,” he said.

“You like beautiful things?”

“I do, yes, I do,” he said, and kissed her temple. “Come sit with me on the sofa.”

She did as he asked, and there he covered her with another Scottish plaid, which appeared to come from a country that had nothing to do with the house.

As though he’d held off until they were married and at home, he said, “Darling, you must understand about me that I’m awkward with feelings, and, really, that’s the reason why I can’t use words to express them.”

“I do,” she said.

“Listen to me, please, darling, because I may never be able to talk to you in this way again, which I have to admit I’ve been preparing myself for. You must believe that I love you, and always shall, and that’s a principle.”

She said, “Do you like poetry?”

“I do.”

She smiled and said, “I’d like to go out into the garden with you.”

“In the rain?”

“The roses look so beautiful in the rain.”

He stood and looked at his desk and said, “I must return to my work.”

“Then when you’ve finished.”

“Come back in an hour.”

She sighed and quietly said she would, and she drew the plaid from her, folded it neatly, and left the room as he returned to his desk; she quietly closed the double doors.

She went back an hour later, dressed and carrying a large umbrella. Tim was slumped forward on his desk, in the midst of papers. He was asleep. But she felt something more for him than his dedication to his work; she felt, seeing him there asleep, the helplessness in him in the world that she felt was not his, that she was sure he had little or no faith in.

As soon as she tapped him on a shoulder, he sat straight up, wide awake, and looked at the papers on his desk, then at her, and frowned a little.

“We’re going into the garden,” she said, “and I’ve brought an umbrella.”

Still frowning a little, he looked at his desk, then at her.

She said, “Come on.”

“Very well,” he said, “for a moment, then I have to get back here.”

And out in the garden, she did remark on the smell of the mass of roses in the rain, but he said nothing, and she asked herself if she was overdoing her attention, which was meant for him.

The house of Tim’s parents, in St. John’s Wood, was closer to what Nancy had imagined Tim’s house to be: it had clarity and space, and the parquet floors shone in the light through the tall, wide, many-paned windows, their inside wooden shutters folded back to let the sunlight in. The pictures were old-master prints.

Mrs. Arbib, her hair parted and combed back into a chignon, wore a stark black dress, her husband a dark suit, the buttoned jacket a little cinched in at the waist. Mrs. Arbib’s very dark eyes seemed to embrace Nancy sadly, bringing her into a world of sorrow with a frail embrace and soft kisses on both her cheeks. She stood back while her husband held out his arms to Nancy just enough to grasp her elbows and said, “Welcome to London.”

Mrs. Arbib poured tea, which a maid passed around, then brought little diamonds of baklava on fine china plates with fine silver forks. The tea napkins were white linen with crocheted lace around the edges.

Nothing in the room suggested where Mr. and Mrs. Arbib were from, and even their accents, though not English, could have been formed by any number of languages, as, no doubt, they were.

“Tell me about Alexandria,” Nancy said. “I really want to know.”

Smiling a slightly ironical smile, Mr. Arbib said, “Alexandria has a long, long history.” He seemed to be announcing that Alexandria had a longer history than any history Nancy could claim.

“I was born in Cairo,” Mrs. Arbib said. “Cairo has even a longer history than Alexandria.”

Her chin raised, Nancy asked her, “What do you remember most of Cairo?”

“You’ll laugh. When I was a little girl, out for a walk with my English nanny, I was fascinated by the way the men in the laundries who ironed would take water into their mouths and spray it out over the sheet or shirt or whatever they were ironing to dampen it. Now, why do I remember that?” Nancy showed off a little, saying, “My mother had lovely memories of Berlin.”

She had the sudden sense of being in the wrong place here in London, in the wrong place with Tim’s parents, in the wrong place with Tim. There was no Vinnie around who would listen to her say she found Mrs. Arbib, for all her apparent solemnity, a slightly silly woman. And as for Mr Arbib, wasn’t he slightly too seriously pretentious?

The tea things were cleared away, but Tim remained to talk lightly about a recent auction of old-master etchings. Nancy considered herself well educated, not only by college but by her parents, but she did not know the artists referred to by the Arbibs, and she began to tire from having to pay attention to a conversation she didn’t understand and wasn’t interested in, talk, between Tim and his father, about how much the collection was worth.

She asked to look at the pictures, which couldn’t have been a better way to ingratiate herself with Tim’s father; with a hand held out graciously, he showed her to a dead white wall on which etchings hung one above another in thin black frames. Nancy exclaimed, in a slightly affected voice, “There’s a Piranesi, I love Piranesi”—one she recognized because the etching was of his fantastic prisons—but she did not know who Giulio Carpioni was, or Michele Marieschi, or Giuseppe Zocchi, about whom Mr. Arbib knew a lot.

Mr. Arbib said, “We have been able to keep the collection together, but I can’t say for how much longer.”

The collection made Nancy think of the Arbibs as refugees in London, and she wondered if they mingled with no one but other refugees from Egypt.

When they were sitting again, Mrs. Arbib asked Nancy what she had read at university, and she answered that she had her degree in literature. She had concentrated on the works of Henry James.

Mr. Arbib pressed a knuckle against his chin and said his favorite writer was Somerset Maugham.

The doorbell rang, and Nancy was introduced to friends of the family, two men and a woman, who had arrived to play music in the sitting room. They came regularly, Mr. Arbib told Nancy, and would stay on for what Mrs. Arbib called a simple supper.

Listening to the trio, Nancy saw Tim raise a hand—a poised hand—to touch a cheek with an index finger. Yes, he was handsome, in profile sharply angled, his close-cropped hair clearly defined at his nape, at his sideburns, along the receding hairline, his head seemingly set into his stiff white collar with its carefully knotted tie. And though he looked severe, he had a right to his severity, because he was superior not only intellectually but emotionally, for here, now, listening to the rapturous music, he was at the highest level of emotion, higher than she would ever be able to go, higher for no greater outward expression than a finger touching his cheek.

While the piano kept up an insistent, slowly repeated rhythm, the stringed instruments seemed to rise up from and float above the piano to a height of great, swooning freedom, and she rose up there with that swooning music. Tim, lowering his hand, turned to her and smiled a smile that she understood was a recognition that she, too, was on the high level, where she was accepted, and where, yes, she was loved. He turned again to the trio. He would not have used the word love any more than anyone could use one word to describe the feelings roused by the music, but for the duration of the movement she felt an expansiveness that longed to be called love, however much she thought she could not use a word that Tim would not use.

She assured herself that everything was going to be all right. Everything would come together, and coming together would make it all whole. She longed above all for that: for everything to come together and be whole.

She found herself swaying a little, and stopped.

Leaving, Tim said to her, “My parents told me how much they like you.”

At home—what she felt must be her home—he told her to go up to their bedroom and sleep, she was exhausted. He would go to his study alone for an hour or so at his desk.

Alone, Nancy tried to sustain the sense of wholeness, as if the sense could be sustained by intention long enough for her to fall asleep and wake up next to Tim, in bed beside her, holding her.

She always slept in the morning after Tim got up, but before he left for the law courts he did wake her enough to tell her to go on sleeping, he wanted her to have all the rest she needed for their child.

When she had a miscarriage she said, “You’ll want to divorce me.”

“Of course I’ll not divorce you,” he insisted. “The fact is you can become pregnant, and you’ll become pregnant again, and you’ll carry the baby to term. This, I am certain, is a certainty.”

But she didn’t believe him; she never believed what he said to her, and she never believed what she said to him.

Nancy at first thought the invitation cards Tim placed on the mantelpiece—what he called the chimneypiece—were pretentious, but she thought she had to allow Tim his pretensions. Then, in the sitting rooms of homes they were invited to for dinner parties, she saw invitation cards displayed on the mantels of other fireplaces, and thought that what she had taken to be a pretentious display of social connections—some of the cards had raised gold crests on them—was actually an English custom. One evening, she found on the mantelpiece a large invitation card from someone she had never heard of to a charity event to raise money for music in country churches: a famous pianist was to play in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Kent at the Middle Temple, Champagne 7:00 p.m. Recital 7:30 p.m. Supper 8:30 p.m., Carriages at 10:30 p.m., Black Tie. She picked it up.

Tim came in with a silver salver of champagne flutes and an open bottle.

“When did this come?” she asked.

“In this morning’s post.”

“I don’t know the person who’s inviting.”

“But I do.”

“What are ‘carriages at 10:30’?” Nancy asked.

“We’ve got to be out by 10:30.”

“That doesn’t seem polite.”

He laughed a rough laugh. “Would you rather they rang a bell and shouted that it was time, as in a pub?”

Tim filled a flute and handed it to Nancy. She said, “I guess I’m just beginning to learn what it is to be English.”

Not waiting for her, Tim drank, then said, “You’ll never be English. Nor will I. I’m not English. I’m a Jew.”

The early autumn evening when they were to go to the Middle Temple was hot. Nancy liked to take a long time to bathe and make up and dress, but by the time she was sitting on the bed, putting on her shoes, Tim had not yet come home to change into his black tie. Because of the heat, the window of the bedroom was open onto the back garden. She was putting on her second shoe when Tim came into the room, taking off his suit jacket, and said, frowning, “You’re not wearing stockings.”

She raised a bare leg and lifted the skirt of her long, tight, black dress to admire her calf and ankle, and she moved her shoe from side to side. “Don’t you like the look of my leg?” she asked. She badly needed to joke with him because, really, it was ridiculous that he didn’t approve of her not wearing stockings. He would never have approved of the casual way she had dressed in New York.

He grasped one of her ankles. Startled, she began to lose balance, and threw out her arms and shouted, “Tim.” He raised her leg higher, and she fell backward onto the bed. He let go.

“Put on stockings,” he said.

She was still too startled to know what he meant. She asked, “Stockings?”

“You are not going to that party with your legs bare.”

Her dress was rucked under her and her bare legs were exposed. One shoe had fallen off.

“It’s too hot for stockings,” she said.

He appeared, suddenly, to expand, his head to become larger, his shoulders broader, his chest deeper, his hips wider, his raised hand huge, but it was particularly his head, with thick black hair and the dark shaved beard shadowing his white skin, that became so large it shocked her. His voice was equal to his size.

He shouted, “You had fucking well better get up from that bed and put on stockings.”

Stunned, she sat still for a while and noted there was a patch high on one of his cheeks where he hadn’t shaved his beard. Slowly she got up from the bed and, with one shoe on and one off, she limped to a bureau, opened a drawer, took out a crumpled pair of panty hose, and held it out to him. “Will this do?” she asked.

“It will do.” But he kept watching her as she took off her shoe, hitched up the skirt of her dress, pulled off her underpants, and, all her lower body exposed, drew on the panty hose.

She asked, “Should I wear a hat?”

“A hat will not be necessary,” he said.

They wouldn’t go by car, Tim said, but taxi, and, without asking why, Nancy simply followed him, clutching a little purse covered with black jet beads. In the taxi, as if nothing had happened between them, he told her, as he told her every evening, about his day in chambers. She listened but said nothing.

When they got out of the taxi and Tim was paying, the driver asked, smiling, “Important do this evening?” Tim grunted, all he would allow in response to the taxi driver, and Nancy, to make up for her husband, said to the taxi driver, “Come on in for a glass of champagne,” which made Tim smile at her, and he took her by the arm. Tim approved of her solicitude. She did want Tim’s approval.

The Middle Temple had stone-paved passages with polished wood-paneled walls and portraits of men in old frames. Just within the entrance was a round table holding place cards arranged in circles to indicate at what tables and in what rooms people would sit for supper. Tim looked for his name and hers. After he found them, he continued to study the seating of the guests. Then she followed him down a wooden staircase with a thick wooden banister and a red runner patterned with large blue flowers out into a garden where men and women in evening dress were gathered along a stone parapet, a wide, deep lawn extending beyond the parapet. A waiter came with a tray to offer Tim and Nancy flutes of champagne from a silver tray.

There was nothing for Nancy to do but be social. Tim introduced her to Christopher Swire, a young, bald man with large black eyes who had organized and was paying for the party, who stood before them for a silent moment before looking beyond; without excusing himself, he went off to speak to another couple standing near by.

Tim said to Nancy, “Really, Christopher only gives a do like this to be able to invite the Royals.”

Nancy looked around for the Royals.

“We’d better go up to the recital hall,” Tim said. “The seats are unreserved.”

The hall was large, with a groined ceiling and high, wood-paneled walls, and painted on every wooden panel was a coat of arms. Along a high shelf that went all round the hall were placed breastplates and helmets.

Tim saw his old friend from his Oxford days, Toby Tonks, who had been best man at the wedding in New York. Toby kissed Nancy on both cheeks, and she sat between him and Tim, who talked to one another past her.

Tim, shocked, said, “Toby, you’re wearing a clip-on bow tie.”

Toby touched his tie.

“In our Oxford days you wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing a clip-on bow tie.”

The pianist came in, sat at the grand piano, adjusted the height of the stool by turning knobs on either side of it, and then held his fingers over the keys for a moment before he struck the first chord. All the while he played, people in the audience coughed.

Nancy got through the supper, seated between two men whose names she hadn’t been told. Acting to amuse them, with sassy sensuality she knew how to project, she touched their arms to make a point and shook her breasts a little when she laughed. They were barristers, and she told them she thought the law should be reformed to allow women to batter their husbands, even to castrate their husbands, and, seeing that the more outrageous she was the more they liked it, to murder their husbands. Both men were sweating. Tim was sitting across from her at the round table, and whenever the barristers laughed she saw him look toward her and smile and nod to let her know he was pleased that she was doing such a good job.

She was deliberately acting out of her own character, and thought she was having her little revenge on him for forcing her to wear stockings on a hot night by impersonating an American seductress. Tim didn’t seem to sense this, but she knew how to get the better of him by being a social flirt in a world he had once told her he couldn’t properly behave in because he did not know how to be social, but had to rely on her.

While acting, Nancy saw through the people at the table, and what she saw, to her own strange awareness, was that there was no darkness behind these people. Shouldn’t she prefer being among people who had no darkness behind them? It did amuse her in some way that they lacked deep character because they were without darkness, for darkness behind a person authenticated that person’s character. She would make her home among these characterless people. She would be as amusingly superficial as they—would learn their habits of speech, would smile the vague smile of a duchess at people she didn’t know. She would even learn to know her place as a Jew, a place that at home she was never sure of—that being to consider herself privileged to be accepted and to appreciate the privilege, and always, always to be amusing.

Married to Tim, she would become British, and that would make her different. She would learn something about irony, irony about the British, who took delight in irony, and, too, irony about the United States, an un-ironical country.

And this was what was wrong with Yvon, she thought; he had no sense of irony, none.

Napkins falling to the floor from laps, everyone rose when the Royals, the duchess at one table and the duke at another, got up. The duchess, her eyes wide and staring apparently at nothing, walked through the standing guests, and, still apparently without seeing anything as she stared, stopped for a second before a woman and smiled a smile that seemed to float out from her face and have nothing to do with her. The woman curtsied. Then, as soon as the Royals had left, the guests dispersed, as if in a hurry to get away.

Nancy on his arm, Tim left when Toby did, and all together they walked for a while in the cool outside air after the stifling inside.

Toby said, “I was a long way from being seated at the best table.”

Tim said, “I would put our table at, say, fifth best.”

“Not too bad.”

Nancy laughed. She could not, before she married, have imagined herself in so totally different a world, a world that, for all its being foreign, did not seem so much strange as it was merely peculiar. She was in a world in which she could come to terms with the manners, could find out what carriages at ten thirty meant, find out that men shouldn’t wear clip-on bow ties, could learn, maybe, how to curtsy.

She’d married Tim, and maybe—or to use the English word, perhaps—she wondered why she had, but as much as Tim insisted he was not English, would never be English, he did, and now she did, live in an English world. With Tim, she thought, she would be free of fantasies she only now realized she had to grow out of—free, oh, of longings, a word she had to be free of. With Tim she was free to act in a world where he allowed her to act for him, who was bad at acting but admired her ability, and free to help him. And, as remarkable as this seemed to her when she first thought it, there was nothing, finally, unknowable about him.

Nancy sat close to Tim in the back seat of the taxi. He reached out to put an arm around her. “You were splendid,” he said.

“Was I?”

“You were,” he said. “Thank you, darling. You were truly splendid.”

She did what she felt was still out of character: she put her head on his shoulder, and she thought she would show him some feeling for his dependence on her, though he didn’t seem to have noticed that his wife had made a little bit of a fool of herself. She had done it for him, and it had pleased him.

She gave way to his wanting to make love that night, holding his head as if to steady him, and she wished, for him, that she would become pregnant again. His lovemaking had more consideration for her than she had known, and she thought he was now considering her as his wife, the wife who would bear a family for him, and she responded as his wife, a response that made her feel, perhaps, loving, if she allowed herself to use the word “loving” even to herself.

Before turning away from her, he said, “I’m sorry, darling, for my fit of anger earlier. I honestly don’t know where the anger comes from. I can’t imagine my father ever treating my mother in that way, so it must be something that has come to me living in England.”

“Well,” she said, “I guess you have to think yourself back into being Jewish, because Jews never get angry.”

He laughed and kissed her and turned over and switched off the lamp on his side of the bed.

He fell asleep, but she seemed to be seeing at a distance, far beyond the room, and out there snow began to fall, and she saw Yvon walking towards her through the deepening snow, Yvon from a long way away—she had no idea from how far away; and he stopped when he saw her.

Surprised, he said, Nancy.

She asked, Where have you been?

He smiled and said, Oh, lots of places.

In America, she asked?

All over America, he said, all over this country.

What were you doing all over?

Collecting specimens of rocks.

And are you happy now?

No, not really, but that doesn’t matter. He smiled a wider smile and said, I won’t ever be happy, because, you see, I was born unhappy.

Ah, she said, Yvon, and, as if pleading, called out to him to come closer, Yvon.

But as he was walking away in the falling snow, he asked, And you, are you happy?

No, she answered, no, I’m not.

He disappeared in the snow, and she was left with an overwhelming sense of longing.

She was in her bedroom brushing her hair in front of the full-length mirror. She had not redecorated the room as she once thought she would. Reflected in the mirror she could see behind her part of the bedroom wall, a curtain, and half a window, and outside the window a plane tree in sunlight, its leaves going faintly brown-yellow. She focused on the tree in the mirror, not herself, when she noticed a blue pigeon perched on a branch; the sense came to her that someone was standing behind her, just where the mirror didn’t reflect, and the moment she thought this she felt that this person was about to grab her and pull her backward. Startled, her brush raised and her hair flying, she turned. No one was there. As soon as she finished brushing her hair, she went downstairs to find Tim.

She came into the sitting room while Tim was on the telephone, the telephone receiver in the crook of his neck and a tiny agenda, soft leather with gilt-edged paper and a silk page keeper, in his hands. He said, over the receiver, “Let me see,” and turned the pages of the agenda. Nancy was uncertain if he wanted her in the room while he was on the telephone, and the way he looked at her gave no indication whether he wanted her to stay or go. He said, “No, no, next week won’t do.” Maybe (“maybe,” Nancy thought, or “perhaps”) he was speaking to one of his friends from his Oxford days. Tim had been at Christ Church at Oxford, and a lot of his friends were also from Oxford, and he saw them on his own. But Nancy heard Tim say, “Yes, the week after will do for Nancy and me, that will do, but let me check.” He turned the pages of his little agenda and said, “No, no, wait, it won’t do, I see I’ve penciled in dinner, and we’re waiting to hear if it’s on or not. But the weekend after that, I see, is perfectly free.” As Nancy was turning to leave the sitting room, leaving it up to Tim to make whatever plans he wanted, excluding or including her, he waved his agenda at her to stay. He spoke a little more over the telephone, smiling broadly, and when he hung up he said, “We’re going to the Kesses in Scotland.”

“Who are the Kesses?” Nancy asked.

“Hilary and James Kess, old friends I’ve wanted you to meet. They’ll like you, you’ll see,” he said, but he spoke as if he wasn’t sure they would, as if their liking her or not was not up to them, but up to her. He said, “I’m counting on you,” and she tried to imagine these people who meant something to Tim that she didn’t understand, and whom Tim insisted she must like. She had no choice. James Kess was a retired judge.

They took the train to Scotland first class, and changed at Keswick for a local to Dumfries in the Lowlands. They arrived by taxi over the narrow, dark country roads at the Kesses’ Victorian brick castle with a neo-Gothic porch, a crenellated tower, and narrow, pointed, leaded windows. James and Hilary met their guests in the hall, which had a high coffered wooden ceiling and uneven stone flagging.

Hilary Kess said immediately that there was cold salmon in the kitchen, and led the way. She stopped at two long grooves worn into the flagging of the passage and said, “These were caused by the wheels of the tea trolley being pushed into the drawing room and back into the kitchen for years and years.”

Nancy admired the grooves in the stone.

She was never really introduced to the Kesses by Tim, but she supposed that didn’t matter, because they knew who she was and she knew who they were, and perhaps in England it wasn’t done to introduce people one already knew by name.

In the kitchen, at a long deal table set with china plates on the bare wood and blue napkins printed with tiny white flowers and crystal wine and water glasses and silver and, at the center, the cold, skinned salmon surrounded by slices of cucumber, they sat to eat. Nancy saw how pleased Hilary and James were to have Tim with them, and, if they paid less attention to her than to him, she understood they were closer to him and that there were reasons for their closeness that had to do with James’ past profession and Tim’s present profession, and even if they didn’t talk about this, they were both in a world that was as complicated as the making of dates, and she, who had never found making a date complicated, was still outside of that world, a world of names that Hilary recognized. James Kess kept filling their glasses with white wine.

Distracted from the talk, Nancy noted that in the kitchen was a large range with many ovens, and an overstuffed sofa was set before the range.

Addressing Nancy for the first time since she and Tim had arrived, Hilary said to her, “It was noble of you to come all this way to meet us.”

Nancy laughed a little. “Oh,” she said, not sure how to deal with the extravagance, “I don’t know how noble I am.”

“No, no,” Hilary said, “I mean just how noble you are for coming, far, far beyond the call of duty. I’m sure we’re going to have the grandest time all together, however catch as catch can it will be, because, I must tell you, we haven’t planned to account for each and every one of your minutes here with entertainments. We rather let our guests do what they want. Isn’t that why you like coming, Tim, because you can do here just exactly as you want?”

Tim said to her, “My reasons for coming here are multiple.”

It could be, Nancy thought, that one of Tim’s reasons for coming was that he wanted to become a judge.

Hilary said to Nancy, “We leave you, shamelessly, to your devices, while we, without you, get on with all the boring bits we have to get on with. You won’t mind getting your own breakfast on Sunday morning when we skip off to church? We go because, really, we’re not native to the place, and we think it helps us, in a hokey-pokey way, with the locals if they see us in church.”

Hokey-pokey? Nancy wondered, staring at Hilary, who seemed to be waiting for her to speak. It occurred to Nancy to offer to go to church with the Kesses, but then she thought maybe, or perhaps, not.

Nancy asked, “Where are you from, then?”

“London,” James said. “And we thought we’d move as far away as possible from the Old Bailey and the London world of law when I retired.”

“And here we are,” Hilary said, “trying to fit in, higgledy-piggledy, with the locals, and, of course, always, but always, getting things wrong.”

“But not as wrong as our recent American guest who offended everyone by wearing a plaid tie when we went to dine at a neighbor’s house,” James said. He laughed, a shrugging laugh. “I was wicked. I didn’t tell him, when I saw his bright tartan tie, just how much he would offend. I am wicked.”

“Oh, but they weren’t really offended, not really. I didn’t think so,” Hilary said. “Really, they took it all in good humor after all, and even promised our American friend they’d set him up with his own tartan.”

“Of course they never would,” James said.

As they walked from the kitchen into the hall, Hilary said, “Whenever I wear tartan, I make sure it’s the Royal Stewart, which is the Queen’s, and which all her subjects are entitled to wear.”

“I see,” Nancy said.

They sat before the neo-Gothic stone fireplace in big, dark leather armchairs and a big, dark leather sofa in the hall. A suit of armor, rusty about the edges, stood against a frayed, hanging tapestry. James offered to light the fire, but Tim said it wasn’t really necessary: it wasn’t cold and he and Nancy would go to bed soon. Hilary told James to offer brandy if he wasn’t going to light the fire.

James said to Nancy, “The armor has nothing to do with ancestry, not Hilary’s or mine, at any rate.”

“Nor the castle, not that it is anything like an ancestral castle,” Hilary said. “Goodness, I don’t have any ancestry to brag about, I want to make that perfectly clear; nor, really, does James. James wanted to leave London, so we looked through Country Lifefor places, and took a liking to this from a photograph. It wasn’t expensive and didn’t need much work. We moved in during the summer, and what we didn’t know was how bitterly cold and rainy it would be for most of the rest of the year.”

James said, “And even in the summer it’s often cold and rainy.”

“It was sunny today,” Nancy said.

“Freakish,” Hilary said. “Most of the year we live in the kitchen, where it’s cozy. We sit on the lovely, chintzy sofa in front of the Aga and doze.”

“In fact,” James said. “It’s terrible here, terrible. It’s rainy and cold all the time.”

Hilary said she had invited George and Constance Plummerton the next day, Sunday, for lunch. They, too, had moved to Scotland from London, but, Hilary said, like herself and James, there wasn’t anything Scottish in them. George was English, and Constance was mostly Welsh.

Nancy thought she was beginning to hear different accents, and it occurred to her that Hilary’s accent was not English—not, anyway, of a class that Tim had learned at school, or so Nancy assumed. But she wouldn’t ask Hilary where she was from originally.

Holding a snifter of brandy by the base and swirling the brandy in it, Tim said to Nancy, “He’s Sir George.”

She said, “I’ll remember that.”

Hilary said, “He was knighted, but, you know, he was an Hon., born an Hon.—really more distinguished than to be knighted.”

“What was George knighted for?” Tim asked.

So, Nancy noted, Tim didn’t call him Sir George, as he told her to; he said George.

“You don’t know? I’m surprised. For his English bicycles,” James said.

Tim jerked his head back and said, “Of course, of course,” then repeated, “of course,” so Nancy realized that he hadn’t known.

Nancy, who felt that they were all playing a game they didn’t take seriously, said, “I had an English three-speed bicycle when I was growing up in America. Everyone I knew had to have an English three-speed bicycle.”

James said, “George was knighted for exporting them to America, where, just as you say, you and everyone you knew had to have one, which meant that lots of American dollars came in exchange to the United Kingdom. He made the United Kingdom richer, and he became very rich, and he became Sir George.”

Tim said, “George once told me that at a fancy do such as an embassy dinner he knows, just by looking around at the others present during drinks beforehand, where, by protocol, he will be seated. He said he’s never wrong.”

Hilary suggested to Nancy that the ladies retire and leave the men to talk, given how much James liked to talk with Tim. James smiled at Nancy and said quietly, “Tim’s a clever young man.”

Tim said, “I hope the recognition of that is one of the reasons my wife had for marrying me.”

Nancy said, “Of course it was.”

“His cleverness won’t disappoint you,” Hilary said to Nancy.

All Nancy could think of to say, meekly and in appreciation of being so lucky to be married to a man whose cleverness supposedly wouldn’t disappoint her, was, “Thank you.”

Taking Nancy’s hand as though to reassure her, Hilary said to Tim, “I’m not at all sure I should introduce George and Constance to Nancy as Sir George and Lady Plummerton. I don’t have a butler, but open the door myself. We’re really quite informal, in a rather tinkerty-tonk way. It would be awkward, in the midst of our informality, to be so formal. And how would I introduce Nancy, if all the rest of us go by first names, as Mrs. Arbib?” She let go of Nancy’s hand.

“I see the difficulty,” Tim said.

“Then don’t call anyone anything,” James said.

“There is that,” Hilary said.

In their bedroom alone, while Tim was using the bath down the passage, Nancy held a drawn curtain aside to look out a leaded window to black pine trees against the deep gray sky, and she felt the pull to look behind her, and she glanced back into the room, at the bed with high posts and a large wardrobe.

And this came over her: grief, the word itself a revelation, as she had never before thought it applied to her so deeply, especially now, here in this large, cold house with people she didn’t want to know, with a husband she was suddenly afraid to know.

She asked herself how she would act as Tim would expect her the next day, and she got into bed, under the heavy blankets. When Tim, in pajamas and a towel over an arm, came into the room, she turned away.

He said, “I really would have expected Hilary to know how to introduce you to Constance Plummerton. Constance, may I introduce Nancy. And Nancy Arbib, Lady Plummerton. But it would be as vulgar of me to tell her as it would to correct her idiotic usage of idiotic expressions. It never occurred to me quite as much before that she’s Australian, and childish, rather.”

When he was in bed next to her, she said, “Please switch off the light.”

In the morning, while James and Hilary were at church, Tim and Nancy took a walk wearing gum boots. The autumn day was sunny. The sharp, flinty hills were dark green, and on them, isolated, were one-story stone houses painted white, the stone doorways and window frames bright blue or red or green.

They walked along a river. A rotting sheep stood upright in the current, the clear water swirling around its exposed skull.

In the high distance, the castle, as they walked back to it, appeared to have a cloud gathering about it in the sunlight. Tim and Nancy joined Hilary and James in the hall to wait for their guests. Hilary kept twisting her pearl necklace. She said, “I hear a car,” and quickly went to the door and opened it. An elderly woman in a cardigan and a high-necked jersey and woolen trousers came in and Hilary kissed her on both cheeks, and then an elderly gentleman, in a pullover that looked too big for him, one of the wings of his tie-less collar under the V neck and one out, and Hilary kissed him on both cheeks. And after James and Tim kissed the woman and shook the hand of the man, Hilary, smiling more widely and gesturing with one hand to present her grandly, said, “This is Tim’s wife.” Hilary did not call the woman and man anything. They both said to Nancy, “How do you do,” and Nancy held out her hand, but as soon as she did she realized it hadn’t occurred to the woman and man to do the same, perhaps because they’d assumed it wouldn’t have been expected, and just as Nancy was lowering her hand they stepped forward with their hands extended toward her. Embarrassed, Hilary laughed.

She said, “Now that we’re all happily together, we’ll go into the drawing room for sherry, which I’m sure you’re all passionate for.”

Why now, in the drawing room rather than the hall, Nancy wondered, except, perhaps, for a fire in the fireplace that heated the room, while a fire in the hall would not have heated even the hearth.

At a table set with bottles and glasses under another frayed tapestry, James did the honors with the drinks. No one had sherry except Nancy, who, because Hilary had said they would have sherry, supposed that that was what she should have.

Hilary said to Sir George and Lady Plummerton, “You really are noble, braving this dreary day to come to us.”

“Isn’t it sunny today?” Lady Plummerton asked.

“It won’t last,” Hilary said. “We’ll see, only too sadly, how dreary the day will get.”

Tim asked the couple how Augusta was, and they said she was having a delightful time, and they should, really, have been annoyed at her ringing every day from so far away, which was frightfully expensive, but they were, after all, reassured to know she was quite all right out there.

“Who’s Augusta?” Nancy asked.

“Our daughter,” replied Lady Plummerton, not quite looking at Nancy, maybe, Nancy thought, because she was shy.

“And where is she?”

“Mombasa,” Sir George said, and he also seemed too shy to look at Nancy as he spoke. “Africa, you know.”

“Remember that story about Africa Lord Fairley used to tell,” Tim said, “about an uncle of his coming back to England from some African colony with a lion cub, which, on the high seas, fell overboard, and, as the captain refused to stop for a lion cub, the uncle jumped over the railing to save it, knowing he would stop for a marquis.”

Blinking rapidly, Lady Plummerton said, “No, I don’t remember.”

Tim laughed and said, “And then the cub grew up into a fully developed lion, which the family kept on the grounds of their country house, and one day it ate the uncle.” Tim drank. “Well, the lion was given to the London Zoo, and Lord Fairley remembered being taken by his aunt to see the lion that ate his uncle.”

Sir George said, “We didn’t know Lord Fairley.”

“I am sorry,” Tim said.

“Not at all,” Sir George said.

Nancy asked him, “What is your daughter doing in Mombasa?”

Lady Plummerton said, “She did something rather silly—we never understood why—and after she recovered a bit and thought she’d like to get away, she chose Mombasa.”

Looking into the distance, Sir George said quietly, “She can be very silly.”

Nancy thought she hadn’t understood them—they couldn’t be so open and blithe that they were telling her, someone they hadn’t even been introduced to, that their daughter had tried to kill herself. Repeating the expression Lady Plummerton had used, but with a tone of incredulity that asked, please, for an explanation of something she couldn’t have understood, she asked, “She tried to do herself in?”

“I’m afraid so,” Lady Plummerton said, blinking, not looking directly at Nancy.

Nancy saw Tim frowning at her, and she knew that she mustn’t ask anything more about Augusta. Maybe, she thought, their being so open about their daughter precluded anyone asking anything more than what they had stated.

Sir George tried to smile when he said, “We hope she doesn’t return with a lion cub that will grow up to eat us.”

Hilary said, “I should think we’re all desperate to eat,” and suggested they go to the dining room.

Lunch was at a round table in the dining room, not at the table in the kitchen. Sir George sat on Hilary’s right, next to him sat Nancy, and then James, then Lady Plummerton, and, completing the circle, Tim, on Hilary’s left. Tim smiled at Nancy across the table, and there was some expectation from her in the smile.

Hilary rang a little bell, and an old man wearing black tie came in carrying a bowl of rice and mushrooms. Sir George leaned back in his chair and, raising his hand in a salute, said, “How are you, Arthur?” to which the old man said, “Keeping well, sir.” Arthur held the bowl, a little shakily, for the guests, all casual in their sweaters, not one man wearing a tie.

When he left, Hilary said, “Without any kind of permanent help, I don’t know what I’d do without Arthur coming in from time to time.”

“What would any of us do?” Lady Plummerton asked.

“Last week, he helped me hang the curtains in my sitting room.”

“He’s especially good with hanging curtains,” Hilary said.

“Who is Arthur?” Nancy asked.

Sir George said, “Arthur? You mean, there is someone in the world who doesn’t know who Arthur is? Arthur is a Polish refugee from the war who landed in the village, and has been here longer than any of us.”

“And we’re all dependent on him,” James said.

Arthur came in with the bowl of rice and mushrooms again for second helpings.

Nancy listened to the others at the table talk and laugh about people she had never heard of; no one bothered to explain to her who they were. She heard names—Clarissa and Robert and Alicia and Humphrey—but she had no idea how these names related to one another, and the conversation was too involved for her to break in and ask who was who, or if, she wondered, she should break in and ask. No one addressed her or even looked at her to include her in what was being said, with such hilarity, about Clarissa and Robert and Alicia and Humphrey.

Nancy thought it was up to her to take part, but the only way she could, without spoiling the fun by asking for explanations, was to laugh when they laughed, though she didn’t know what she was laughing about. Tim, who had pleaded with her to help him in social gatherings, appeared to be just where he wanted to be.

Nancy kept thinking of their daughter Augusta.

Hilary said, “We’ll go back to the drawing room for coffee, which I’m sure you’re all frantic for.”

No, Nancy thought, Hilary can’t be English.

The drawing room had French windows that gave onto a lawn and a stone wall; beyond the stone wall the land rose and fell, gray-green, under a gray sky. As they entered the room, Hilary, drawn to the windows, said, “Hounds.” Nancy, too, went to the windows and saw a pack of hounds, their noses to the ground and their tongues out, running across a gray-green misty field toward a row of dark pines. Hilary said, “You see, the hounds are tonguing the air. I’ve learned all this sort of thing, not that I ever get it right, but I go along, making my way.” After the hounds came the mounted hunters. “We’ll know when they’ve killed the fox,” Hilary said. “We’ll hear it.”

Wild barking came from beyond the pines.

Nancy heard herself say, “How horrible,” and it was only when the room went silent that she realized everyone had heard her.

When the barking stopped, Hilary turned away from Nancy and, looking about the room, folded her hands together and said, “Well now, more coffee for anyone?”

Sir George said he would, and Lady Plummerton said she wouldn’t, but that they really should be going. However, Sir George held out his cup to Hilary, and, with it filled, he went to Nancy, still standing at the windows. She looked out as he approached her.

Quietly, he said to her, “If I didn’t think I had to, I wouldn’t do it. Fox hunting is barbaric, but, then, the British are barbaric.”

She said, “Sir George, I’m a foreigner here.”

“Please call me George,” he said, “if you’ll allow me to call you—” He paused.

“Nancy.”

“Yes, of course—Nancy.”

After Sir George and Lady Plummerton left, James said Hilary must have a rest, she absolutely must, and Hilary, laughing as if she must give in to him, said to Tim and Nancy, “What can I do now but have a rest?”

“We’ll see you for tea,” James said.

As soon as James and Hilary went, leaving Tim and Nancy alone in the drawing room, Tim frowned at Nancy in a way that made her draw back a little. But she followed him up to their room, and as soon as their door was shut, Tim’s entire body, and particularly his head, expanded with sudden rage. He shouted, “What the fuck do you know about fox hunting? You humiliated me before my friends.”

Nancy sat on the bed. “Your bloody friends.”

“And I’ll thank you not to use the word bloody, which, you obviously do not know, is offensive in this country. You shouldn’t use offensive language to describe people in whose company you should considered yourself honored to be.”

“What you don’t know is Sir George came up to me and agreed and said it was barbaric and that if he weren’t English he wouldn’t hunt.”

“There you see. He was being polite. A gentleman.”

“Anyway, Sir George and Lady Plummerton did not ask me one direct question, not one.”

Tim breathed in deeply. “You need to understand why they didn’t ask you questions.” Tim put on a professional voice to explain. “Because, by the mere fact of your being among us at an intimate luncheon party, everyone’s assumption is that you are known to everyone, and such questions could only make you feel you don’t belong.”

“But they didn’t know anything about me.”

“Let me try again. I realize it’s rather subtle. They didn’t ask you questions about your life because your being among us meant they should have known everything, and they didn’t want to offend you by asking questions that would have revealed they didn’t. Do you understand anything of what I’m saying?”

She asked, “Why are you trying to make stupid excuses for the English?”

“What do you know about being English?”

“What do you know?” she shouted. “You yourself told me, you’re a Jew.”

Tim swung his arm out and back and hit her with the back of his hand on the side of her face, and she fell backward onto the bed.

The blow did not leave a mark, but James and Hilary knew from Nancy’s stunned look that something had happened, and at tea, the elderly couple were attentive to her.

When Hilary left her side on the sofa James took her place. He seemed to have had his little talk prepared when he said to Nancy, “I want to tell you something about London.” James leaned toward her and smiled a little. “Many people, the British included, imagine there is a center to London where, if they can only get to it, they will be established forever. They may think that being invited to dine at the Coffees’ house puts them at the center, but they find, when, at another dinner party at the Teas, they let it be known that just last week they dined at the house of the Coffees, that the Teas will say, ‘My God, you didn’t! The Coffees are the most boring people in the world,’ and they will think they made a terrible mistake and the center was not at the Coffees but at the Teas. And then, the next week, when, at the Cocoas, they let it drop that they are on such good terms with the Teas that they have been invited for the weekend, the Cocoas will say, ‘Not the Teas! My God, how can you bear the Teas?’ and they will think, again, that they have made a terrible mistake, and, really, the center is at the Cocoas. And this will go on and on in that way until they are invited to Buckingham Palace to dine with the queen, who they are absolutely sure is the center, and will drop this bit of information when they meet the Horlickses at a reception, and the Horlickses tell them they consider the queen a Hanoverian arriviste and they won’t have anything to do with her socially.”

Tim, holding a cup of tea, laughed.

Without looking at him, James continued to Nancy, “I think this is something even Tim, who purports to understand everything about London, does not understand.”

Tim put down his cup and laughed louder.

In bed, waiting for Tim, Nancy felt grief, grief for whom or for what she didn’t know, come over her again, and she rose from the bed and went to the window and watched the crows in the pine trees.

Nancy became pregnant again, then had another miscarriage. Tim was made very anxious by this, and said over and over that something had to be done. In his anxiety he blamed their doctor, and threatened to bring a suit for malpractice. She said sadly but calmly, “Please don’t,” and he set his jaw. She was made deeply sad by the miscarriage, sad not only because the choice to be a mother was taken away from her, but because she believed she would have been a good mother.

She put on weight, more than when she’d been pregnant. Her white, finely freckled breasts bulged in her bra, and her hips expanded and rounded.

She thought she must, for Tim’s sake, become pregnant again. She did, and Tim’s anxiety left him, but she had another miscarriage. Again he shouted that something would be done, something had to be done. She stood calmly and listened to him. She would do anything, anything he said she must do, but, in herself, as though accepting what she knew was beyond her control, she accepted that she wouldn’t be a mother. Her sadness made her calm. After a hysterectomy, for which her mother came to care for her, she grew a little more plump. She was aware that not being able to have children changed the way Tim felt for her, although because this was not her fault, she was also aware that he wanted to be fair toward her. After they made love, he still said thank you, and his thank you was a statement, even a tender statement, of his appreciation of her, however disappointed he was.

In the space of a year, Tim’s mother died. Shortly after, his father died, and at his cremation in Golders Green crematorium Tim introduced to Nancy his father’s mistress, Helen Phillips, whom he insisted stand by his side. Nancy had not known that Mr. Arbib had a mistress, as Tim did and accepted, and she wondered if Mrs. Arbib had known. Yes, Tim said, she had known, she had known, and that was all he said.

Anxiety always made Tim work, with determination, to put right what was wrong. She knew that he would never give in and accept that wrongs could not be put right, and she admired him for this. And yet she felt pity, if pity was the word, for him, because she knew that his insisting that what was impossibly wrong be put right would not put the wrong right, any more than she could be made to have children for him. She felt tender towards him for what he wanted and what she couldn’t give him.

His father’s collection of old-master prints was sold at a Christie’s auction, with a catalogue devoted to it that reproduced each work, giving its provenance and details of its condition. With his inheritance and the money from the sale, Tim was, after taxes, able to buy a house in upper Hampstead with a white façade and a portico over the black street door. The anxiety of having work done on the house and having it decorated and furnished—the builders never did what they were supposed to in the way Tim wanted it and on time, the decorators’ drop cloths didn’t cover the parquet floors so paint was splattered on them, the wrong pieces of furniture were delivered—made Tim so agitated that Nancy worried about him.

He assembled his remaining collection—the paintings and brass vessels and glass vials and ancient oil lamps and statuettes—in his new study, propping the smaller paintings against books in the bookshelves where he also placed the objects, and he stacked the larger paintings against a wall. The Torah case he placed on the table in the middle of the study. He kept the door to his study shut, so Nancy glimpsed inside only when he went in or came out and she was nearby. She was aware that this was where he must go for whatever reason he had to withdraw there—to be alone, she thought, and deal with the disorder that made him anxious, and she never entered.

She wanted to allay Tim’s anxiety. If she could not make him a father, she could, she thought help him in his professional life. If he was determined, so could she be. When the house was in order, Nancy thought of asking James and Hilary Kess to come for a weekend, and she would give what she had learned to call a drinks party for them. She would ask whom they’d like to have invited, hoping to bring together for Tim a house full of judges.

The Kesses said the weather in the Lowlands had been so bad they hadn’t left their kitchen in weeks, except to run, run, through the cold rooms to their bedroom at night to get quickly into bed, and in the morning from bed to the Aga in the kitchen. They’d love to come to London to stay with Nancy and Tim, and it was princely of the young couple to invite them. As for the drinks party, it was royal of them to want to have it. Hilary suggested a few guests, but she must really leave it to them to invite whomever they would like to have. As Nancy didn’t know who the right people would be, she left the guest list up to Tim. He made it out carefully, and gave it to her to do the inviting.

“Who is Gabriella Almansi?” Nancy asked.

“An Italian lawyer,” Tim answered.

In the early autumn evening, the rooms were becoming dark and Nancy was lighting the lamps when the doorbell rang, and the young woman hired for the party went to open the door for the first guest. A slender woman with a slender neck and short auburn hair and blue eye makeup but no lipstick came in. She was wearing a dark, double-breasted, pin-striped business suit, the skirt narrow and long, with a white blouse, and she went quickly to Nancy to say, with an accent that was like a deep shadow to her clear English, “I am sorry to arrive in my work clothes, but I thought that if I went home to change I would be very late. Now I see I’m early.” She held out a slender hand and said, “I am Almansi, Gabriella.”

Hilary and James came into the sitting room from upstairs, and Nancy introduced Gabriella to them. James shook her hand, but Hilary, smiling, stood back and, as she had learned to do, fingered her pearl necklace. Gabriella exclaimed to Hilary, “What a very beautiful pearl necklace.”

Hilary asked, “Oh, do you like it?” and Gabriella, laughing, said, “Be careful—as a lawyer, I would use all my knowledge to justify my stealing it with impunity.” James laughed, and Gabriella turned to him and said, “I think we have common friends.” He made her laugh now, asking, “How common?” Nancy and Hilary turned to each other as Gabriella and James talked about their friends in common. An elderly woman came in with a tray of champagne and orange juice.

Tim was not yet down, and Nancy felt awkward introducing herself to other guests who began to arrive. Just as she was about to go upstairs to get Tim, he appeared. She was speaking to three men, trying to keep the conversation about opera at Covent Garden going, and she expected Tim to come to her, but he went immediately to Gabriella and James, who were still talking, she presumed, about their common friends. Hilary, twisting her pearl necklace in her fingers, was standing aside, alone.

Two tall women came in, younger, Nancy thought, than she, and they came to introduce themselves to her with accents Nancy couldn’t place. She didn’t get their names. In America she would have asked them to repeat their names, but here no one did that, and she continued to try to behave as the English did. Neither could she remember the names of the men, so she stood back a little to make room and, gesturing from one to the other with her arm, let the men introduce themselves. She looked again at Tim talking to Gabriella and James, all of them intent. Tim’s neck, she thought, was bulging over his shirt collar.

One of the tall young newcomers was blonde and wore a black cocktail dress with a large rhinestone necklace and long rhinestone earrings. Nancy saw the smooth cleavage between her small breasts. Her shoes had very high heels. The other tall woman was brunette, in a tan silk dress with long sleeves and a high, round neck tied with a bow of the same material.

When Nancy went to Tim to tell him they had come in, he looked over her head and, smiling, said, “They’re Brigitte and Erica.”

“Who are Brigitte and Erica? Were they on the guest list?” she asked.

He said, “Girls who work in the Temple. I thought I’d ask them. They’re German.”

“Oh,” Nancy said.

Tim said, “I’d better go and talk to them.”

After Tim moved away, James left, and Gabriella Almansi was standing alone. By the smile Gabriella gave her, a smile that tried to be open in a face closed with reservations, Nancy knew suddenly that she and Tim were having an affair. She felt a sense of displacement and wondered for an instant who she was and what she was doing at this party in this house, standing in front of this adulterous woman.

She heard herself say, “It was a dreary day, wasn’t it?”

Gabriella, who knew exactly who she was and thought she had every reason to be in this house at this party, said, laughing lightly, “You have become very English, talking about the weather.” She had, Nancy thought, every right to be having an affair with Tim.

Nancy didn’t know what to say to her. As if from a distance, she saw herself introduce Gabriella to a couple standing nearby, and as soon as Gabriella took command of the conversation with them, Nancy, without excusing herself but feeling she had become invisible, turned away from them. She felt that no one at the party, now crowded, saw her.

Involuntarily, she looked again for Gabriella, and saw her talking with another woman.

She didn’t go to look for Tim. She went through the guests in the sitting room and the dining room and into the kitchen. The girl who had answered the door was arranging little sausages on a dish. Nancy went past her, through the open back door, and down the cast-iron stairs to the garden. The air in the dark garden was moist and humid, and the thick ivy growing on the back wall looked black. She walked slowly to the end, where there was an old apple tree. Ivy grew up the trunk of the apple tree and about its lower branches. Small creatures moving in it made the ivy rustle abruptly here and there, and then it went still.

Why, she asked herself, hadn’t it occurred to her that of course Tim would have an affair? If he had been able to, he would, like his father, have had a mistress, but married men whose fathers had lived in a world in which they had mistresses didn’t themselves have mistresses, they had affairs.

She turned round to the back of the house, which was attached to similar houses by shared brick walls, and she saw lighted windows all along. She saw the lighted windows of her kitchen, no one inside, and, above, the lighted windows of the rooms. Hilary stood at one of them, alone, looking out. Nancy drew back, though she was sure Hilary could not see her. Hilary was twisting her necklace in her fingers. Nancy looked up to the lighted windows of what would have been the nursery and saw in one Tim, and in the other the girl with the rhinestone earrings.

She had always thought men were excused for being helpless in what they wanted, but, in her naive egocentricity, she had thought that what men most wanted in their helplessness was support.

Upstairs, Tim gestured to the girl that they must go and opened the door for her to go out first, then shut the door behind him onto the empty room, the light still lit.

Nancy knew he was not doing anything to hurt her. Again she told herself she felt that the very helplessness with which men wanted to make love, the helplessness she thought of, no matter how old and how experienced the man, of a boy wanting to make love for the first time, was their excuse, if they needed an excuse. They didn’t. And they shouldn’t be blamed for what they longed for. But—, she thought, and she didn’t know what she meant by this “but.”

In the nursery that Nancy had learned to call the spare room, Hilary turned off the light and disappeared into darkness, then reappeared in the light that shone in from the passage when she opened the door to go back to the party. Nancy wondered about Hilary’s withdrawal.

Slowly Nancy returned, because she knew she must, into the house. Tim and the two girls were drinking champagne together on one side of the dining room table, and, without looking at them, Nancy passed on the other side of the table to go into the sitting room.

Gabriella came to her to tell her she must go, and to thank her.

Nancy said, “You were the first to arrive, and you’re the first to leave.”

Gabriella said, “My husband is waiting at home, and I am sure the baby is howling and he is trying to calm the little darling. You and Tim will come to dinner. I will make you a special Italian Jewish dish.”

Nancy felt guilty that she had suspected the sleek and commanding Italian. Taking Gabriella’s hand in hers, Nancy, surprised, asked, “You’re Jewish?”

“You couldn’t tell?”

“I couldn’t.”

“But Almansi is a Jewish name.”

“I didn’t know,” Nancy said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gabriella said, and, still holding Nancy’s hand, leaned forward to kiss her on a cheek, and Nancy moved her head so Gabriella kissed her on the lips. Nancy flushed, but Gabriella, stepping back, held Nancy’s hand in both hers and said, coolly, “Or perhaps I shall try to cook alla Americanafor you,” and she said goodbye and left Nancy feeling she was an uncultured American.

Tim was coming toward her with the girls on either side of him. He said to Nancy, “Erika has come to thank you before she leaves,” and Erika held out her long, thin hand. Tim didn’t mention the other girl, who stood behind Erika as Nancy shook Erika’s hand and said she was glad she’d had a good time at the party. Erika’s small, thin nose was a little crooked at the bridge. Nancy said goodbye to the other girl, and Tim accompanied them out.

Softly clapping his hands, as though he were congratulating himself on a successful performance, James Kess entered the sitting room with Hilary. It had been arranged: they were to have supper out with a judge and his wife.

In what seemed to her a rush, all the guests approached Nancy to thank her and say goodbye, and she, a little detached, tried her best to make them think she was happier that they had come than that they were leaving. They were all gone within ten minutes.

Tim said to Nancy, “I’m going into the kitchen for grub.”

“I’ll get you something to eat,” she said.

In the kitchen, while the helpers quietly cleaned up, Tim sat at one end of the kitchen table with a plate of cold chicken and salad and a bottle of champagne, and Nancy, who wasn’t eating or drinking, sat at the other end.

Tired, she put her elbows on the edge of the table and held her head up, her hands under her jaw. She watched Tim eat and drink. His taut neck muscles swelled against his stiff, white, shiny collar, which, because his shirt was striped, looked like an old-fashioned detachable collar. His lips were thin, as were his nostrils and the lobes of his ears. His hair, with a rigidly straight parting that showed his white skull, was combed smoothly in place. It was, she thought, a sort of groomed starkness.

The helpers finished their work and stood by the table while Tim, leaning back in his chair, reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket for his wallet, extracted some bills, and held them out to the older woman who, it seemed to Nancy, curtsied just a little as she took them. He said, “You’ll sort out between you who is owed what. And, mind, I don’t want one of you suing the other and coming to me for legal aid.”

The two laughed and left, only turning back at the door to say goodnight to Nancy.

Nancy said to Tim, “During the party, I went out into the back garden.”

He poured himself another glass of champagne. “To get away for a bit? I don’t blame you. I hate parties as well as anyone, but, here we are, they are useful. And, I must say, darling, on the whole it was quite a useful party. Thank you for your pains.”

She said, “From outside, I saw the light on in what was meant to be the nursery.”

Tim thrust out his jaw, apparently thinking. “As evidence of what, do you think?”

“I saw you and the German girl in the room.”

“And what were we doing?”

“Talking.”

“Quite right. We were talking. She is a Cambridge graduate, speaks not only German and English and French and Italian and Spanish, but also Russian. Do you know the Russian word for kiss is something like pazzo-lui, which in Italian means he’s crazy?”

“I did know.”

“I was proposing to Erika that she work for me.”

“I’m sure, with all her languages, she’ll be very useful, in the new, united, multilingual Europe and all that. Is she Jewish?”

“Does she, do you think, have a Jewish name?”

“I’m sort of vague about what is and what isn’t a Jewish name.”

“She doesn’t, but, yes, her mother is Jewish.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nancy said.

Tim drank down the champagne, then, with the tips of his fingers, he pushed the glass a full arm’s length away on the table. “I shall now do a little reading of certain papers for tomorrow.”

That “certain” meant the papers were important, and also meant she should ask him about these important papers. He had always counted on her interest, and he counted on it now, to listen to him talk about his work. She said, “Tell me,” as tears rose into her eyes.

He said, “You’re tired. Go to bed, darling. I’ll stay up to read, but won’t be late coming to bed myself.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to talk?”

“Thank you, but I’ll be able to sort everything out, this one time, without having to talk it through with you. Go to bed.”

He was tender in his consideration for her, and his tenderness made the tears rise more and run down the sides of her nose.

Tim got up and stood over her. “You’re weeping.”

As she looked up at him, blinking, tears ran down her face.

“I know how demanding I can be,” he said, “and I must tell you I am sorry.”

“I don’t mind your being demanding,” she said. “It’s just that—”

“What?”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to do enough.”

“You find I am demanding more than you can give?”

“Sometimes.”

He looked away from her.

She said, “I thought it’d be enough, helping you as much as I could by supporting you in your world.”

Looking down at her again, he said, “But you’ve already proven yourself in that, which is more than enough for me.”

A small sob broke from her and she pressed her hand to her mouth. Tim leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. Weeping, Nancy asked, “Why did you marry me? I’m not beautiful, I’m not rich, as an American. I’m no help to you here. And now I can’t have your child. Why?”

This made Tim stand back. He asked, “Don’t you know?”

“No, no.”

“I married you because I loved you, though I once did tell you I don’t use the word love.”

Pressing both hands to her mouth, Nancy rose and hurried out.

In bed, when, finally, she heard Tim come into the room, she pretended to be asleep. From what seemed a great remove from him, she heard him undress and carefully hang his clothes up and put on his pajamas and come to the bed, and as he got into bed her sense of removal became greater.

They lay side by side, and Nancy imagined that all about them was a big hollow, and the bed floated in that hollow.

Surprise jolted her body when she heard, just heard before she understood, Tim say, “Have you been having suspicions about me?”

The hollow they were in expanded so much their bed became, in it, tiny, and her voice, which surprised her when she heard it as much as Tim’s had, was also tiny. She said, “Yes.”

“Ah.”

“Do I have reason to feel suspicious?”

The hollow expanded more, and Tim said, “Yes, you do.” He turned toward her and asked, “Shall I tell you about it now?”

“Is it Erika?”

“It’s Erika.”

“Why did you lie?”

“I did not lie. I do want her to work for me. What I didn’t tell you is that I’ve made her pregnant.”

“She didn’t look pregnant. She looked skinny.”

“That is as is.”

“And she’ll have the baby?”

“I want her to have it.”

“And you’ll want to marry her?”

“I won’t want to marry her. I will, however, set her up in a flat with the child and, from time to time, stay with them.”

“And you’ll go on being married and, whenever you’re not there, living with me?”

“If you accept that.”

“And if I don’t?”

“The choice you have is between that and filing for divorce, which I would have no reason to contest. This may make my chances for becoming a judge difficult, but I won’t give up my child. And because I won’t give up my child, and because the child is Erika’s as well, I have to establish a separate household for the child and her.”

“And if I divorce you?”

“I would not marry Erika.”

“And if she wants to marry someone else?”

“The child is mine.”

“You’ve both agreed to that?”

“We have.”

“She sounds practical.”

“She is.”

“And you sound practical, too.”

“Jews tend to be practical.”

“Do they?”

“In my experience of Jews.”

“You would like me to accept all this?”

“Yes, I would like you to. But please do not think I demand it of you. You must think about it and tell me, in your own time, what you conclude.”

“I wish I had your power of analysis. I really admire the way you can analyze a situation and reach a conclusion about it.”

“Thank you,” he said. “But this is about feeling. We once talked of feelings, feelings too vast to be named. I told you how much I want a child. How much I want children. Can that desire have a name? It’s immense. It’s the closest I shall ever get to an immortal need—no, to a mortal need. A marriage without a child, however close, however loving, is to me like a suicide pact, the closeness, the loving, end in death, no more. There is something deadly in a marriage without children. Yes, deadly.”

She closed her eyes as if to take all this in as feeling, and she did, she did enough to open her eyes and say, “We could adopt.”

“You know me well enough, you’ve suffered me enough, to know the child must be mine. Forgive me, darling, forgive me, as I once told you I would need forgiveness, but our marriage is dead to me. This is not your fault. I assure you, I do not in any way think this is your fault. You can’t help yourself. But neither can I help myself. I can’t die without having a child to keep me alive in this world, this so terribly, terribly, terribly destructive world, a world that has wanted the end of me and my line. I refuse to give in to the destruction. I refuse. I can’t die without having a child to keep me and my line alive in this destructive world. I refuse to die out, to be made to die out. They want us dead, they want us dead, but I won’t die. I will stay alive in a son.”

“A son?”

“A son, yes, yes, a son. There, you have the full blast of my ego. A son, a magnificently masculine son who will have sons, who will have sons, who will have sons. Do you at all understand this need?”

“No.” She lay still. She said, quietly, “I feel, instead, that I want to die.”

“You admit this finally. I have always sensed that in you. You’ve repressed it, you’ve repressed it very well, admirably well, but you’ve been defeated.”

“Yes,” Nancy agreed weakly.

“What defeated you? Did I?”

“Yes, you.” She again lay still. “No,” she said, “not you. I don’t know what defeated me.”

“But you won’t die.”

“No, I won’t die.”

“I couldn’t bear that, darling. That would break me. Though I can hardly bring myself to give it a name, you at one time recognized grief in me, the blame caused by grief. If that was all the expression of grief I was capable of, it was almost more than I could bear. I couldn’t bear more blame. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I understand. I understand because I have never stopped feeling blame for someone whose life I think I destroyed.”

“You’ve told me.”

“I’ve not told you, not really. I’ve repressed that, too. I left him when he most needed me, and I’m sure that destroyed him. And I’m to blame.”

Tim’s voice too went quiet. He said, “Do we exaggerate our sense of blame because we feel, all of us, that we were, that we are, to blame for the mass destruction forced on us? That we were, that we are, to blame for the world wanting us dead? Why, at some deep level, do we think we are to blame?”

“I don’t know, Tim. I don’t know anything.”

“You can say the same about me.”

“You know a lot.”

“I know nothing, but in my ignorance I am determined to force myself on the world.”

Her mind went out, far, to the edge of the vast, still hollow, from where she looked back at them both.

She asked in a dry whisper, “What did you mean when you once said your wife was an American mystic?”

He placed the back of his hand on his forehead. “As far as I sensed, which was not far, for I only had a sense of what she believed, which she kept from me—when she would withdraw into herself—or perhaps she didn’t withdraw, but, instead, expanded far outside herself, out into the views that seemed to be so meaningful to her, that became more and more meaningful to her the more ill she became—I sensed her need for more than I or anyone could give her, her need for, oh, everything, as if everything could be had. She wanted everything, I felt, everything all together. If she was Jewish, she was Jewish American, and she was vastly more American than she was Jewish. Sometimes I thought she was not at all Jewish.”

“And you, a Jew, thought what she believed nonsense.”

He dropped his hand to his chest. “It is nonsense, but I never told her so. She believed her death must have meaning in the ultimate union with everything, and I swear I never disabused her of the idea. Never. She died believing in the vast ultimate that her death had meaning. But death has no meaning, none. Destruction has no meaning, none. Suffering has no meaning, none. There is no meaning to life either, but we must live.”

“And you are determined to live.”

“I am.”

A sudden arousal in Nancy made her draw her hair back from her face and hold it together at her nape, and her voice, as of itself, rose. “But your life is all pretension.”

He raised a hand, as if to guard himself.

She lowered her voice and said, “I’m not condemning you. You need your pretensions, and, yes, I understand the need. Build on your pretensions, build and build and build, and maybe you’ll finally convince yourself that you’re no longer pretending, but are the real right thing. But you’ll never be the real right thing. Never. I wish that for you, I do, but you’ll never be the real right thing.”

He lowered his arm. “You’re right. And I know I’ll never convince myself I’m the real right thing. But, believe me, I’m not pretending when I say I want a son.”

“A Jewish son.”

“A Jewish son.”

“I would have loved to give you a Jewish son.”

He cried, “Oh my darling.”

She turned away from him.

“Do you forgive me?” he asked.

Her back to him, she laughed lightly and said, “I forgive you.”

He didn’t laugh. “Thank you.”

Nancy remained out at the far edge and didn’t sleep all night; her eyes remained open as if she were far out in space and looking back at the world, and as if it were looking back at the world that made her eyes fill up with tears. She didn’t move when, at dawn, Tim got up. She stayed in bed while he was out of the room. She, too, should get up and make sure their guests had breakfast, but she would let Tim do that. He came back into the room to dress, and she turned over to lie with her face in the pillow. The bedroom door closed, and she shifted onto her back and opened her eyes. She lay for a while longer.

The house was quiet when she got up. In her dressing gown she went downstairs and, on impulse, to the door to Tim’s study, and she leaned against it to listen for any movement inside, thinking he might be there. She dared herself to open the door as slowly and noiselessly as possible, to make her entrance unobtrusive even into a room with no one else present. The shutters on the window were closed, so the room was dim. She opened the shutters, and as she turned back into the room the Torah case drew her attention shining in the morning light beaming through the window. She approached the case carefully, as always to be unobtrusive, and she studied the case. She hadn’t noticed before that in places it was dented, in places the silver embossing worn. She touched a little gold bell, which gave off a faint, resonant clink. What, she asked herself, what did this mean to Tim? For her a resonating object, resonant of a religion constantly under scrutiny from outside, constantly debased from outside, constantly open to destruction from outside? She would never have been able to ask Tim the question; he already knew the answer. She ran a finger around the bells hanging on one of the elaborate globes, to make the gold bells ring together, a delicate carillon.

The guests had gone.

Deep in bath foam, she watched the rain hit the window. As she was putting on her robe, her body still a little moist, she was sure she heard someone walking downstairs, and she knew it couldn’t be Tim, who was out. Her scalp tight and tingling, Nancy did something that she knew was absurd, but she did it before her awareness of its absurdity could stop her: she picked up a bottle of cologne from a shelf, uncapped it, and poured some between her breasts, and as she went out of the bathroom and through her bedroom to the passage, she smeared the scent on her neck and her breasts and under her arms.

She stood at the top of the narrow stairs, listening. Hearing nothing for a long while but the beating of her pulse, she thought she had only imagined footsteps, and she turned away, then stopped, stark still, when the footsteps sounded from below, more and more faint as they went from one room to another. The footsteps stopped, and she descended the stairs, often pausing, one hand on the rail and the other holding her dressing gown closed over her breasts, to listen. At the bottom of the staircase she again stood still; then, as if suddenly and helplessly pulled forward by her fear, she went barefoot along the passage to the archway into the sitting room, which was filled with rain light that made the room appear empty. She went through the room into the dining room, her breathing as quick as her pulse. The dining room, too, was completely empty, and she rushed through it, excited, to open the door to the kitchen. No one was there.

Back in her room, she quickly dressed and went out, not quite knowing where she was going. All of London became a thin, moving cloud, with the pale white and red lights of cars appearing and disappearing in it. On Park Road, across from the mosque in Regent’s Park, she saw, ahead of her in the mist, a man, alone, waiting at a bus stop, and all at once she was sure that the man was Yvon Gendreau. She did not know if she should hurry on to him or draw back, and as she stared at him a double-decker bus came along and stopped by him, and he boarded. The bus was lit up inside. It passed her and she looked through the wide windows for him, but she saw only an old woman sitting toward the back.