From my mother’s diaries:

General Hospital 1,

Saint-Hilaire,

March 21, 1917

IT IS SIX DAYS since I lost a patient, but this evening the Canadian died. I want to write down his name. It was William Barkham. His family came from Devonshire, but sold up and went to farm in Saskatchewan, in a place called Fort Qu’Appelle. It is a very small place, and their farm’s address is a box number. I have written to his mother there.

I knew that he would die: He had trench foot, and the doctors amputated badly. They had seared the wound with tar; he was then three days at the field station. The gangrene was advanced before he reached here. I knew there was no hope.

He talked to me for an hour before he died. He told me about that farm at Fort Qu’Appelle. They farmed wheat. They kept two cows, some bantams, and some chickens. The farm was near a lake; in the winter mornings, when he rose early for the milking, he used to walk by the lake and watch the sun rising. The ice was three feet thick; it stayed all winter, from November to March. When he was a child his father taught him to skate on that lake, and when he was a man he skated there with his girl. Except—I suppose he was not really a man. He joined up when he was eighteen. He was nineteen yesterday.

Each morning when he finished the milking, he walked back to the farm; his mother cooked him griddlecakes and bacon. He saw her at the end; he spoke her name when he was dying. There was something he wanted to tell her; he clasped my hand very tight; I could see the words in his eyes, but he couldn’t speak them. He was in great pain, and being silenced. It made me very angry.

I wanted a miracle. I wanted to put my hand on him and feel the life come back. I prayed—but nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. There are no more miracles, and God does not listen to my prayers. Perhaps there is no God, and I had to come here to learn that. I think I prefer to believe that, than to believe in the God I see here every day, in the hospital wards, a God who turns his back on an only son, a boy of nineteen, a God who spares no one and never intervenes. Surely he could give some sign—is that so much to ask? Just one resurrection.

I thought I could not cry anymore—I could not even cry when they told me about Boy. Yet I cried tonight for William Barkham, and that made me angry too. Tears are useless. They give no comfort to the dying. Tears are an indulgence.

Some of the nurses take laudanum, for the tears. I will not do that. Wexton says that eventually you reach a place that is not beyond the tears, but in them. Maybe he is right. I am still waiting.

Yesterday Wexton brought me a present at the hospital. It was a haggis. He was given it by a Scotsman. We boiled it in a kettle on a primus stove, and shared it with the nurses on this ward. One slice each. I owe Wexton my life. I also owe Wexton my thanks. He has arranged for me to reach my destination after all: Next week, our transfer comes through. We leave for Étaples on Monday.

“Étaples. Didn’t I tell you I could fix it?”

They stood outside the railway station; the train that had brought them was already steaming away into the distance. A crowd of people, still pushing through the barriers: several other nurses, some French and Belgian soldiers, an old woman dressed in black, carrying a crate of chickens. Jane turned, and there in the distance, just as Wexton had promised her, was Étaples, her destination.

A huge encampment, like a small city: rows and rows of Nissen huts, fields of khaki tents, a parade ground. Jane narrowed her eyes; she could just discern the figures of men, small as ants: They were drilling.

Part of her view was blocked by a large woman standing a few feet away. She was at least six feet tall, with the shoulders of a man and a bosom like the prow of a battleship. The woman wore an unfamiliar uniform, including belted greatcoat, jacket, and tie. On her head was a hat like a basin, pulled low over her eyes and cropped hair. Evidently she had recognized them, for as Wexton spoke, she stepped forward.

“Wexton,” she barked.

Wexton jumped, as well he might, dropped both cases, and swung around with a beam of pleasure.

“Winnie!” He ignored her outstretched hand and kissed her. The giantess blushed scarlet. “Winnie, you’ve come to meet us! How kind. You must meet Jane Conyngham. Jane, this is Winnie. You remember, I told you? Winnie’s a WAAC.”

“How do you do?” Winnie extended her huge hand once more and grasped Jane’s in a painful grip. “WAAC Clerical Division, actually. And as a matter of fact, I fixed it. Welcome to Étaples. Give me her bag, Wexton. Good Lord, is this all you have? It’s as light as a feather.”

“Winnie is a woman of influence.” Wexton regarded her with pride. “Better watch out for her. How are you, Winnie?”

“In the pink. In the pink. Good to see you again, Wexton. Good to meet you, Jane. Do you like to be called Jane, or do you prefer surnames? I prefer surnames myself, so I’ll call you Conyngham, I expect. See how things go. See if you last the course. See if I take to you. You may call me Winnie, though. Everyone does. I’m the controller, Regimental Base Depot Two—which is officer ranking, in case you don’t know, but they don’t give us fancy titles because the men wouldn’t like it. If you need me, just ask for Winnie the WAAC—that’ll find me. I work for Colonel Hunter-Coote. One of the old brigade. An absolute sweetie. Got him well trained. Eats out of my hand. So, any problems, any trouble with that matron, and you come to me. She and I have crossed swords already. On a number of occasions. Right—all ready? Off we go then. It’s just over a mile. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes.”

She turned and set off at a smart pace. Wexton and Jane exchanged glances.

“Isn’t she wonderful?” Wexton gave a sidelong smile. “I’m mad about her. Étaples was my first posting. Winnie took me under her wing—which, as you can see, is a pretty large wing. I knew, if I wrote, that she’d fix it. Winnie can fix anything.”

“I’ve never met a WAAC before,” Jane said in a faint voice, trying to keep pace.

“Well, they’re new, of course. But Winnie’s not simply a WAAC. Right now, Winnie’s running the war. In my opinion. Hers too.”

“She’s very …” Jane stopped. It was difficult to think of an adequate word.

“English? Isn’t she? What do you think of the voice?” Jane hesitated. The voice, indeed, was formidable. The ring of the English hunting shires, overlaid with tones of the parade ground. “It’s loud. I suppose you could say … commanding.”

“It’s ridiculous.” Wexton gave her a delighted glance. “It’s ridiculous. And wonderful. I also love her moustache. In fact, I love everything about her. Oh, hang on …”

Ahead of them, Winnie had come to an abrupt halt on a small rise of ground.

“Look lively, you two.” She turned. “Now, guided tour coming up. Pay attention, Conyngham, or you’ll get lost. Right, behind us is the station …”

“We kind of noticed that, Winnie. We got off the train there.”

“No lip from you, Wexton.” Winnie shot him a fond glance. She pointed. “Now, there’s the village—full of Frenchies. Watch out for them, Conyngham. Lot of old lechers, and they all chew garlic. Over there’s the camp—mostly Tommies, some Aussies, a few Kiwi infantry at present. Rumors we may see the Americans, if they come in. Colonel Hunter-Coote says they will. We’re still waiting, and my girls are very impatient. That’s the hospital, over there—Conyngham, you see that big gray building beyond the perimeter? And the ambulance billets are just beyond that, so Wexton will be nice and close.” She looked from Wexton to Jane as she said this, and smiled in a meaningful way. “Now look, over there—you see that building there, just past the parade ground? That’s my depot, and that’s where you’ll find me. You’ll both need a pass for the camp, but that’s all taken care of. Meanwhile, that”—she stabbed the air with a large finger, and a note of pride entered her voice—“that little hut is our YWCA. We’re setting up our own little club there. I fixed it with Hunter-Coote. I told him, straight from the shoulder: My girls are going to need a place to go to in the evenings. ‘Cootie,’ I said—I call him Cootie, by the way—‘Cootie, my girls need a home away from home. You have the mess. What do we have?’ So he put in a chit. Tablecloths, and china cups, too—none of that tin-mug nonsense, not for my girls. They won’t stand for it. Everything tiptop quality, Army and Navy Stores, you know—I insisted. Fraternization with the men allowed.” She fixed Jane with her eyes in a stern way. “My girls wanted that, so I hope you won’t mind, Conyngham. All right by you, is it? By the way, there’s a piano.”

“Oh, of course. How nice …”

“We have singsongs. Of an evening. Then cocoa. Right. Off we go again. Come on, Wexton—what are you staring at?”

“That.”

Wexton had put down his bag and was staring in the direction of the river below. The village of Étaples was set back between the river and hills so steep they were almost cliffs; the river continued down the valley toward the sea.

“That?” Winnie seemed reluctant to follow the direction of Wexton’s eyes. “That’s the river Canche. Over there, Conyngham, where the roofs are, that’s Le Touquet. Nice beaches. Only one stop on the train. We go down on Sundays sometimes, for a swim. Hope you brought a bathing suit, Conyngham. If not, don’t worry. I’ll put in a requisition to Stores—”

“I didn’t mean the river, Winnie.” Wexton had not moved. “What’s that?”

“Where those men are digging?” Wexton was now pointing, but Winnie still seemed reluctant to look in the right place. “That’s the extension to the trenches. In case of air attack. Happened once or twice.” Winnie sounded dismissive. “Didn’t do a lot of damage. But you have to think ahead. Be prepared. Another week and the trenches will go all the way from the camp to the caves—”

“Caves?” Jane turned.

“Over there. In the cliffs behind the village. They’re huge. Best possible shelter. It was Cootie’s idea, actually. Evacuate through the trenches and into the caves. Put up the proposal weeks ago, but of course no one did a damn thing. Red tape, as per usual. Now—”

“I didn’t mean the trenches, Winnie. Or the caves. I know about those.” Wexton turned to face her. “I meant that. That yacht.”

“Which yacht?” Winnie sounded irritable.

“There is only one yacht, Winnie. The large one, moored downriver. What’s that? It wasn’t here before.”

“Evacuation yacht.” Winnie sniffed. “Evacuation yacht, if you must know. For the VIPs. If the Allies have to evacuate northern France.”

There was a silence.

“Evacuate? Surely not?” Jane said in a small tight voice.

“Lot of damn nonsense.” Winnie shouldered Jane’s case once more. “Alarmists in Whitehall. Now, shall we get a move on?” She set off; Jane and Wexton looked at each other.

“Oh, great.” He bent and picked up his case. “That’s the VIPs taken care of.”

“It’s just a precaution, Wexton.” Jane looked back at the yacht. It was large and stately. For the first time it occurred to Jane that the Allies could lose this war. She began to walk, then quickened her pace; after some minutes Wexton caught up with her. Winnie, marching ahead, occasionally looked back. She appeared to have recovered her temper, for several times she gave them an approving nod.

“Why is she looking at us like that, Wexton?” Jane said when this had happened for the third time.

“She thinks you’re my girlfriend.” Wexton sounded nonchalant.

“She thinks what?”

“Well, I didn’t actually say so. Not in so many words. She just kind of jumped to that conclusion. When I wrote. I didn’t want to disappoint her. After all, you did want to come here. Of course, Winnie doesn’t know about me. And I don’t think she would understand if I explained. Winnie’s led a very sheltered life—and besides, she’s a romantic. She’s madly in love herself.”

“Winnie?”

“With Cootie. Didn’t you gather that? And he with her. That’s why she wouldn’t look at the yacht, you see, and didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because if the balloon goes up, Cootie will be on the yacht and Winnie won’t. Hunter-Coote is a VIP. Winnie, who damn near runs this place, isn’t.”

“I see.”

Jane stopped, one last time. They had almost reached the camp. A group of men in Australian uniform were laying sheets of corrugated iron over the newly dug sections of the trenches.

Étaples. Acland had been here. He had stood, perhaps, where she stood now.

“So. If the balloon does go up”—she began to walk again—“if it does, where will Winnie be?”

Wexton gave her a gentle and ironic smile.

“Winnie? In the caves, I guess. Along with you and me and about a thousand others.”

Wexton and my mother arrived at Étaples in late March 1917. It was the beginning of spring, after the most notorious winter of the first war.

Shortly after they reached Étaples, America declared war on Germany. Not long after that, Canadian troops, including the survivors of William Barkham’s regiment, took Vimy Ridge. The third battle of Ypres, and Passchendaele, lay some months ahead.

Terrible battles, a year that marked the turning point in the war. I grew up with those names. They would come to me from the murmurings of grown-ups, when Wexton visited Winterscombe, or Winnie (who had by then married Colonel Hunter-Coote). It was years before I understood that these graceful, mysterious foreign words referred to battles. Passchendaele: I thought the word was Passion Dale, and I imagined a valley like Winterscombe, through which flowed the River Passion.

Wexton and my mother were to stay at Étaples only one month. It was there that Wexton completed the poems Shells, which he would dedicate to Steenie. It was from there that he wrote to Steenie, letter after patient letter to someone he still loved but was already losing.

Those letters haunted Steenie. Half a century later, when he was dying at Winterscombe, he would wait for a day when Wexton was absent; then he would read them aloud to me.

“Look,” he would say at the end of a letter. “Look what I lost. Look what I threw away. Don’t you ever do that, Victoria.”

To two of those letters in particular, Steenie returned again and again. One concerned the caves at Étaples, and the curious event that would take place there. The other (with an earlier date) described the day in April when Wexton and my mother finally gave in to Winnie’s invitations. They joined her and Colonel Hunter-Coote on an expedition to the beaches at Le Touquet—or, as they called it then, Paris-Plage.

It was a Sunday when they went by train to Paris-Plage. They had lunch outside, on the terrasse fleurie of the café Belvedere. Wexton sat at a round table under a striped awning, overlooking the sea; it was the first warm day of spring; the sea glinted.

Next to him sat Colonel Hunter-Coote. Across the table, wearing civilian clothes that day, and a straw hat that shaded her eyes, was Jane. The air was a dusty gold. Wexton felt warm and well fed; he had the pleasant sensation that he had strayed into an Impressionist painting, and that the joie de vivre he experienced was not his but Renoir’s. The war felt far away.

Below them on the beach, Winnie, with a group of her “gels,” was preparing to swim. They were enduring what Winnie described as “the warming-up process.” This procedure (Wexton felt sure it would be necessary; the weather might be warm but the water would be icy) involved the throwing to-and-fro of a large striped beach ball. Winnie, mountainous in a black woolen bathing suit that reached from neck to knees, worn with a frilled bathing cap that reminded Wexton of dairymaids, led this warm-up.

“Jump, Clissold,” he heard her call in a commanding voice. “Oh, you silly gel. Not like that. Higher.”

Colonel Hunter-Coote, a very small neat man with birdlike bones who, when next to Winnie, resembled an anxious sparrow, watched this performance with an air of pride. Only when the waiter approached did he turn. He then tried to interest Jane in the prospect of what he called pudding.

“Oh, but you must,” he said. “One of those sort of cake things they have here. Winnie likes them.” He eyed the approaching tea cart. “Why don’t you let me choose for you? Now those, for instance. I can definitely recommend those. Oui, garçon. You’re sure you won’t, Wexton? Deux—ex—pâtisseries, s’il vous plâit, monsieur. No, no, not the cakes. Those. That’s it. Oh, jolly good. Merci beaucoup.”

Jane, catching Wexton’s eye, smiled. Her own French was fluent, as Wexton knew; Hunter-Coote’s was execrable. He spoke it in a very loud voice, with an expression of profound embarrassment. It had obviously never occurred to him that Jane might speak French; she and Wexton had an unspoken pact not to disillusion him.

Jane ate the pastry, then, when the coffee was brought, accepted a cigarette from Wexton. She smoked occasionally now—something that would have horrified her a year before—but she smoked in the manner of a novice, taking small puffs, then letting the tube of tobacco lie between her fingers. She gazed out to sea. Wexton thought she was daydreaming.

She looked peaceful, contented; she was greatly changed, Wexton thought. When he had first met her, he had thought her more tense, more striving, more pent-up than almost anyone he had ever known—and this had interested him. Her nervous mannerisms had almost disappeared; this had interested him too. He liked Jane, had liked her even when he met her in London. He thought her … good. Or if not good yet, at least trying to be good. And that was interesting. Not many people bothered.

Jane had removed her straw hat now and was fanning her face with it; she turned in the direction of the promenade. From beneath the awning, one band of sunlight lit her hair. In this light it was as red as maples in the fall; the pallor of her skin against the flame of this hair was remarkable. Across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose there was a dusting of freckles; Wexton found these, in their symmetry, pleasing. They drew attention to her eyes, whose beauty lay less in their formation than in their tranquil expression.

Jane possessed a quality he found difficult to define, but which was most apparent when she nursed. Now, she no longer used that quick bright blank voice they had taught her at Guy’s; she did not need it. She might lay her hand on a man’s arm, and Wexton could see a mysterious process of transference take place: From Jane to the man, there was an intense outflowing of energy. This energy calmed. And yet energy, too, seemed the wrong word for something so serene. For want of a better word, Wexton would have said Jane possessed grace.

That term, a hangover from his Episcopalian upbringing, fretted him a little.

He leaned forward in his seat so that he might also see what had caught her eye on the promenade at Paris-Plage. Not Winnie and her gels—though they had the loyal attention of Colonel Hunter-Coote, and Winnie seemed to be preparing to swim. Jane looked away from the beach. She looked toward a now-familiar sight.

There, on the promenade below them, was a group of Red Cross nurses pushing wheelchairs; they lined the chairs in a neat row, so that their occupants faced out to sea and the warmth of the sun was on their faces. The nurses arranged red blankets across their knees; they fussed over them briefly; they withdrew.

Such expeditions were judged remedial for these special patients, whose wounds were invisible. These men were explained by various euphemisms: They had “neurasthenia”; they had “battle fatigue.” At the camp they were restricted to a certain wing of the hospital and were nursed only by the most experienced of the Red Cross. There, too, they were brought out into the sun; someone presumably had faith that fresh air and sunlight might heal them.

Wexton, who had carried some of these patients in his ambulance, doubted that. If they had damage to their bodies—and some did—that might be cured; he doubted even time would heal the damage to their minds.

The men with broken minds: they embarrassed people. They were shipped here first, then—once the doctors were sure there was no malingering—they were shipped back to England. They were sent to special hospitals in remote parts of the countryside, in order that they might have peace and quiet. That was the official line. Wexton doubted that too. He thought the relevant authorities preferred to hide them away; they were more than an embarrassment—they were an accusation.

The men with broken minds; the men who had seen the unspeakable; the men who had been driven quietly—it was usually quietly—mad. For some time now Wexton had believed that it was these men only who were sane.

Jane watched them, he saw, with a fixed concentration, and when she finally turned back, Wexton saw that her eyes shone: with tears, he thought, and then realized that it was not tears. Jane was angry.

“Oh, I say!” Colonel Hunter-Coote rose to his feet. Jane and Wexton moved with him. They moved to the edge of the terrace, with its pots of geraniums, and looked down at the beach. Hunter-Coote cheered.

“Keep it up, Winnie. Jolly good.” He turned to Wexton and to Jane, his small brown eyes irradiated with love. “Isn’t she the most remarkable woman? Nothing daunts her, you know. Absolutely nothing.”

Some way out, the figure of Winnie could be discerned. She advanced upon the sea, head high; she gave the waves a quelling glance. She flapped her arms. An impertinent wave splashed her face; it engulfed her to the armpits. Winnie waited for it to subside and then launched herself upon the swell of the next. Once the small tidal wave created by this attack had diminished, Winnie swam. Her teeth were clenched. Her chin crested the water. Her frilly mobcap bobbed. It was some while before Wexton realized why this intrepid progress looked so odd. Then it came to him: Winnie was swimming doggie-paddle.

Jane perhaps realized this at the same moment, for she began to smile. She glanced at Wexton and her smile broadened. She did not look back again to the promenade and the lines of wheelchairs.

At the end of the afternoon they began the walk back to the station. Hunter-Coote and Winnie walked in front; Jane and Wexton followed them. The sun was warm. The road was dusty. Their feet kicked up white dust as they passed. Wexton whistled. Jane stopped, removed her hat, and lifted her face to the sun.

“Maybe it’s wicked. Maybe I shouldn’t”—she took Wexton’s arm—“but I feel happy. I feel at peace.”

“Acland?”

“Yes. I can feel him. Just as I hoped. He’s very close.” She looked up at Wexton anxiously. “I know he’s dead. But I can still feel it. Do you think I’m imagining it, Wexton?”

“No, I don’t.” Wexton’s creased face was sad. “Steenie was close—and I knew. He isn’t anymore—and I know that too. You can’t explain it. Maybe it’s a sixth sense. Or an eighth. Or a tenth. It’s there, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Wexton.” Jane took his arm. “Was it Conrad Vickers?”

“Well, Vickers was available when Boy died—and I wasn’t. Steenie had witnessed a terrible thing. He would have needed someone to talk to—”

“But it wasn’t just that?”

“No. I don’t think so. It might have happened anyway, sooner or later. Steenie’s very young. He’s very impressionable. He likes …”

“Fashionable things?”

“Kind of. And I just read and write all the time. I can see it’s pretty dull.”

Jane made no comment. Wexton looked at the white road, at the decorous but affectionate figures of Winnie and Colonel Hunter-Coote. He looked at the flowers by the wayside, the small train that puffed into the station just ahead. Jane’s hand lay on his arm.

He felt energy flow from her hand; the loveliness of the day and the serenity of the valley beat in upon him. The sky was azure; there were small puffs of white cloud. He felt the surprising perfection of the moment. He would change nothing—not the clouds, not the sky, not the shape or disposition of the houses, not a blade of grass, not even the faithlessness of Steenie. The knowledge of that was part of the day’s composition. It pained him, but the pain gave sharpness to the beauty around him. A poem, just there, hovering at the outer edges of his consciousness.

“I’m all right,” he said finally. “Steenie too. He’s moved into his own studio. He’s having that exhibition of his paintings soon. All that will help.”

“Are they good—Steenie’s paintings?” Jane turned to look at him.

“Some of them are good.”

Jane stopped once more. She sniffed the air. “I believe in God—today. Yesterday I didn’t. Today I do. I didn’t expect that to happen. Maybe it’s the sun … and the air. I can’t feel the war today—maybe it’s that. Never mind anyway.” She gave him a rueful smile; she took his arm once more. “Forget my religion. Tell me yours. Tell me about words, Wexton.”

“A poem, you mean?”

“Yes. Tell me a poem.”

“All right,” Wexton said.

He started on a sonnet, one he knew by heart, one that fitted the day and the walk and the white road and the station just ahead and the steam of the train hissing.

Fourteen lines: by the time he reached the end, they had reached the platform. Winnie was fussing: The train was two carriages short.

“Just tell me,” she was saying to an aged French porter. “Just explain. Are we to sit in the luggage racks? This is a disgrace. There is no room for my gels.”

Later that April my uncle Steenie did have his first exhibition of paintings. It was also to be his last exhibition, although Steenie did not know that then, of course. It was, in social and even critical terms, a success. In later years Steenie liked to recall his moment of triumph, but Steenie was no fool; his triumph had also been the occasion of self-discovery. “I found out I was a dabbler,” he would say.

The circumstances surrounding that exhibition were to prove memorable: It was held late in the war; it was some three months after Steenie and Freddie had witnessed Boy’s death; and it was on the very day of Steenie’s preview party that the strangest event in my family’s story occurred.

We will come to that event in due course. (News of it reached Steenie and others late that night.) But even before this news was broken, it was—according to both Steenie and Constance—an important day. “A day of reckoning!” Constance said.

Constance and Steenie spent that day together; they had spent many days together in the six weeks since Constance had returned from her honeymoon. That morning, Constance had visited Jenna and her baby, a son born the previous Christmas, named Edgar. Constance seemed to Steenie oddly obsessed with this child, whom he had never seen. She would dwell at length on the charms of the child, his quietness, his green eyes, the minute details of his babyish progress. Steenie found this tiresome and suspected insincerity. Constance was now full of plans for poaching both Jenna and the child from the Cavendish family. According to her, Jenna had no wish to take up marital life with Jack Hennessy once the war ended; there was no reason why Jenna had to go back to Winterscombe to live as a head carpenter’s wife; there was every reason (Jenna was the best maid she had ever had) why Jenna and child should take up residence with Lady Stern and her husband.

There were, Constance had admitted, one or two minor problems. In the first place, she and Stern still did not have a permanent residence. Since their return from their honeymoon they had spent a great deal of time inspecting houses both in London and the country, but despite the fact that money was no object, they seemed unable to settle on one they both liked. Constance became, Steenie found, oddly evasive on this subject. (In fact, Steenie had the impression she was keeping something back; whatever it was, he could not worm it out of her.) Meanwhile, they were renting a series of houses in London, each more magnificent than the last.

Apart from this difficulty, there were other problems regarding the hiring of Jenna; Constance tended to dismiss them with a wave of the hand, but they seemed to Steenie serious. In the first place, Jenna herself was opposed to the idea. (“She’s frightened of Hennessy, that’s all,” Constance would cry. “She need not worry—I will deal with him.”) Also, the idea was opposed by Montague Stern—with vigor.

Steenie found this odd. Why should Stern care whether his wife had one maid or another? What possible difference could the baby make in a household that was bound to be a large one? Constance did not explain her husband’s opposition. She said, in a dismissive way, that Stern thought she fussed too much about the baby; she would, however, talk him around. Steenie, privately agreeing with Stern, doubted Constance’s husband was the kind of man to be “talked around”; he was wise enough not to say so.

Constance’s frequent visits to Jenna and her child always seemed to leave her in a pensive and uncommunicative mood. The day of Steenie’s preview was no exception. But then Steenie had found that these moods of Constance’s were more frequent now—and they did not always seem to be caused by visits to Jenna. He would catch her staring off into the middle distance when he was in mid-anecdote, clearly not listening to a word he said. She had changed since her return from her honeymoon; she was quieter, more subdued, thoughtful. Even her movements, always so swift, had become slower. There was a new quality to her beauty which Steenie had never seen before: It had lost its hard-edged defiance; it had acquired a stillness and a repose previously lacking. Steenie had wondered once or twice if she might be expecting a child; when there seemed no evidence of this, he assumed that her husband had wrought this change in her—and that made Steenie curious. He would dearly have liked to know more on the subject of Constance’s married life, her attitude to her husband, indeed the circumstances of her honeymoon in Scotland. But when Steenie asked how the time in Scotland had been, she gave what he felt was a very odd reply. The telegram giving the news of Boy’s death (in a shooting accident—that was the official line) had been there, awaiting Constance and her new husband when they first arrived at Denton’s shooting lodge.

“So my honeymoon began with a death,” Constance said. And then she changed the subject.

At the time Steenie had been glad she did. He did not want to be reminded of Boy’s death. He had been discovering, those past three months, just how remorseless memory can be. No matter how hard Steenie tried to suppress what he and Freddie had witnessed, the memory stalked him, then pounced. It insinuated itself into his dreams and his daily life; no matter how fast he ran (and, those three months, Steenie had been running very fast indeed) it caught up with him. I understand now what the Greeks meant by the Furies, he wrote in a letter to Wexton, one he never sent. The letter was unposted because Steenie had some self-respect left; he knew he had no right, now, to turn to Wexton for help—he was too deeply embroiled in his new love affair with Conrad Vickers. I have betrayed you, Wexton, he wrote in another emotional letter, also unsent, but he knew that was not the whole truth, for he added a postscript: Worse, I have betrayed myself.

So, the night of his preview, both Constance and Steenie were tense. They had spent the afternoon at the gallery, Constance on the telephone, making sure that everyone on Steenie’s ambitious guest list would be coming that night; Steenie checking that his paintings were advantageously hung. They were. The lighting could not have been more flattering. The framer’s handiwork was irreproachable. The surface prettiness of his paintings, their pleasing coloration, his own gift for line—all this was still apparent to Steenie. So, unfortunately, was the paintings’ irrelevance. They were decorative, charming, oversweet; they were the visual equivalent of a diet of Turkish delight. Steenie thought of Boy. He thought of what had happened to Boy’s head. He looked at the paintings again.

Glucose and rosewater, Steenie thought, and fled.

He and Constance returned to his new studio. His splendid new studio. Steenie, fencing with emotion as always, refusing to raise the subject of Boy, pretended to himself and to Constance that his greenish complexion, the fact that his hands shook, were entirely due to nervousness. The preview. The party. The guest list.

“It’s going to be ghastly,” Steenie said. “No one will come. No one will buy. They’ll slink off, making polite noises. I think I might be sick.”

“Don’t be feeble, Steenie,” Constance replied, staring off into the middle distance once more. Then, as if repenting her absentmindedness, she became kind. “Why don’t you have a drink? Just a little. That will help. Where’s the champagne I sent you?”

“In the bath. Keeping cool.”

“Then open a bottle.”

As Steenie gave his attention to the champagne, Constance prowled about; she moved a chair a few inches; she rearranged a heap of cushions that might have been found in a seraglio; she switched on, then off, a lamp she had provided. She seemed totally absorbed.

This was the first occasion, Steenie would later say, on which he truly noticed Constance’s obsession with rooms, her desire to dictate to the inanimate. It did not occur to him then that Constance might wish to order a room because other aspects of her life were in disorder. All Steenie could see was that Constance, three months a wife, was certain—about everything.

Steenie was not. His capacity to make any decision veered as wildly as his moods. He felt he could not control his own life, let alone the details of his environment. One moment he would think of Boy; the next, Wexton. He would vow never to see Conrad Vickers again, then rush off to meet him half an hour later. Everything was in flux—whereas Constance exhibited an unfailing tenacity. This was the only material for the curtains; that sofa was unthinkable, this the perfect one. The result was a studio that was eclectic, dramatic, resonant, and unconventional. It made Steenie very uncomfortable. It was, he thought as he poured champagne, Constance’s room and not his.

This he could not say. Constance would have been offended; besides, he was being foolish. After all, this studio had been much admired. Conrad Vickers had said, in high fluting tones, that he simply couldn’t begin on his new flat unless Constance advised him. Lady Cunard, whose taste was more conventional but whose instinct for innovation was acute, was also now claiming that Constance simply must help her with her new country house. Constance’s future career (although Steenie did not know that then) was in the process of being launched.

Steenie handed Constance her glass of champagne. She did not drink it. Steenie drank his very fast, then poured another. Constance was now rearranging an amusing group of objects on a side table. She moved a small porphyry column a fraction of an inch. She frowned at the flowers—Steenie’s one contribution to the room. They were large, heavily scented white lilies—expensive lilies; they had used up one whole week’s worth of Steenie’s meager allowance.

Steenie began to feel sicker still. There was another reason why this room made him uneasy: Most of the contents had been paid for by Constance—and, since Constance had no money of her own, that meant they had been paid for by her husband. Constance was generous with Stern’s money. It acquired things Steenie could never have afforded himself, since his father had been, Steenie felt, remarkably ungenerous over the whole matter of his new home. With grumbling reluctance, Denton had stumped up the money for the lease; he had refused—in an extremely graceless way—to stump up any more. Steenie had been expecting an advance against his trust fund; it had been refused. Constance, waving a checkbook, had stepped into the breach. Considering she had been married such a short time, Steenie thought she had learned to spend her husband’s money very fast. He had risked one such observation, and Constance had given him a wry look.

“Man and wife are one flesh,” she said. “One bank account, too. Remember that, Steenie.”

If it had not been for Constance, this studio would have been furnished with castoffs from his parents’ homes. He would have been surrounded by memories. Constance had saved him from this. Nevertheless, Steenie felt he had been dictated to; he also felt he had been compromised. A specific indication of that fact confronted him that very evening: The guest list for his exhibition preview, which of course included Constance and her new husband, accordingly excluded his aunt Maud. Maud, when told this by an embarrassed, squirming Steenie, had behaved with dignity, decorum, and (Steenie felt) a magnificent unconcern. She said she quite understood; she would make her own, private visit to the gallery at a later date. Would Steenie perhaps keep back for her one small painting which she had always liked? Steenie had agreed. The painting in question was now the only one in the gallery bearing a small red sticker to indicate it was presold. Looking at this sticker, Steenie had loathed himself.

Steenie downed his second glass of champagne. He hesitated, then decided to risk a third.

“Lady Cunard is coming?” His voice came out in a squeak.

“Of course she’s coming, Steenie. I told you. She promised me.”

“And Stern—do you think he’ll be able to get away?”

“Montague? Oh, he’ll come. I shall meet him there. He has some meeting first, I think.”

Her tone was careless, as it often was when she spoke of her husband. Steenie, who knew that tone of hers, and knew Constance used it to disguise strength of feeling, looked at her closely. As always, her face revealed nothing.

“Oh, well, I’d like to know what he thinks of them. If he doesn’t make it, I shall understand. I know how busy he always is—”

“Busy?” Constance seemed to find this amusing. “Oh, he is always busy. But he is also very organized. Meeting after meeting, right through the day—yet he fits marriage into his schedule, Steenie. He is very good about that.”

“Fits it into his schedule?”

“Of course.” Constance gave an odd smile. “Do you know, he returns to me every evening at exactly the same time? Six. Six-thirty, at the very latest. I could set the clock by the turn of his key in the lock. I wait for him upstairs—well, downstairs sometimes. Do you know what we do then, Steenie? We go to bed.”

Steenie was startled. It was unusual for Constance to be so frank. He took nervous refuge—as he had begun to do—in a passable imitation of Conrad Vickers.

“No! Constance, darling, every night—always the same time? Too impressive. Such ardor—”

“Every night. Always the same time. Other times as well, of course—but always then. From Downing Street to bed. From war to his wife. It’s strange, I find. Tell me truthfully now, would you ever have suspected such a thing?”

“From Stern? No. I suppose not. He always seems so very controlled….”

“I know.” Constance gave a small shiver. She appeared to hesitate. Steenie flung himself down on the sofa Constance had chosen and Stern had paid for. He adopted an artistic pose.

“Darling!” he said, throwing up his hands. “It’s too riveting. I have to admit, I had wondered. Is he … I mean, when you—”

“I shan’t be indiscreet.” Constance’s face became closed. “I have no intention of telling my marital secrets to you, Steenie.”

“You mean there are secrets?”

“Perhaps. One or two. Montague is—”

“The most incredible lover.” Steenie giggled. “The stuff of every woman’s dreams: masterful, dominant—I can imagine that. Connie, my sweet, I feel positively envious.”

“I could love him, Steenie.”

Constance put down her champagne glass. She turned away. Steenie stared at her in astonishment.

“What did you say?”

“I said I could love him. I come … very near to loving him. That was something I never expected. Like him, yes; admire him, even, or respect him—I expected all that. But not love. I hadn’t calculated on love. I used to think … Well, never mind what I thought. I’m probably wrong in any case. It’s just a passing thing—being a new wife….”

Steenie began to regret the champagne he had drunk. It was clouding his mind and slowing his responses, just when he wanted to concentrate. For a moment he forgot about being Conrad Vickers.

“Connie, I don’t understand. You sound so resentful. He’s your husband. Why shouldn’t you love him?”

“Because I don’t want to love anyone.” She turned back to Steenie in an angry way. “Is that so hard to understand? I don’t trust love. I don’t believe in it. It weakens people. It makes them dependent—stupid little puppets, with someone else pulling the strings. I don’t want to be like that—I never did. Most women can’t wait, of course. Love, love, love—they think of nothing else. They speak of nothing else. It’s a disease with them. Well, I don’t want to catch that disease. I’d sooner have malaria, typhus, tuberculosis—anything….”

“Connie—”

“It’s true! I’d rather my lungs rotted than my mind—and that’s what happens when someone loves. Their mind goes. Their thinking goes. Their self goes. I’ve seen it often enough—”

“Connie, stop this.” Steenie found that her remarks came too close to him for comfort. He stood. “You’re working yourself up for no reason at all. You don’t mean half you say—”

“Oh, but I do,” Constance replied more quietly. “I have thought about this very carefully. My husband does not love me, you see. He was never even in love with me. He made that very clear. He has spelled it out to me, several times, face to face.”

“Connie, don’t be foolish.” Steenie stared at her in consternation. “Listen—if Stern said that, he cannot have meant it. He … is playing a game, that’s all. People do. Conrad does it with me. Stern just doesn’t want you to be too sure you’ve made a conquest. You’re a woman. Women are bored by easily available men—you especially. If Stern threw himself down at your feet, languishing with love, you’d hate it—you know you would.”

“Perhaps.” Constance turned away. “I might respect him less. I might think his judgment poor. I am not worth loving—I always knew that. Still, I might have liked to be loved, just once.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Steenie stared at her in astonishment. “You know that’s not true. Lots of people love you. I love you. Look at all those men, following you about, before you married—they were besotted with you—”

“Ah, but they did not know me.”

“Well, Stern must know you.”

“No. He does not.” Constance shook her head. “He would like to, I think sometimes. I intrigue him, you know—like one of those clever Chinese puzzles. He would like to take me apart, put me back together again—and then he would lose interest at once. So, I am very careful. It would be a bad idea, don’t you think, if he knew how I felt? I shall never tell him, Steenie. Not if we are married for fifty years. I shall never let him be sure who I am, whether I love him or not. The politics of love, you see? I intend to keep a balance of power.”

“That’s absurd. No one can live like that. Besides, what’s the point? If you love someone, why not trust them and say so? Why turn it into a stupid war? Wexton always said—” Steenie stopped, coloring. “Well, anyway, it’s just false pride that makes you say these things—”

“No, it’s not. It’s experience.”

“Why experience?”

“Because I loved my father. I loved him very much, Steenie. I used to tell him how much I loved him. I’m sure you can remember the result.” She looked back at Steenie over her shoulder, then gave a small resigned shrug. “He hated me. He resented me. The more he saw how I loved him, the worse it was. I shall never make that mistake again. Once is enough.”

Having said this—and she spoke in a flat tone, with no sign of bitterness, as if stating an obvious fact—Constance walked away. The conversation, begun without warning, now seemed to be closed. Steenie hesitated. The last person he wanted to discuss was Edward Shawcross.

“Connie,” he began awkwardly, after several minutes of silence, “are you unhappy? Is your marriage making you unhappy—is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

Constance seemed to find this question strange.

“Unhappy? No. Why should you think that? You’re quite wrong. I like being married to Montague. He is changing me. My new life is beginning. I think I just wanted to tell you—” She broke off. “You are my only friend, Steenie.”

This was the closest Steenie had ever seen Constance come to admitting any kind of weakness. He was touched by it. He blushed, hesitated again, made a rush at her, and gave her a hug.

“So I am. And you’re my best friend too. Oh, Connie”—he drew back—“I feel such a mess. All these nerves—it’s not just the party and the invitations—”

“I know that.”

“It’s Wexton, you see. I miss him terribly. Then Conrad likes to make me jealous. I can’t talk to Freddie anymore. Mama never goes out—she won’t even come here, you know. Father’s so old and so crotchety. He goes on and on about money. And I know it’s because of Boy. I know it’s broken them, and none of us can say what’s really wrong. When we talk it’s awful. It’s like tiptoeing around a mine field. We can’t mention Acland. We can’t mention Boy. Everyone pretends they believe all that stuff about a shooting accident—and no one does. Even Freddie pretends. I told him all those terrible things Boy said—but he won’t listen. He just says it was shell shock, the war talking—and I know he’s right. Part of me knows he’s right. But there’s another bit that won’t lie down. I keep asking questions. I think, what if …”

Constance, he saw, was watching him; no staring off into the distance now. Her face was intent and concentrated. When Steenie turned away and sat down, Constance followed him. She sat next to him. She took his hand.

“Steenie,” she began in a hesitant way. “Steenie, tell me. All those what-ifs of yours—do you mean what Boy said to you about my father’s death?”

“I suppose so.” Steenie concentrated on his hands. “You see, I know he wouldn’t have done that—all those things he said. I know he wasn’t sane when he said them. But he was so very definite about it. He went on and on in this awful reasonable voice. How he took the guns. How he discussed it with Acland. And so I think sometimes—well, something must have happened. Why else would he invent all that? Where would the idea come from?”

“I understand. He was very definite in his note to me as well.” There was a pause. Constance was about to say something to Steenie that was of the very greatest importance. Steenie would later explain to Wexton that what she told him gave him not only relief but a sense of release—although what she told Steenie did not have that effect on me when I read it.

“Steenie,” she began in a tired voice, “I don’t really want to talk about that night anymore. But if there was something I could tell you—about that night, and about Boy, which would put an end to all your doubts … if you could be sure that it was just the war talking when you sat there with Boy—would that help?”

“Yes. It would. You see—” Steenie paused. “I did love Boy. I can understand shell shock, at least. But I can’t bear to think of Boy as a murderer.”

“He wasn’t a murderer, Steenie. If you think about Boy, and remember him as he was, you’d know that anyway. The point is: he could not have been involved in my father’s death. Not in any way. It’s the one thing that’s impossible, and he must have known I would know that.”

“Why? I don’t see—”

“Oh, Steenie.” Constance squeezed his hand. “Because the night of the comet, I was with Boy. I was with him all night.”

Steenie’s parents did not attend his preview party; their absence was not remarked in the melee. The reception began at seven; by seven-thirty the gallery was so crowded that guests had spilled out onto the pavements. Steenie, plotting the guest list with Constance and Conrad Vickers, had been worried that it might prove divisive. He feared a kind of social apartheid, with the older, grander, richer friends (“The Cunard contingent,” as Vickers called it) on one side of the room, and the younger, poorer, more artistic element on the other. To Steenie’s great surprise and growing delight, lavish quantities of alcohol broke down social barriers. There was a brief period of suspicious social sniffing (“Like dogs! Only more decorous,” Steenie cried later); then resistance was overcome.

Conrad Vickers and Steenie swooped from group to group, and if Steenie paid marginally more attention to potential patrons than impoverished poets, his friend Vickers made up for it, scattering his “dah-lings” far and wide with a generous lack of discrimination. More and more red stickers were appearing; more and more people, it seemed, did not consider this work glucose and rosewater—or if they did, preferred art that was so palatable.

Montague Stern, who did not—and who was the one figure at this gathering who remained, cautiously, on its margins—was the person (Steenie later claimed) who started this rush. Arriving punctually, he reserved three paintings at once; where Stern led, others followed.

Constance, seeking her husband out some half an hour later, gave him a kiss.

“That was kind of you, Montague. I know they are not to your taste.”

“I like Steenie. Perhaps his paintings will grow on me.”

“I doubt that.”

“He seems to be enjoying it all anyway.” Stern watched Steenie sweep down on a new guest. “He looks happier than he has in weeks.”

“Ah.” Constance gave her husband a sidelong glance. “That is partly my work. He has been worrying about Boy, as you know. He finally explained. And I was able to tell him something that set his mind at rest.” She paused. “It is something I must tell you, too—and I will later. When we escape. I should have told you before—I see that now. When this is over, may we go home and just sit quietly together, like an old married couple, and talk?”

“I should like nothing better, my dear. But for the moment, you should circulate. It might be an idea, perhaps, to rescue Lady Cunard from that parlor pink.”

Constance was not anxious to tackle this man, a famous sculptor. (The last time she had done so, he had lectured her first on Marx, then on free love. Constance thought free love a contradiction in terms.) However, he was becoming louder, and possibly more drunk; Lady Cunard was beginning to look trapped by his arguments and his bulk. Constance did her duty.

Lady Cunard moved off fast; the sculptor lurched.

“Constance!” He gave her a scratchy kiss. “My muse. Where have you been hiding yourself? How was the honeymoon?”

Constance recoiled sharply. Before she could stop herself, out came the phrase, the same one she had used to Steenie: “Oh,” she said. “My honeymoon. Well, it began with a death.”

That honeymoon. Stern and Constance had finally arrived at Denton’s shooting lodge late in the afternoon, after a long and arduous drive, the nearest station and town being some eighty miles away. Lodge is a misleading term: The house in which she and Stern were to begin married life (a house that Stern was later to purchase) was a huge mock-baronial castle, an extravagant but bogus piece of architecture built by Denton’s father. The road to it, narrow and rutted, wound up through a pass in the surrounding mountains, then cut down through outcrops of rock and heather toward the coast and an invisible sea. The house itself, at the neck of a remote glen, was constructed out of blood-red sandstone.

They saw it first, the view opening out before them, as they came through the pass. Stern asked the driver to halt; he climbed down from the car and stood for a few moments facing into the wind. Constance refused to leave the car; she shivered and clutched the traveling rugs around her. They faced west. The sun was setting; beyond the red bulk of the house the sky was a conflagration; the clouds bled. Constance averted her eyes. She had visited this house before, but only in the summer months; bleak magnificence, in winter, made her afraid. Was this the extremity she had sought? You could see the hand of God in this landscape. Even the trees were poor and stunted things, shrinking from the violence of the elements. The mountains were sharp as teeth against the sky; the bones of rocks broke from the ground all around her. A wild, desolate, and deathly beauty. Constance thought, shivering again, Oh, why did I agree to come here?

When they entered the house they were greeted by the steward, and by a telegram. Constance, who had not mentioned to Stern the note Boy had given her, knew what that telegram was likely to say. She sank down into one of the enormous chairs in the huge and vaulted hall. Her eyes rested on the vastness of the room, on windows some twenty feet tall, on a massive fireplace that burned eight-foot tree trunks. Her small feet rested upon a tiger skin; the beady eyes of dead stags looked down at her from the walls. She clutched her little handbag very tight. She felt that her husband, who saw everything, saw through the leather of the bag, saw through the vellum envelope, and read the contents of Boy’s last letter inside it. Stern gave no sign of anxiety as he opened the telegram; as he read it his expression did not alter. Looking up, he said with perfect calmness: “Boy is dead. A shooting accident. I will telephone Winterscombe.”

It took time to make the connection; once it had been made, Stern dealt with the situation with his customary imperturbability. He expressed shock, regret, condolences; a perfect readiness, if it would help, to curtail this honeymoon and return to Wiltshire. In view of the lateness of the hour, he suggested the decision be made the following morning.

“I don’t think that it was … an accident,” Constance said in a small voice, once they were alone.

“I imagine not. In the circumstances,” Stern replied.

He said nothing more. The question of suicide was not discussed; there was no examination of his own culpability or his wife’s; no reference to the photograph shown to Boy in the Corinthian Club. Constance found his composure alarming; in an odd and furtive way, she also found it thrilling. Schadenfreude: as she had on the train north, she found all instances of her husband’s ruthlessness thrilling. A secret man—death is his familiar, she thought. She felt a quick nervous excitement. What would this husband of hers do next, when they were upstairs in the bedroom?

What he did was disappointing. With a cold politeness Stern escorted her to her room, summoned her maid, informed her that he understood she must be both exhausted and shocked, and then left her to rest and to recover.

Constance did not want to rest. She spent a sleepless night. The wind howled outside. It rattled the great doors and windows. The next morning Stern came into her room and drew back the curtains. The light was bright and unnaturally white.

“It has snowed during the night,” he said. “Heavily. I’m afraid there is no question of returning to Winterscombe, Constance.” He turned back, his face expressionless. “We are cut off,” he added, and then he left her.

Cut off indeed: they were marooned, Constance discovered. Snowfall had made the one road to the house impassable. No one could reach the house, and no one could leave it. The telephone lines were down. It seemed to Constance that her husband was pleased by this; he exulted in this enforced isolation.

Constance did not. Despite the vast fires burning day and night, she was always cold. The rooms and the corridors echoed. The view from the windows was of loneliness.

“What can you see, Constance?” Stern said to her some five days later, when the snow remained but the storm had abated. They sat in the great hall, Stern by the fire, Constance curled up on a window seat.

She pressed her face to the glass. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands. For five nights she had slept alone; for five nights her marriage had remained unconsummated. No explanation.

“What can I see, Montague?” she replied. “Why, twelve thousand acres of white. The same view, from every window.”

The next day, Stern gave instructions to the steward. His wife, he said, found the house confining. Estate workers were dispatched to dig a path through the snow. When the work was complete, Stern drew Constance to the doorway. Smiling, he displayed to her this path, cut for her benefit. A glittering pathway, just wide enough for two people to walk side by side, it led straight from the door to a balustrade. This balustrade marked the boundary of Gwen’s unsuccessful attempt at a garden. Below it, the ground fell away to a viewpoint overlooking a Highland wilderness. Constance looked at this path, at the bright sky without clouds, at the high sun. The air was icily fresh, with a tang of salt in it. The glitter of the air tempted her; Stern smiled.

“You see?” he said. “Freedom.”

Every day for the next three days, morning and afternoon, Constance and Stern took the air. They would walk along this path, arm in arm and side by side: a slow progress, from the house to the wilderness, from the wilderness to the house.

“A little like exercising in a prison yard, don’t you find?” Stern said once as they paced back and forth. He glanced at Constance as he said this, as if the remark amused him, as if it held a meaning he would like her to understand.

“A little,” Constance replied, clasping his hand. Gloved fingers; a slight and reassuring pressure; she decided the remark had no edge.

“Shall we walk to the wilderness?” Stern would say in the same tone of amused irony, and walk to the wilderness they would. One hundred paces each way; sometimes Constance would say to herself that when they had taken fifty, or a hundred, when they reached the balustrade, she would speak. It shouldn’t be so hard, after all, to turn to him and ask why he left her still to sleep alone, her husband.

One day, two days, three days. She never did. The words would stick in her throat, the way thanks did when she was a child.

By the afternoon of the third day, she had decided: No matter what, the words would be said. No more hesitation. She would pronounce them the very second they reached the balustrade. One hundred paces, Stern accommodating his longer strides to her smaller steps. She clenched her gloved hands tight, rested them against the stone of the balustrade, opened her lips to speak, looked at the view, and was silenced.

Such a majestic view and, to human beings, so diminishing. All color was bleached out: The peat bogs, the heather, the outcrops of rock—all these were invisible beneath the snow. Snow upon snow, in the distance the white bones of mountains and then, below them, ringed by them, the flat black water of the sea-loch.

This loch had a deathly and forbidding air. The sun rarely reached its waters; protected from the prevailing wind by its flanking mountains, its surface was without ripples. In the distance, some three miles away but clearly visible in this crystalline air, she could discern the point where the waters of the loch flowed out into the open sea. Two black sheer rock faces fronted this boundary, making a narrow channel through which, at high and low tide, the water sucked and hurtled. A dangerous stretch of water this, notorious for its currents. Constance, who could not swim and was afraid of water, had always hated it.

“How deep is it?” she had asked Acland once when she was still a child. Acland, indifferent, had shrugged.

“God knows. Very deep. One hundred—two hundred fathoms.”

No, she could not speak. The loch would not allow her. It trapped the words on her tongue. With a sense of fear and despair Constance looked up at her husband.

He had not spoken for some while. Now, as he gazed out across that landscape, she saw it again on her husband’s face, that expression of exultation.

Stern, she saw, did not shrink from this place, as she did. He gloried in it. For a moment, watching him, she thought he was engaged in a silent battle of will with the savagery and desolation of this landscape; it was as if he matched himself against it, as if he challenged its dangerous beauty. He seemed oblivious to her presence; locked in that private struggle of his own. Constance was humbled by this. It was on that occasion, in profile to her, his face fixed and pale, etched against the sky, that she saw for the first time how little she had understood her husband. Stern the Machiavelli, Stern the power broker, exercising his influence in clubrooms, corridors, drawing rooms—that was how she had thought of him, and she had been wrong. Today, I saw Montague’s soul, she was to write in her notebook. It was in that terrible, beautiful place, in that loch, in those mountains.

After a little while, when Stern still did not speak and seemed to have forgotten her presence, she stole out her hand and laid it upon his arm. She would have liked to tell him what she had seen in his face, but the words would not come out correctly. She said only that his liking for this place surprised her; she would not have expected it. Had she been asked to describe a location that matched his character, she would have selected the very opposite of this place.

“A classical house, and a classical park—I should have chosen that,” she said. “Somewhere a little austere, a place men had tamed for generations.”

“I can like such things,” Stern answered in an absent way, his eyes still fixed on the horizon. “But I prefer this. I never came to Scotland before.”

There was a silence. Stern continued to look out over the snow. His eyes traced the line of the crags against the sky. In the far distance a bird—an eagle or a buzzard, great wings outstretched—soared upon the thermals.

“Shall we have this?” Stern turned to Constance suddenly, startling her. He gripped her hand. She saw his face unmasked, freed from all his customary restraint, naked to her gaze for the first time, his eyes lit with a dark excitement.

“Shall we?” His grip on her hand tightened. He gestured toward the landscape before them. A wide arc of the arm: rocks, mountains, water, sea.

“We could, Constance, if you wished. We could have all this. It could be ours. We could … claim it.”

“This place?”

Constance was drawn to him. Stern offered her all this, and more. Such recklessness! For a moment the air sang in her lungs; she, too, was lifted up on those invisible thermals. There the world lay before their feet; one word and it was theirs. No, not even a word, for her husband bent toward her now; all she had to do was kiss his mouth.

She looked into his eyes; she reached up for his kiss; his arm tightened around her waist. At the very last moment, one tiny second of time, she shivered. She was afraid. She shrank back.

She gave a small and hopeless gesture of the hands; tiny kid gloves against the elements. She looked at the ring of mountains, the water of the loch beneath. Did she think of her father? Perhaps, perhaps.

Too far north, after all, she said to herself. Too cold, too extreme. She turned away with a hateful little shrug, a pout of distaste she despised but could not suppress.

“This place? It’s well enough in August—if you like to kill animals. But in winter?”

She stopped, appalled at what she had just said. When she turned, the light had gone from Stern’s face. One more chance, she wanted to cry out: just one more chance. Instead she said, “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Stern replied, turning away his face. He took her arm. “Shall we return to the house?”

“Montague—”

“You’re cold. We’ll discuss it another time,” he said in a curt voice.

Constance felt that voice shrank her; it shriveled her up. One hundred paces back to the door. By the door, Constance lingered. It was unbearable to go in. If she went in now, if she did not speak, it would be an end. But how to speak? She bent and picked up a handful of crisp snow. She crushed it tight in a ball between her fingers.

“Over dinner tonight,” Stern said in an indifferent voice. “We can discuss it then.”

He opened the door. Constance did not move. She did not believe him. They would not discuss it over dinner. This was not something that could be … discussed. She crushed the snow tighter in her hand.

“Montague …”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Do you ever feel confined? Shut up, closed away—so—so you cannot breathe, so the air is like a prison, so you reach out your hand and all you touch is bars—” She stopped. Stern was watching her now with attention.

“Yes,” he began in a cautious way. “I have felt this. I imagine most people have—”

“You could let me out,” Constance cried, clasping his hand, scattering the snow. “You could. Oh, I feel sometimes that you could. If I dared just a little bit more. I think then—I should be so free. So marvelously free. And you might be too. We might free each other. Oh, Montague—” She raised her face to his. “Do you understand me? Do you think I’m right?”

Stern looked down into her face, which was lifted to his, which was imploring. His own expression became gentler. Drawing her to him, he kissed her brow, then traced, in a tender, yet regretful way, the lines of her face.

“That is why I married you,” he replied quietly. “Did you not realize that?”

“When we return to London, Constance,” he began, after dinner that night, watching her down the length of the table, “we shall have to decide where to live. Do you have a preference?”

“Somewhere in London. And a place in the country, I suppose.” Constance spoke with care; she knew Stern was leading up to something. “Then, after the war, I should like to travel. I don’t care to feel too settled.”

“I know that.”

Stern looked down. He gave his attention to his wineglass. He moved the glass back and forth in an arc across the dark polish of the table. The servants had withdrawn. Between Constance and Stern was a monstrous pyramid of fruit, an epergne, flanking lines of silver candelabra some two feet tall. Constance looked about the room with a sense of despair. Massive chairs, vast banners with tattered heraldic emblems, great mauve paintings of Scottish glens. Everything in this house is too big, Constance thought; even the chairs dwarf me.

“I could have Winterscombe within the year—if we wanted it.” Stern spoke suddenly, without looking up. “The house is security against my loans. I can call those loans in at any time. I see no possibility of their being paid back.”

He looked up. Constance stared at him.

“I could have Winterscombe,” he continued in an even voice, “but not just Winterscombe. Did you know I owned the Arlington estate?”

“No, Montague.”

“I bought it, after Hector Arlington’s death. I also own Richard Peel’s estate—you remember Peel, Denton’s old crony, who was quite happy to take investment advice from a Jew, rather less happy to have that Jew eat at his table? He died last autumn. I bought his estate from his executors. He had no children.”

“The Arlingtons’ and Peel’s and Winterscombe? Those estates adjoin.”

“Obviously. And then there is the question of Jane Conyngham’s land. She has the largest holding of all. She tells me she intends to sell.”

“And her land borders the Arlington land.” Constance watched Stern closely. “You could take four estates and make them one?”

“I could.” He seemed almost bored. “This place, too, perhaps. I like it here.”

“If you did that, how much land would you have?”

“Fifteen thousand acres—discounting the twelve here. Together with four houses—which would give us four to choose from. Winterscombe is not greatly to my taste, though it may be to yours. Jane Conyngham’s house is fine. Peel’s is even finer. We could look them over. If you disliked them, we could build.” He gave a dismissive gesture of the hand. “Houses do not greatly interest me. I have owned several. I feel obliged to fill them with things, and once they are filled, they rather bore me.”

“You mean it is the land that interests you?”

“Yes. I suppose that it is.”

“Why is that, Montague?”

“I like space.” Stern rose. He stood, looking down the table at her. “When I was a boy I dreamed of space. The house I grew up in had only three rooms. You could never be alone in it. However—you do not like to discuss Whitechapel, as I remember.”

Stern turned away. He moved to the windows, drew back the heavy curtains, and looked out. There was a full moon; Constance could just glimpse it over her husband’s shoulder, riding high in an unclouded sky. The stars were ice in the dark. She looked at their patterns. She looked down at her plate.

“Is that the only reason, Montague—your love of land?”

“Not the only reason. No. I have always wanted—this may surprise you—I have always wanted to have something I could pass on. You said once that you thought the subject of children did not interest me. You were wrong. I should like … a son. I should like to pass my land on to my son. Perhaps I have dynastic leanings.” He paused. “I have a dream, a recurrent dream, which I’ve had for many years. In that dream I see my son quite clearly. His face, his hair, every feature. We walk together, through our estates. We—survey them, perhaps. And we know, as we walk, that they are virtually limitless. We could walk all day and still not reach our boundaries. Sometimes we stand in the center of all that land. We look at it. And I say to him: ‘This is yours. Take it.’” He broke off. “My son is different from me, of course. He is freer than I have ever been. Anyway. That need not concern you. It is just a dream.”

“I would have thought it might concern me,” Constance said in a low voice.

“But of course. I’m sorry. I did not intend any slight—”

“Are you always alone with your son in the dream, Montague?”

“Yes.”

“I am never there—even now?”

“Not so far, my dear. I’m sure that will change, and you will make an appearance. My mind takes time to adjust, perhaps, to our marriage.”

“I’d have liked to be there.” Constance continued to stare at her plate.

“You manifest yourself in my dreams, Constance—you have for some time.”

“You’re sure?” She turned to him anxiously and held out her hand to him.

“But of course.” His tone was gentler now. He took Constance’s hand, then bent to kiss her.

“Such a sad face.” He drew back, tilted her face up to look at him. “Such a very sad face. Why is that? Have I made you unhappy?”

“A little.”

“Tell me why. It was not my intention.”

“I’m not sure. I might not want to live at Winterscombe. Or anywhere near Winterscombe. It reminds me too much of the past. Of my father—”

“Then we will forget that idea and build our little empire somewhere else. Think about it for a while, and then, if that is what you decide, we will change our plans.” He paused. “I think … it is not just Winterscombe, is it? There is something else?”

“I suppose so. I … Do you like me, Montague?”

“Such a question, from a wife to her husband! Of course I like you, Constance. I like you very much.” He frowned. “Perhaps I do not express myself very well. It’s my nature to be indirect. I have tried to make you see—” He stopped.

“Could you … almost love me, Montague?” Constance darted out her hands and caught his in an impulsive and pleading way. “It would be enough, I think—if you could almost love me.”

“Shall I tell you something?” Stern drew back. “It may answer your question. I’ve been certain—of my interest in you, of my concern, for a long time. Would you like to know when it was that I first noticed you?”

“Yes.”

“When we went to the opera, to see Rigoletto. And we stood in Maud’s drawing room. You told me what it was you thought happened in the opera—after the curtain went down.”

“Then?”

“Oh, I think so. The device about your mother, and her race—none of that was necessary, you know. I knew that I would marry you some months before you proposed.”

“I don’t believe it! You’re making fun of me.” Constance sprang to her feet.

“As you like.” Stern shrugged. “You are wrong. I would not risk making fun of you, nor would I want to. I’m telling you what I thought. That we would marry. That we might have children—in due course.”

“But you were still with Maud then—”

“Even so.”

“You made a decision—just like that, so coldly?”

“It did not feel cold at the time, though decisions are best made in such a frame of mind. I imagine you calculated your assault on me quite coolly. You see? We are two of a kind. If you would learn to trust me a little—”

“Do you trust me?”

“I try.”

“You won’t make me … live at Winterscombe?”

“No. I shall try never to make you do anything against your wishes.” He paused. “I had thought—obviously I was wrong—that you had an attachment to the place.”

“To the house? No.”

“To someone in it, perhaps?”

“No. Not now.”

“To Acland, for instance?”

“Why Acland? Why should you say that?”

“No particular reason. It was just an impression I had.”

“Oh, Acland and I were old enemies. He was my sparring partner, that is all. I do not think of him now. Acland is dead. I have a new antagonist, Montague. Look—I wear his ring upon my finger.”

“You wear a great many rings on your fingers,” Stern replied, examining the small hand Constance displayed to him.

“Only one of any significance.”

“Is that true?”

“Of course. I am a wife now. I am … almost a wife.”

“Shall we make you a complete wife?”

That was Stern’s reply, and it is there that Constance’s account of that particular night, and of her honeymoon, breaks off. There is a gap—literally a gap, of half a blank page. Then the following sentences, written in a hand which is almost illegible:

Montague was so good, so kind and patient and gentle. No games now, and no words. I did not manage very well. I bled. I waited. I thought he would say I was scrawny and clumsy, but he never did. I thought his eyes would hate me, but they didn’t. I think this confused me. I did a terrible thing. I cried out your name, Papa—three times.

I have managed better since. Montague never questions me. He is considerate at all times. When he touches me, I feel dead. He cannot wake me up. I want want want to wake up. We have to keep trying, both of us; we can’t stop. If I stand next to him, I have to touch him.

I shall have to tell him. I’m afraid to tell him. All those secret stories. All those little boxes. Shall I open them all—or just some of them?

“Tell me then, Constance,” Stern said to her.

It was still the night of Steenie’s preview party; Constance and her husband had returned home to the latest of their opulent rented houses. It was ten in the evening, and the telephone call that would so change their lives was still one hour away.

Stern sat by the fire, and Constance, her face set and concentrated, paced about the room. Punctilious in such matters, she was wearing half-mourning for Boy—a dress of advanced cut, made up in a muted lavender-colored material: a compromise between chic and the conventions of grief. There were signs, even so, that Constance rebelled against these strictures, for in her hands she held a most beautiful scarf, of the brightest colors: indigo, vermilion, violet. As she paced back and forth, she passed this scarf through her hands, sometimes winding its colors about her fingers and her rings.

She prefaced her explanation by saying that part of it had been told to Steenie earlier that evening, but, not wishing to hurt him, she had given him an edited version.

“And am I to have the uncensored account?” Stern asked in his dry way.

“Yes,” Constance replied, winding her scarf about her hand. “But even if you are angry, you must not interrupt. I see now that you have to know everything. I should have told you before. You see, Boy liked to photograph me—you know that. What you do not know, no one knows, is that Boy also liked to touch me.”

Constance then told her husband the following story. Since the only other witness to that story was dead, I have no way of knowing whether the story was true or whether Constance—unable to tell her husband the whole truth, even then—invented it. Perhaps parts of it are true; perhaps it is all true; perhaps it was a complete fabrication. Constance was not an ordinary liar, and she often used fiction, as a storyteller does, to convey a deeper truth.

You judge. One thing is sure: Constance’s role in all this is unlikely to have been as innocent as she made out. Remember how she posed for Boy’s photograph, in the King’s bedroom? Remember Freddie? If there is a hidden tempter in this account, a serpent carefully disguised in the long grass, I very much doubt that it was Boy. To portray herself as a victim would have been accurate had Constance been telling Stern the story of her father—but a victim of Boy? That I cannot believe. My reaction, however—and even yours—is less important than Stern’s. The question is: did Stern believe her?

It began with talking, Constance told him; talking developed into a series of games. The first game had clear-cut rules: Boy was the father and Constance the daughter. She was required to call Boy “Papa,” and when she visited him in his room, she was required to confess to this “papa” all her childish misdemeanors. Sometimes this new father was benevolent: He would say that her small crimes—rudeness to her governess, a torn skirt, a quarrel with Steenie—could be forgiven, and he would give her an absolving kiss. On other occasions (for no clear reason) this new father would decide the crime was more serious. “Inattention in church,” he would say. “Now that is very serious.” Or: “Constance, your reading of the book is slipshod. You must pay better attention to your lessons.” He would pause, frown. “Constance,” he would say, “I shall have to punish you.” The method of punishment was always the same. Boy would lean her across his lap and administer several stinging slaps. When this happened, a change would take place in Boy which, to begin with, Constance did not understand. His eyes would become fixed and glazed; he would stammer; the timbre of his voice would change; he would also have an erection

She did not, then, know what an erection was, Constance told her husband; all she knew was that when Boy played this game, when he pressed her down across his lap, she would feel something stir, then thrust against her rib cage. This seemed to make Boy ashamed; after the spankings he would never look at her.

Some while after this, Boy invented a new game, a form of hide-and-seek—an odd form, since they both hid and there were no seekers. In his bedroom at Winterscombe, Boy had a very large wardrobe, a huge mahogany affair. Inside, it was lined with fragrant cedar wood. It was like a small room—even Boy could stand upright inside it. In the game they both climbed into this wardrobe; then Boy pulled the doors closed. It was one of the rules that they must both be absolutely silent.

Inside, Constance would be as quiet as a mouse. She would be pressed up against evening cloaks, tweed jackets, the fine khaki of Boy’s officer uniforms. Boy, a poor performer at this game, always breathed heavily. There was no light. Constance, stealing her hand out, found she could not see it. She would start to count, and tell herself that when she reached fifty, Boy would end the game. She would pray to be let out; she could not breathe in there.

One day, or one night, perhaps the third or fourth time they played this game, Boy whispered: He said they might hold hands in the dark, because he knew she was frightened. He held her hand for some while; then he made a strange noise, which was somewhat like a sigh and somewhat like a groan. He guided her hand so it touched him.

There was that strange thing again, as stiff and hard as before; it made a bulge beneath his trousers, and Boy made her hand into a cup shape, so it fitted over him snugly. He moved about, twisting a little from side to side so that he rubbed against her hand. His movements became urgent; he rubbed faster, in a surreptitious and frantic way, never speaking—until suddenly he gave another groan, and a tremor ran through his body. He released her hand at once. When he lifted her out of the wardrobe, he gave her a little kiss on the corner of her mouth. He said this was their secret; they could play this game because Boy was her papa and her brother and he loved her.

They played it in this way for several weeks, never speaking once they were inside the wardrobe. Then Boy began to introduce variations. One day he unbuttoned her dress; another day he knelt and stroked her ankles. A third day, inside the wardrobe, there were shuffling and fumbling noises; then, when he guided Constance’s hand, she found the bulge thing had been unbuttoned. She could feel it, standing up in the dark like a big stick. It felt warm and damp, and Boy told her to stroke it, but the instant her hand closed around it, Boy shuddered convulsively.

Constance was afraid of this thing, but she was also fascinated by it. She was not sure whether Boy produced it out of love, as he said he did, or whether it was an instrument of punishment.

As the weeks passed, Boy grew bolder. Now, they did not always go into the wardrobe, and into the dark. Sometimes Boy would produce this thing when he took her photograph. He liked to pose her, load the film, set up the camera, and then—before he took the photograph—sit opposite her with this thing in his hands.

He never looked at her face when he did this. He liked to stare at the small slit between her thighs. Constance hated this part of her body, her own secret place, but Boy would stare at it and stare at it while he stroked. Then he would close his eyes. Sometimes he would groan in a way Constance hated. Afterward, he would wash. He always washed next. The soap he used smelled of carnations.

Finally, a long time after this first began, Boy introduced his final variation. One last game: it was called “caving.”

This game was always played in the same way and in the same position. Boy would sit down; Constance would sit astride his lap. Once, Boy kissed her on the mouth, but he never did that again. He did not like mouth kisses. Boy would put his hands around her waist, and he would raise her and lower her.

When he reached the cave—he always called it reaching the cave—Boy’s face would contort. This game hurt Constance, and she thought it must hurt Boy, too, because whenever he reached the cave, he looked like a wounded man. She could not understand why he liked this game so much, when it hurt them both, but Boy would never explain.

When it was over, he would help her dress. He was always very kind and gentle. He might give her a kiss or a small present. Once he gave her a ring with a blue stone; another time he showed her a box in the corner of the room, and there, fast asleep under a rug, was a tiny tricolored spaniel, a puppy. After the present giving she would leave his room. She would have to be very careful never to be seen—and for a long time she was not. Then, one day in that long hot summer when war was first declared, and Boy was on leave from his regiment, she was caught.

It was a Sunday morning, and just as she crept out onto the landing, there was Acland at the top of the stairs.

He stopped. He looked at her. Constance knew he could see into her. He never said one word to her, but he went into Boy’s room, and from the far end of the landing she heard the sound of voices raised in anger. Something must have happened; no one explained, but the visits ended then. No more photographs; no more hide-and-seek; no more caving.

Acland had rescued her, and Constance was grateful for this. She was no longer a child by then; she knew the games were wrong. She did not exactly blame Boy—she thought he really had loved her—but all the same, it was a sin, and sometimes she hoped Acland had punished him.

This was her secret, Constance said, turning back to her husband and winding the bright scarf tight about her hand. It made her ashamed. She felt sullied.

“Do you see?” she said. She was trembling. “That is what was done to me. I cannot always forget. It has made me into a circle of air, a nothing. I cannot be like other women. Boy locked me up in that wardrobe of his, and I am trapped in there, with no air to breathe. It killed Boy, and now it is killing me. Even now. You are the only one who can release me.” Constance began to weep as she said this: one of her sudden and violent storms of emotion. She covered her face with her hands.

Stern, who had been sitting silent all this while, rose to his feet. He did not go to his wife at once, but walked back and forth in the room. When Constance looked at him, she saw his face was white with anger.

“It’s as well for him that he killed himself,” Stern said. “Had he failed, I would have done the job for him.”

Constance, looking at her husband, did not doubt for one second the truth of what he said. There was no bluster in his voice; he spoke coldly, with decision. As she had before, once or twice in Scotland, she glimpsed some extremity in her husband, an ability, a willingness to step over the edge. As before, it excited her: Constance was drawn to people who allowed violent emotion to take them beyond the boundaries of civilized behavior. She liked it out there, in bandit country—and perhaps she liked it even more when she knew the crossing of the frontier had been provoked by herself. Stern, her avenger: more deadly than any such fictive creature in a novel or a play, more satisfying, too, for this drama was real and her life was the plot. Her tears stopped. She gave a shiver. Stern, who had turned away from her, turned back.

“Boy gave me his word. That day in the club. He said he never once touched you.”

“What would you expect him to say?” Constance cried. “He was scarcely likely to confess then—and to you, of all people—”

“But the way he said it. I thought I understood—”

“Believe him then!” Constance began to cry again. “That is always men’s way. They will always trust another man’s word against a woman.”

“No. No. It is not that. Constance, don’t cry. Of course I do not doubt you. No one would say such a thing unless … Come here.” Stern put his arms around her. He drew her close, tight against his heart. He began to stroke her hair. He kissed her brow. “Constance,” he went on, in a different voice, a gentler voice. “I wish you had told me this before—I would have behaved very differently. I blame myself now. If I had known, I would have … Constance, when did this begin?”

“The night my father died.” Constance clung to her husband. He stopped stroking her hair. Constance wound her arms tight about him. “That makes me even more guilty—do you see? My father was outside, and he was dying, and I never even knew. I was inside. I was with Boy—I was with Boy all night. From the end of the comet party until almost five o’clock in the morning. I sat in his room with him and we talked. That’s all it was then, just talking. But that was the night it began. And that was what I told Steenie tonight. Not the other things, the later things. Just that we talked. I wanted Steenie to understand that all those things Boy had said to him were lies. It wasn’t Boy who killed my father.”

Constance stopped. Stern’s hand rested against her shoulder. She could feel a new tension in his body and, when she looked up, saw a new alertness in his face.

That was when he drew back from her, all signs of anger gone. He held her hands. He looked down into her face. A clock in the room ticked. Several minutes of silence went by.

“It was not Boy?” He frowned.

He drew her toward a sofa. They both sat down. Then Stern said to her: “Constance, explain.”

Explaining anything to her husband, Constance was later to write, could be difficult. It was like explaining a sequence of events to a barrister, under cross-examination. As she spoke, Stern would from time to time interject questions. It was then Constance began to sense that all these details he requested—time, place, circumstances—were being cross-checked against other information already stored away.

“You see,” Constance said, “Boy had already taken my photograph that day—the first picture he ever took of me alone. It was in the King’s bedroom, that morning. I had never paid much attention to Boy before then, but that day—I could see—he was trying to be kind to me. Then, later that night, Steenie and I were allowed to stay up. We watched the comet. Nanny put me to bed, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep—I was far too excited. I used to pry in those days—I’ve told you that—but that night I just wanted to watch the party. I wanted to look at all the beautiful dresses. I crept downstairs in my nightdress, and I hid in a place where Steenie and I used to hide from Nanny Temple. It was in the conservatory, behind a high bank of camellias. You could see into the drawing room from there.”

“That was how you witnessed the famous proposal?”

“Yes. Jane was playing the piano, and the music made me a little sleepy. I was just going to creep back out to the hall and go to bed, when the music stopped and Jane and Boy came in. He proposed—well, you know that part of the story. He did it very badly, and I used to make fun of him for that. Steenie and I even made it into a play once, and acted it for Freddie. I wish we hadn’t now. It was unkind. You see”—she turned to look at her husband—“I don’t hate Boy, Montague, no matter what he did. I do … pity him. He was his father’s victim. He knew he would never be the man his father wanted him to be. It made him very unhappy.”

“It made him into a child molester—is that what you’re saying?”

“Don’t be harsh.” Constance looked away. “Boy was afraid to grow up. He was afraid of adult women. When he was a child he was sure of his father’s love, but the older he became, the more he felt he failed him. I could understand that—wanting to remain a child. Wanting to remain the same age you were when you were happy.”

“Could you?”

“Oh, yes. And Boy knew that. It was why he felt safe with me. I was a child, for one thing, and I was a horrid, unattractive, sullen child as well—no one could feel himself a failure next to me, not even Boy. He was always being pitied—and he hated it. I could understand that too. So, there was an alliance between us. We were friends.”

“Very well. I understand.”

“Do you?” Constance gave him a sad glance. “I would like you to, but I can see it is difficult. You don’t know how hateful it is to be pitied. No one would dare to pity you.”

“I am not as invulnerable as you think.” Stern took her hand. “But never mind that. Go on.”

“Very well. After Boy and Jane left, I was more excited than ever. A proposal! I wanted to wake Steenie at once and tell him the news, but when I went back to the nursery, Steenie was fast asleep. I thought I had better not wake him. It must have been about midnight by then, perhaps a little later. Anyway, I could hear the guests beginning to leave. You know where the nurseries are at Winterscombe? They’re on the second floor. Just along from the day nursery, there’s a landing, then a corridor where Boy and Acland and Freddie had their rooms. The landing overlooks the hall below—so I went to sit there. I had a bird’s-eye view. The hall, the main staircase, everything. I peeped through the banisters. I watched the guests leaving. Then I watched the houseguests go up to their rooms. I saw Maud go up.” She gave a small smile. “I even saw you go up, Montague. I saw Boy escort Jane to her room. Jenna went in to her; then Boy went upstairs to bed. He looked so very miserable! After that, the house became very quiet. I was just about to go back to the nursery when Boy’s door opened and he came out.” She paused. “I think he was looking for Acland, because he called his name in a low voice, then opened the door of Acland’s room—but he can’t have been there, because Boy came out again almost immediately.”

“He was looking for Acland?” Stern’s question was sharp. “What time was this?”

“I’m not sure. Late. I had no watch. Everyone else was in bed, even the servants. It must have been about one, perhaps a little later.”

“One o’clock—and Acland wasn’t there?”

“No.”

“Do you know where Acland was?”

“I asked him once.” Constance turned away. “He said he was with a woman. All night.”

“A woman?”

“Yes. All night.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes. I think I did. Anyway, Acland is beside the point. The point is, Boy came out onto the landing and he saw me. He asked me what I was doing, staying up so late, and I explained about the comet. He smiled. He said he used to watch the grown-up parties when he was my age, from just that place. He asked if I still felt wide-awake, and when I said I did, he said I could come and sit in his room. We’d have a talk.”

“A talk?”

“That was what he said. I went in, and Boy sat me down by the fire. I only had my nightdress, no dressing gown, so Boy fetched a rug to wrap around me. He gave me a glass of lemonade and some biscuits. He showed all his collections—the birds’ eggs, the lead soldiers. It was fun! Then we talked. I think Boy was very unhappy—he needed to talk to someone, and I was there.”

“You talked. For how long?”

“A very long time. It didn’t feel long. Then, eventually, Boy said I must go back to bed. He took me back to the nursery. That was when I looked at the clock. It was a minute or two before five—I remember because I was surprised it was so late. I crept into bed, and as I lay down, I heard the church clock strike.”

“You’re quite certain of all this?”

“Absolutely certain.”

“What time was the accident discovered?”

“Six-thirty. Cattermole always said around six-thirty.”

“How strange.”

“Why strange?”

“Because, as you say, Boy could not have been involved. Why should he claim to Steenie that he was? Was he shielding someone else, do you think?”

“Shielding someone? Do you mean his father?”

“That’s one candidate. There is another.”

Constance rose. She shook her head. “I’m sure that wasn’t it. I think he was just … confused. Our marriage made him unhappy. He was shell-shocked. It was the war making him speak in that way—that was what I wanted Steenie to see—”

“You seem very anxious to believe that.”

“I want to forget all this—perhaps that’s why. Oh, Montague, don’t you see? It used to obsess me so much. I used to say to myself that it was not just an accident, that one day I would know the truth. I used to try and patch it together, piece by piece. I don’t want to do that anymore—”

“Why not?”

“Because it was an accident. No one was to blame—except Hennessy. He put that trap there, and the wrong man was caught by it. It was seven years ago. I want to forget it, leave it all behind. Please, Montague, don’t you see?” She turned to him and caught at his hand. “I want to begin a different life—with you. This is the last time we ever need to talk about the past. I want us to find somewhere beautiful to live—”

“Not Winterscombe?”

“Not Winterscombe—not anywhere near Winterscombe. Don’t you see now how impossible that would be?”

“Yes. I do see that.”

“And then—oh, I want us to be happy. I want to give you your son. I want us to begin conquering the world together, just as we planned. I want—”

“Do you still want Jenna as your maid?”

“Yes, yes. I should like to save her and her baby from that horrible Hennessy. I should like to look after them. But that is just a small part of my plans—forget that. The important thing is us. Oh, Montague, I want us to be so very close—”

“Is Hennessy that baby’s father?”

“How should I know? What difference does it make? Jenna says he is—presumably she knows! Forget them. Listen to me, darling Montague. I told Steenie something else today, something that concerns you. And now—”

“No. You listen to me, Constance.” To her surprise, Stern interrupted the rush of words. He laid his hand across her lips to silence her. Constance would have pulled that hand away and pressed on, but she was silenced by the expression on his face. She gave a small cry.

“Oh—so grim and so sad! Why do you look at me like that?”

“Because there is something I want to tell you. Something I have just understood. An answer to an old puzzle. There were always pieces missing, but tonight you put the last piece into place. Now I can see it, the whole pattern—and I think you could, too, if you would look closely enough. It is really very simple—so obvious I should have seen it long ago.”

“I don’t understand.”

Stern sighed. Whatever he was about to say, he seemed to find it difficult to begin. He took both her hands in his.

“Constance,” he began gently. “You should look at this, just one last time. You can never leave it behind you otherwise, and, perhaps, neither can I. Listen. Ask yourself. Was it an accident? Wasn’t there someone in the house that night who might have had good cause to harm your father? Someone who felt betrayed by him, someone who might have seen him as a trespasser, someone who knew of his affair with Gwen?”

“Denton? Do you mean Denton?”

“Well, Denton is an obvious candidate, of course. But no, I do not mean Denton.” Stern paused. Again he seemed reluctant to go on. “You forget, Constance—I was there that night. I have considered this too. I ruled out Denton long ago. By the end of dinner he was so drunk he had difficulty in standing, let alone walking. Peel and Heyward-West and I helped him as far as the library. He passed out almost at once. We left him to sleep it off.”

“That’s where he was?” Constance frowned. “Boy was looking for him, you know. He never found him. He wanted to tell him about the engagement—”

“Well, that is where he was. I saw him there before I went up to my room. He was out cold.”

“Then there is no one. Don’t you see? No one.”

“Oh, but I think there is, Constance.” Stern released her hands. “You seem very reluctant to examine this. Ask yourself. Of all the alibis, whose is the weakest?”

“Oh, I see.” Constance gave a small angry gesture. “I see what you are driving at. I see what you are trying to make me say.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. You’re accusing Acland. I won’t believe that. It can’t have been Acland. He told me where he was that night—”

“Constance—”

“I shall not listen to this! Acland is dead. He can’t defend himself. It’s wrong to speculate—you have no right. You never knew Acland, and I did. I knew him through and through. You’re jealous of Acland—I see that now. You’re always mentioning him, always questioning me about him. Well, I won’t have you speak of him in this way. Acland could not lie to me—”

“Ah, but you could lie to yourself, Constance. Think about that.” Stern rose. He looked down at her. “You could believe what you wanted to believe. We are all capable of that, especially if it helps us to avoid an ugly truth. Don’t you see?” He looked at her with great sadness. “When a truth is painful, and it concerns someone we love, none of us wants to look it in the face. We shield ourselves from the knowledge. We also shield the person we love.”

“You think I love Acland?” Color mounted in Constance’s cheeks. She stood. “Is that what you mean?”

“The possibility had occurred to me. Among others.” Stern moved away. “You were certainly greatly distressed by his death. I remember that.”

“You think I am shielding him?”

“I think you are shielding yourself. I think you refuse to confront the truth.”

“Very well then, I’ll tell you.” Constance’s voice rose. She crossed to her husband. “I believed Acland when he said he was with a woman, because I know who she was. He was in love with her then—he spent every moment he could with her. That night he met her in the stable loft. It’s true, what he said. I won’t tell you her name, but—”

“You have no need to tell me her name. I know who she was.”

“You can’t possibly know.”

“Oh, but I can.” Stern turned back to her. He took her arm with an expression of regret. “I told you before, Constance, I am not easily deceived, and I dislike to be misled. The woman was Jenna. Her lover was not some man in the village, as you once said to me, but Acland. It was Acland that trap was set for, by Hennessy, who was jealous of him. I imagine Hennessy will remain jealous, and suspicious, despite the fact that Acland is dead, since Jenna’s child is almost certainly not her husband’s. That, I suppose, is why you take such a proprietary interest in the child. It is Acland’s, is it not? You might have said so. But then there are a number of other things you might have said, and did not. You still edit the truth, you see, Constance—to me as well as Steenie. I sometimes think you also edit the truth to yourself.”

“How do you know this?”

“Partly through observation. Partly through information. When Acland enlisted he made a will. It was completed not long before he was killed, by a lawyer I recommended to him. In that will, he left what money he had to Jenna. Oh, and it might interest you to know—you were not forgotten. He left you his books.”

“You know the contents of wills?”

“Some wills. I happen to have read this one.”

“I hate you for that. Spying in that way. It’s the most despicable thing I ever heard—”

“I doubt that. In my position you would have done exactly the same thing. Neither of us has the least concern for social niceties—”

“I shan’t listen to this.” Constance turned away angrily. “It simply proves my point, in any case. If you know about Jenna, then you know why I believe Acland. His alibi is not a flimsy one—”

“All night?”

“He was in love.”

“Oh, I’m sure he was devoted—at the time. I’m sure he met her in the stable loft, just as you claim. Perhaps he remained there—who knows? But we can be certain of one thing. Jenna did not. You yourself saw her, shortly after midnight, going in to Jane Conyngham’s room.”

“Oh.” Constance gave a small start. “Yes, I did. I had not thought of that. Oh, God.” She bent her head.

Stern crossed to her. He put his arm around her. “Constance,” he said, “even that proves nothing—don’t you see? If Acland’s alibi is flimsy, so are the others. Yes, Denton was drunk, and passed out—but perhaps he recovered. Perhaps you were mistaken about the time, and you stayed talking to Boy less long than you thought. We could argue this a thousand ways.” He sighed. “Maybe you were right, and the whole affair was an accident.”

“Ah, but you don’t believe that, do you? I can tell.”

“No, I don’t.” He turned Constance to face him. “I think I know exactly what happened that night—and I think you know too. But it is painful, and you will not examine it.”

“Acland could not lie to me!” Constance’s eyes filled with tears. “And besides, he is dead now. Don’t you see, Montague, it does no good to resurrect all this. We should draw a line under it all, you and I, and begin again.”

“Very well. We shall never speak of it again.” Stern bent, as if to kiss her. As he did so the telephone rang.

He straightened, an expression of annoyance on his face. He picked up the receiver and listened.

At first, Constance paid no attention to this call, which she expected to concern business affairs. Then Stern’s manner—the change in his face, the oddness of the questions he put—alerted her. She turned to watch her husband. She approached closer and tried to identify the voice on the line, a woman’s voice. When Stern replaced the receiver, she made a dart at him.

“Was that Maud?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give her this number?”

“No. Gwen must have.”

“How dare she call!” Constance gave a small stamp. “What’s wrong? Something must be wrong. She wouldn’t call otherwise.”

“Something has happened—”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to please you, whatever it is! Is it money? Is she ill?”

“No.” Stern turned away and sat down. He did not speak. Constance stared at him in growing consternation. She made a rush to his side, knelt down by him, and took his hands in hers.

“Oh, Montague, I’m sorry. I’m being stupid and jealous. What is it? Has something terrible happened? Oh, tell me—tell me quickly. You make me afraid.”

“Something strange has happened.”

“A bad thing?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Does it concern me?”

“I fear that it does.”

“Tell me.”

“Oddly enough,” he said, “it has to do with caves.”

Jane liked the caves at Étaples. The air attacks, once they began, always came at night; they took refuge in the caves, always at night. And the caves, stretching back into the hillside, a labyrinth of limestone caverns and corridors, fascinated her. In the deeper caves no light penetrated, and no sound. To stand in them was to lose all sense of time and place. It might have been midnight or noon. The air was chill; winter or summer, the temperature scarcely altered. Without a flashlight, and some degree of care, she would have become lost within minutes, wandering through fissures of rock. This danger she also liked. Sometimes she would walk back into the hillside; then, when she reached a large cave, she would switch off her flashlight. She would lift her hand in front of her face. It was invisible. She would listen. There was no sound but her own breathing and the drip of water: the liquefaction of centuries. Sometimes she would make herself count to twenty, then fifty, then a hundred, before she switched on her flashlight once more. Her skin would prickle with fear. She liked to remind herself in this way of the caves’ silent power—and, benign or malevolent, they possessed power; she was sure of it.

Winnie felt no such thing and once, when Jane tried to explain, became irritable. Winnie disliked the caves. She said they were confining, despite their size. She complained of the cold. She complained of the hardness of the rock on which she was forced to sleep. She became, in fact, quite bitter on the whole subject of the caves—and there was a reason for this. Colonel Hunter-Coote remained with his men in the camp: Winnie, who considered WAACs military personnel first and women second, resented this separation. “Our place is down there, gels!” she would cry, standing at the mouth of the caves. She would point down through the darkness to the camp, where the guns lit the dark.

Once the exodus to the caves became a regular occurrence, however, Winnie began to enjoy herself. Her considerable powers of organization came to the fore. For Winnie, a night in the caves was intolerable without a great many solaces: She must have a blanket, a small inflatable rubber pillow, a pump to aid the pillow’s inflation. She would not leave camp without a length of string, a flashlight, a box of matches, a penknife, a book, writing paper and pens, spare batteries, and candles. “If we can’t sleep we’d better eat,” she would declare; neither she nor her gels ever set foot in the caves without flasks of cocoa, tinned fruit, and hefty packages of sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper.

After some three or four nights of this, Winnie observed the habits of the French villagers, who, within days, began to turn the caves into homes. First of all, they selected the best cave, the warmest and the driest and the one that provided the finest view of the activities below, since it overlooked the guns.

Having established this cave as their territory, they marked it out with piles of belongings, which would be left there in readiness until the next raid. Mattresses appeared; one very old man even toiled up the hill hauling a sagging armchair. Children carried up baskets of food and bottles of wine; grandfathers brought accordions and harmonicas; one grandmother brought her goat, on a string. She sat in the mouth of the cave and milked it.

“Typical—absolutely typical!” Winnie pronounced jealously, after visiting this cave. “Do you know what that woman was doing—the one with the goat? She was frying chicken on a paraffin stove. In the middle of a battle. The French really are the absolute end.” The night after this, Winnie produced a primus stove, which she set up with a flourish. The night after that, she used it. Being English, she did not fry chicken; she heated up tins of thick oxtail soup. The next night, she promised, there would be deviled sardines.

“Sardines at midnight—amazing, Winnie,” Wexton murmured.

In fact these sardines never made their appearance, for that night the German aircraft scored a direct hit. They missed munitions, they missed the parade ground and the Nissen huts, but one bomb fell, fair and square, right on the top of Winnie’s YWCA club. No one was injured, but the Winnie who made her appearance in the caves the following night was a changed woman.

“Gone, all gone!” she announced with a stricken look. “All my lovely tins of condensed milk—and I’d waited weeks for those! The china, the tables and chairs—matchsticks! Even the piano, utterly smashed. They knew—I’m certain the Huns knew. Munitions? They weren’t attacking the munitions dump; they were attacking our morale.”

Winnie was determined to be inconsolable. She even refused cocoa. She hunched herself under her blankets and began, after a while, to emit noises that might have been snores or groans. When they were sure they were snores, Jane and Wexton left her.

Jane checked the cave where her own patients lay, then joined Wexton at the mouth of the caves, overlooking the camp. They stayed there some while, talking to the sentries, peering out into the darkness, listening for the drone of approaching planes. Wexton sat down. He lit a cigarette and took out his notebook. Jane left him, and turned back.

The cave with the French—she could see the grandmother and her goat sitting side by side. The grandmother was knitting. She passed on to a deeper, larger cave, where the wounded lay sleeping in rows of camp beds. She went farther into the hill and looked into the cavern where the men who suffered from battle fatigue were stationed. This cave was the innermost of those in use; here, the sound of guns and explosions was muffled. The men seemed to sleep peacefully enough. One of the Red Cross nurses, a woman Jane had met at Winnie’s club, sat watching over them. There was a book on her knee and two candles at her side. The light of the candle flames leaped against the walls and danced devils upon the nurse’s face. Seeing Jane, she glanced up from her book and smiled. Jane walked on.

Deeper and deeper into the hillside; the silence was absolute now. Some of the caves were small, little more than spaces below shelves of rock; others were caverns so high that the beam of her flashlight could not penetrate to their roofs. The light made the seepings from the rock gleam; it lit the phosphorescence of stalactites.

Jane did not pause to look at these. She quickened her pace. There was one cave she wanted to reach, one she had explored before, a cave that was as high, as wide, as echoing as a cathedral. At the entrance to this cave there was a hollow of rock as smooth as a stoup. It contained water. When she reached this cave, she felt for the rock. She dipped her hand into the ice-cold water and splashed it against her face. Holding her flashlight tightly, she walked forward, first five paces and then ten.

She stopped. She listened. Far above her, something stirred, a leathery rustling, almost certainly bats. Jane was afraid of bats. She imagined them tangled in her hair. She hesitated; then she knelt.

Jane came to this cave to pray. She came to it because it gave her total privacy. But sometimes, even here, Jane felt her prayers were small things. They knotted and twisted and doubled back.

That night, her prayers began in this way. The cold rock cut her knees and distracted her. There was still that leathery shuffling high in the roof space. She tried to pray for Boy, who, she believed, had killed himself, although his parents claimed it was a shooting accident. Water dripped. She tried to pray for her aunt Clara, who was dead, and her father, who was dead, and her brother, Roland, who was dead in a different war. The darkness stifled the prayers. She sat back on her heels. She felt her stockings tear at the knee. It was perhaps wrong, she thought, that she always seemed to pray for the dead. She ought to pray for the living.

She then did a very strange thing. Later, when she tried to describe it in her diary, she could not account for it at all. It resisted the net of her sentences. There was no conscious decision. One moment she knelt; the next, she lay full-length on the rock, flat against the limestone, arms extended.

All the words were gone; the rock drew them out of her. Anger and pain, war and the pity of war, faith and its obstructions; no more contradictions—they clung and then were gone. Such lightness, being lifted above the words; how small their anguish seemed as she rose above them. A space traveler, gifted with pinions, she looked down on the words and they were as small as a star, inexorable as a planet, distant and lovely as a moon—the good and the bad, the hope and the despair, all the opposites, moving in a sure equilibrium.

Faster than light. She looked down at the woman she had left behind in the cave; she looked down on serenity and on battles; she watched the rhythms of death and birth, of extinction and regeneration. The beauty of this patterning was blinding; its exactitude and justice dazzled her eyes—and the woman in the cave below her cried out.

Over in an instant, lasting beyond a lifetime. Once the brightness of vision was gone, the darkness of the cave was absolute. She lay there, resting in the darkness; then she began to be afraid. She stumbled awkwardly to her feet; the flashlight dropped from her hand. A moment of pure fear then, a vision of being trapped in that labyrinth of passageways. Then, bending, she found the flashlight at once. Her hand closed over the metal casing; the battery rattled. She heard that leathery shuffling in the roof space again; then the beam of light came back on.

Jane trained the light against the rock face. Had she entered this cave by the slit in the rock there, or the one a little farther to her right? Should she go through the near opening or the far one? Which way?

She turned in one direction. She turned back. She stared down fearfully at the ground where she had lain a few moments before. She was no longer sure that she had lain there at all. She might have imagined it. This frightened her more. There was a power in these caves, a power she had sensed from the first; she now began to believe it was malevolent. These caves meant her harm. They meant to lose her.

Something brushed against her face. Jane cried out. The rock caught her cry and threw it back at her. The beam of the flashlight wavered, then strengthened; at once she felt calmer. She looked first to her left and then to her right. She was sure—almost sure—that she had entered this cave by the small opening to the left of her; she considered this fissure, then turned away from it. A few paces; a narrow gap, a shelf of rock, and then a passageway, its floor rising sharply.

Not the way she had entered this cave, but the right way to leave it. She edged through the gap, then began to walk more quickly, now certain of her route; an Ariadne, she thought, following an invisible string. This way. She stumbled, then broke into a run. She was almost there. She stopped at a point where the passageway widened and three paths joined. The bombing had begun again; muffled by stone, she could hear the reverberation of guns. The cave where Winnie slept was to her left; the cave where Wexton sat with the sentries was straight ahead; the cave she must find was to her right.

She ran forward a few paces. As she reached the right cave, a gun stuttered. When she entered, the Red Cross nurse set down her book. She yawned, stretched, smiled. Her two candles were almost burned down. She picked up two more, lit them, fixed them in a pool of soft wax. Their flames wavered, then strengthened. “How long the night is,” she said.

Jane looked from the nurse to the beds. She counted them. There were twenty-five men here. She shone the beam of her flashlight along the rows. Most of the men slept, huddled figures beneath their blankets. One man, caught in the light, sat up in his bed. He counted and then recounted the fingers of his hand. Two beds along, a man moaned, a low, monotonous crooning. Next to him, a man touched himself; the blankets lifted, then fell, up and down, a remorseless jiggling. His eyes rolled back. He opened and closed his mouth. He sighed. Then he began on the jiggling and the jerking again.

“Best to leave them.” The Red Cross nurse looked across at this man. “They don’t mean any harm. Just like children, most of them—and besides, if it keeps them quiet, why not?”

Jane looked back at the beds. The man who had been moaning was growing restless. He began to thresh back and forth in the bed. He leaned back and banged his head against the rock.

“Oh, that one—he’s one of the difficult ones, he is.” The nurse stood. She gave Jane an assessing look. “Some of them are quiet as mice. Never say a word. But that one …” She clicked her tongue. “Once he starts, there’s only one way to stop him. You want to see? You won’t say a word? We all do it, and it settles him just nice—but the sister wouldn’t like it, not if she knew—”

“Please. They are your patients.”

Jane turned away. She looked at the candles. She watched shadows move against the rock. When she turned back, the nurse sat on the edge of the moaning man’s bed. She bent over him. She smoothed his forehead. She gave a quick, precautionary glance toward the entrance to the cave. She loosened the front of her uniform and drew out one plump breast.

“Here you are, love. Here. There now. There now.”

The man’s eyes were still tight-shut; at the sound of her voice, his wails diminished. The nurse took his hand and guided it. It closed on the pale globe of her breast and clutched at it. He began to make smacking noises with his lips. The nurse leaned forward, cradling him. She slipped her nipple between his lips. The man sucked.

She sat there, nursing him, for perhaps two or three minutes. Then she laid him back, stroked his brow, refastened her dress.

“Quiet as a lamb now, poor thing. He’ll sleep now, you’ll see. It’s a comfort to him, and what is it, after all? No more than you’d do for a baby if it cried. Better than morphine, not as addictive, and quicker too.”

“Does he talk?” Jane still stared at the line of beds. “Does he think you’re his mother?”

“I couldn’t say, dear. He moans a lot—like you heard. Never says much. Not actual words. I think …” She hesitated. “I think he won’t make it back, not that one.”

“Do any of them talk?” Jane turned back. “I mean, do they ever talk—about what made them like this? What it was they saw?”

“Some of them.” The nurse gave a sigh. “Usually it’s just one little thing, something they fix on, and they will go over it again and again. And then, others—like him—they never speak at all. They just look right through you. There’s some don’t even have a name. We don’t know who they are, and when they bring them in, we give them a number. I don’t like that, so I give them a name anyway. I say to them: Right, you’re Bill, or Johnny. They seem to like that. They can’t remember a thing, of course. It’s all blanked out.”

“Names?” Jane turned back to the beds. “Why wouldn’t they have names?”

“A hundred reasons. Blown up. On the wire. Half-buried alive. In a dugout with dead men for five days before they get to them. It happens all the time. Some of them still know who they are, some of them can be identified, and some of them can’t. They sort it out, I expect, when they get them back to England. Oh, Lord! Look at that one. I’ll have to stop him. I won’t be a sec.”

She pushed her chair back. She crossed to the man whose blankets had jiggled and jerked. His blankets had now fallen from the bed. His trousers gaped. Between his pumping hands was a strip of anxious hooded flesh, scarcely erect. Jane averted her eyes. There was a sound of a slap. The man groaned. When Jane next looked back, his blankets were in place. The man’s eyes were closed. His thumb was in his mouth.

“No peace for the wicked.” The nurse paused by his bed. She switched on a flashlight and shone it along the line of beds, first to the right and then to the left. Her patients were quiet. She looked up.

“Do you fancy something warm to drink? I’ve a flask here with some warm milk and a spot of something stronger. Would you like some, dear? I’d be glad of the company. We’ll be here hours yet.”

“In a minute. I should just like to …” Jane walked forward. She edged between the beds. “One of the men you checked just now—when you shone your flashlight. Something just caught my eye—”

“Which one?” The nurse flicked her flashlight again, up and down the row. “This one? He’s quiet tonight. He’s another won’t make it back, I think.”

“No, not that one. Over there.”

The nurse directed the beam of her flashlight the other way. It shone on gray blankets and averted faces, closed eyes, grown men curled as tight as a fetus.

“What, that one?” The beam hovered, then was still. “Oh, he’s one of the numbers. I don’t know much about him. They only brought him in—what?—two days ago. Three. There was an exchange of prisoners—at Arras, I think. Then they shipped him up here. Isn’t he thin? Half-starved. And he’s had a horrible wound—it’s healed now, but it’s still horrible. Look.”

She leaned across and drew back the blanket.

“Oh, don’t wake him. He’s asleep.”

“He won’t wake.” The nurse gave her a sidelong glance. “And if he does wake, he won’t speak. He’s catatonic. I only give him a week. Look—just look. You tell me. How does a man get a wound like that and still live?”

The man’s jacket was unfastened; his shirt was loose. The nurse pushed them to one side. She directed the flashlight.

The man had taken a bayonet wound in the chest. The bayonet must have glanced across his ribs before penetrating just below the heart. The wound had been poorly sutured. It had left a livid scar, a cicatrice the shape of a crescent moon. The marks of stitches were clearly visible. Around the man’s throat was a thong and a small leather medallion.

“One-nine-three?”

“That’s his number. His hospital number.” The nurse began to sound impatient. She pulled the blanket back into place.

“Did you not give him a name?”

“This one? No, I didn’t. I don’t know why. He hasn’t been here long, and I haven’t nursed him that much. Also, he scares me. Some of them do, you know. The look they get in their eyes. As if they wanted to kill you. He has that. Cold eyes. They look right through you. And they’re a funny color.”

It was as if the man heard her. He stirred, turned, opened his eyes. He lay on his back, staring straight up at them without blinking. He must have seen them, but he gave no sign. He might have stared at a wall.

“Why don’t we have that milk?”

The nurse turned away. Jane did not move.

“Come on. I’ve some cigarettes, too, if you’d like one. Shouldn’t, not when I’m on duty—but the night’s so slow, don’t you find?” She shivered. “I hate these bloody caves.”

“Yes. Very slow.”

Jane knelt beside the bed. She took her own flashlight from her pocket and switched it on. She shone it carefully to the side of the man’s face, so it would not blind him. A thin face. The reddish stubble of a beard, perhaps four or five days of growth.

Why had no one shaved him? she thought. She felt a sudden spurt of anger. Why had no one done this for him, if he could not do it for himself? And his hair was unwashed, as well as uncombed. She lifted her hand to smooth it; the man’s hair was alive; his scalp crawled. Jane jerked her hand away. She almost dropped her flashlight.

“This man has lice.” She swung around accusingly.

The nurse shrugged. “I’ll make a note of it. They can deal with it tomorrow.”

“It should have been dealt with at once. At once.”

Jane stopped. The man had turned his head. He regarded her face with a still cold gaze. His eyes turned to her hair, to her cap. He looked downward toward her mouth and chin, then back up to her eyes. His eyes had the vacancy of the blind.

“Look, do you want some of this milk or don’t you?” The nurse sounded impatient. “Leave him alone. Let him get some sleep. I don’t want trouble.”

“I know him,” Jane said. “I know him.”

She leaned forward so that her own eyes looked down into his. The man continued to stare straight ahead, as if he looked through her into the dark. His eyes were green, the left a perceptibly different color from the right. Jane took his left hand and held it between her own. Once he had worn a signet ring on the little finger of this hand, though he wore none now.

“Acland.”

She spoke his name very quietly, so only she and he could hear. There was no flicker of response.

“Acland. Can you understand me? It’s Jane. Look, touch me. I’m a nurse here. I’ve cut my hair since you last saw me, but I’m sure if you look you can recognize me—”

Jane’s voice broke. She felt confused. Her vision blurred. Hair? Why was she talking about hair? How could she be so stupid?

“Look.” She lifted his hand so that his fingers rested against her face. His hand remained stiff and inert. “Look, I’m crying, Acland. Tears—can you feel them? I’m only crying because I’m so happy, Acland. I thought I’d lost you, you see. But you’re not lost. You’re found. Acland—can you hear me? Oh, please, can’t you see me?”

The man below her gave no sign he heard her voice. His hand remained stiff. There was no answering pressure from his fingers, no trace of response in his eyes. Jane thought: I was always invisible to him; I am invisible still.

“Acland, please, let me help you. You will be safe now. I shall look after you. I shan’t let anyone hurt you. I’ll take you home—Acland, think: Winterscombe. You’ll see Winterscombe. It’s spring there now—”

Jane stopped. She dropped her own hands and drew back a little. Acland’s hand remained as it had been. He did not lower his arm. Jane had begun to shake. A bomb breathed in the distance. The air moved. She tried to force this upraised arm back down against the blankets, but it would not be forced. It was as stiff as the arm of a day-old corpse. She swung around.

“What is wrong with this man—what is it?”

She put the question angrily. The nurse took offense.

“Wrong with him? What do you think is wrong with him? The same as is wrong with all the others. And you’re wasting your time trying to talk to him. Maybe he can hear—but if he can, he doesn’t listen. And he never speaks. Look—come and have a drink. Have a cigarette.” Her voice became conciliatory. “Come on, dear. It’s best to leave him. He’s mad.”