Madame Saval had departed, presumably for the day. But Penelope, as she approached the house, saw that she was again not going to be quite alone. A boy who must be André had appeared, and was sweeping the terrace with the sort of broom popularly associated with air-borne witches in full flight. On this June day there were few if any fallen leaves to deal with, and André was doing little more than stir up an inconsiderable cloud of dust. In some similar fashion, Penelope remembered, would Tommy Elbrow behave at the vicarage when hoping to combine an appearance of virtuous activity with the pleasures of casual talk with a member of the household. Penelope, although preoccupied with her recent encounter, paused to have a word with this further retainer.
‘Bon jour, André,’ she said. ‘Moi, je suis Madame Ferneydale. Vous avez travaille depuis longtemps chez Le Colombier?’
‘Good morning, Madame. For one year I work here.’
‘And have learnt English? That’s very good, indeed.’
‘It is the language – the second language – of the Dordogne. So many English buy so many houses in Dordogne. One works here, one works there, and always there is English to hear. For one year I am garçon de salle, and always I listen to what I hear.’
André, Penelope saw, was less appropriately described as a boy than as a youth – of sixteen, perhaps, or seventeen. She wondered why he had declined from the glories of being a waiter in a café or a hotel to his present position. He was dressed in that pale blue cotton or denim which, well before it had established itself internationally as the uniform of a young generation, had been the garb of a French peasantry for a very long time. André might be Mme Saval’s grandson, although his appearance would not be likely to put the idea in one’s head. He was fair-haired, of a clear complexion, bright-eyed, and with full lips permanently ready to part in a friendly and ingenuous smile. He had opted, perhaps, for an easy life for a time. At Le Colombier there was no doubt wood to cleave and cart, shrubs to trim and paths to weed as well as grass to mow and a terrace to keep tidy. But it scarcely seemed a full-time job, and it was possible that André turned up only on so many days a week. At the moment Penelope made no enquiry about this, and after a few more words went on into the house. But the thought came to her that Fulke, having made money almost on the grand scale, had perhaps been a notably generous employer. In his letter there was that casually dropped ‘several thousand pounds’ as the sum left with Bernie Huffer to cover such residual activities as he was going to perform. At Mallows, whether in the vicarage or the Hall, ‘several thousand pounds’ would be quite something. And this made Penelope feel again that as one of her late brother-in-law’s legatees she was on the fringes of a world of affluence alien to anything she knew. But at least about Le Colombier itself there was nothing showy – if one excepted, that was to say, half a dozen or a dozen objects in what might be called the Cézanne bracket, commercially regarded. She realised the ownership of these things was going to trouble her increasingly as out of scale with everything familiar in her life. She even wondered why she hadn’t simply told Sophie to send a truck to take them away. Partly it had been that she supposed the transfer of such costly gifts to be not without complications of a legal sort. But much more, she had to confess to herself, it was because she had never greatly cared for Sophie Dix, and somehow had cared even less for Sophie Ferneydale. Having owned up to this in the small court of her own conscience, she set about contentedly finding herself a midday meal.
But the afternoon presented a problem she had been quite aware of as likely to keep turning up. Here she was, a young English widow, transported to a scene with which her sole connection was that of a legal ownership arbitrarily imposed on her by the will, or whim, of a man she hadn’t seen for years; of a man, indeed, to whom her last remembered utterance had been a monosyllabic ‘No.’ It was true that Fulke Ferneydale, whose talents had earned him riches, could be seen as having done no more than his duty in making a generous bequest to his brother’s widow. The second Mrs Henry Rich, who had herself been a widow left in circumstances so narrow that she had been obliged to become a professional governess over a substantial period of years, had been right in insisting upon the propriety of Fulke’s behaviour. Nevertheless the form of his gift, and the unexpected obligation by which – although without legal force – it had proved to be accompanied, had landed her in what she was bound to feel as a deracinated condition. It might be true, as André had declared, that the Dordogne was stuffing with leisured English people, and that she might eventually find some society among these. Le Colombier itself she did feel she might come to love. But it would be only an idle sort of life that she could create there. It would be a life, surely, devoid of duties – and she had been brought up to feel, with Wordsworth, that Duty was the stern daughter of the voice of God. It had never, perhaps, been uttered to her in that magniloquent way, but at least she had been taught to put her back into the daily round and common task. As she washed up a single plate and a single knife and fork it came to her suddenly and clearly that Le Colombier was going to be no more than an episode in her life.
Penelope was taking a walk through the woods – probably her own woods – when the fact came back to her with renewed force. This time it was so incontrovertible that she wondered why it had not come to her sooner than it had done. The answer to this, she told herself in an almost alarming moment, might be Bernie Huffer. ‘She had walked into a house of her own, something hitherto quite foreign to her experience, and there had been a young man, alien in the same degree, but almost instantly interesting and attractive on the very score of this fact.
Rationally viewed, there didn’t seem a great deal to be said for Bernie. He had revealed himself as having no high regard for the genius of his late employer, and his own ambition didn’t even lie in the field of literature. A seriously dedicated young painter, Penelope believed, would not have opted for a certain amount of security at the expense of the distracting business of being secretary to a popular and quirky author.
Still, Bernie Huffer was fun – and thus commanded something which Penelope was conscious of as having been in rather short supply for a good many years past. Her acquaintance with him had been of only a few hours’ duration; yet she was actually missing him now. She wished she had brought Dora Quillinan as a companion on this exploration of her unexpected inheritance. Or did she? Hadn’t she spoken truly when she had said to Dora that she wanted nobody nudging her in one direction or the other when she came to make up her mind about Le Colombier? Of course that resolution must be taken to cover Bernie Huffer, too, however amusing she found him. He was young and therefore probably callow; he knew next to nothing about her; once Fulke’s papers were tidied up he would depart and she would never see him again. Bernie was no sort of factor in any decision she might have to make.
During these ruminations Penelope had wandered on without much regarding where she was going, and presently she awoke to the realisation that she was lost. In the woodland through which she had been walking there was plenty of traversable ground between the trees, and she had seen nothing that could be distinguished as a path for some time. She couldn’t, of course, be far from the villa, but even its general direction was unclear to her. Moreover she hadn’t seen a soul during her wanderings, and even were she to do so there would be something absurd, she felt, in asking the way back to her own house. It might prove to be within a hundred yards of where she stood. So she walked on again at a venture. She must soon come either on a road or a glimpse of the great river in the valley below which would give her a chance of orienting herself. Meanwhile, her solitude was agreeably romantic. What she might meet was a hermit or a pilgrim (who would really be a magician in disguise), or even a knight in armour who would warn her of the vicinity of an obnoxious dragon. These excessively childish fancies were in her head when the trees thinned out before her and she found that she was looking at that colombier from which her house took its name. The house itself, however, was only just to be glimpsed through a further screen of trees.
Bernie, she remembered, had urged her to inspect ‘the lair of the monster’ – which was another piece of nonsense out of romance. It had been, all the same, a genuine injunction, and she told herself that he would be pleased to learn that she had complied with it. Moreover, she was curious about the young man’s manner of providing for himself. So she walked up to the dovecot, found its single door casually ajar, pushed it open, and entered this odd abode.
A dovecot is normally a sort of high-rise dwelling into which a very numerous population can be crammed. But now, under a low ceiling, was a single apartment which afforded a considerable sense of space, even although the walls had been left pitted appropriately for their former inhabitants. In its centre rose a modern and elegant spiral staircase, giving access to perhaps more than one chamber above. And what was immediately revealed to her was at once a living-room and a studio. But the lighting seemed not very suitable for the latter purpose, which was perhaps why, when he betook himself to pigments, Bernie seemed to have formed that habit of working in the main sitting-room of the villa. One segment of the ancient structure was adequately fitted up as a kitchen, and what furniture there was in the rest was of a simple sort well-adapted to bachelor ease. There weren’t many books, and there were no pictures on the walls, although a good many canvasses, some of them still virgin on their stretchers, were stacked up against them here and there. But on several tables, and even scattered carelessly on the floor, were numerous sketches in a variety of media – the favourite appearing to be pencil on damp paper. Without exception, they were of female nudes.
Penelope found herself studying some of these evidences of Bernie Huffer’s industry with care. In two or three cases as many as half-a-dozen sketches displayed the same figure in slightly varying forms of the same pose. The effect was of a considerable tenacity and seriousness of intention in the artist. And artists, she believed, don’t commonly produce that sort of thing straight out of their heads. They work from the life. Penelope wondered where the models came from. Presumably it was from the local rural populace. And this fact might explain Mme Saval’s not very well understood talk about filles and fillettes.
These thoughts signalled to Penelope that her interest in this unfamiliar place was not a matter wholly of aesthetic consideration. She felt suddenly an intruder – and a disconcerted intruder at that. So she took herself out of the lair of the monster at once, closing its door behind her. She closed it, in fact, with a bang. For she was somehow displeased with Bernie for having suggested an exploration of what seemed to her to be an almost obsessive interest in female anatomy. Returning to the villa, she made herself a cup of tea provided en mousseline by Messrs Jacksons of Piccadilly. Her reaction to Bernie’s labours was philistine, no doubt. But it was strong in her, all the same.
And in the course of the next few days several young women – all local peasant girls – turned up at Le Colombier, boldly rang the big bell at the front door, and were clearly disconcerted by the appearance of an unknown and presumably unsuspected English woman instead of the late owner’s secretary. Two of them ventured upon speech, and were answered by Penelope in as matter-of-fact a fashion as she could contrive. Two others, who came together, merely turned to one another giggling, and then still giggling ran away. Penelope found herself particularly offended by the fact that none of these female visitors was particularly good-looking – or none in the conventional sense in which good-looks are judged by what is visible above the neck. But all were in other respects detectably personable. So it could be charitably assumed that their call was in a professional capacity as artists’ models, and that they could thus be linked with the sketches so freely on display in Bernie’s dovecot. Penelope knew very little about the habits of artists, but had a notion that as soon as they got a young woman stripped and perched on some sort of platform before them anything in the nature of an erotic response to the spectacle thus afforded banished itself in the interest of aesthetic feeling. But what about before and after? And what was the inference to be drawn from that unintelligible chatter of Mme Saval’s on the subject of filles and fillettes? Penelope caught herself once or twice as lingering over these speculations; and she magnified this curiosity, inevitable and harmless in itself, into a charge of being very improperly obsessed by it. Was it conceivable that a primitive jealousy was at work in her? The mere possibility of this made her feel that she had come a long way from respectably resigned widowhood in the vicarage of Mallows.
Then a further realisation came to her. During the last few days she had fallen into the way of holding a good deal of casual talk with the only slightly more-than-adolescent André. This again was surely innocent enough. André’s English was elementary but nevertheless useful. His French, unlike the old woman’s, wasn’t difficult to follow. During Bernie’s absence he was the only person for miles around to whom she could talk at all. Yet little that he said was of any substantial interest in itself, and so this attractiveness – which wasn’t in the least overmastering – had to be viewed as of a very simple girl-and-boy order. This was comical rather than disconcerting. She had a memory of once having made a joke to Dora to the effect of her heart being touched by Tommy Elbrow when Tommy was much of André’s age. But she wasn’t a young girl now; she had for some time been habituating herself to the fact that middle age was looming well up on her horizon. So she oughtn’t to be noticing that André owned one very simple sort of appeal more pronouncedly, perhaps, than the majority of boys of his age. The fact appeared to be that she had landed herself in an unwholesome near-solitude. She even began to feel that she would welcome Bernie Huffer’s return from visiting his friends at Le Bugue.
And promptly on the Friday morning Bernie did turn up again. His car was heard on the drive; the engine stopped, a door banged, and his voice made itself audible round a corner of the house. He was shouting to André, cheerfully but imperiously, to come and wash the old crate down at once, since it was smothered in dust. The effect came to Penelope as that of a young squire in some Victorian fiction, confidently committing his horse to the attentions of a groom. Fleetingly, she wondered how much Bernie felt that he owned the place – with André and herself thrown in. But his manner as he joined her on the terrace, although remaining cheerful, became decently tinged with deference at once.
‘Well, now you know, Penelope,’ he said. ‘You’ve had Le Colombier to yourself for a bit, and made up your mind about it. Are you going to like it? That’s the grand question. And I’ve no doubt that Fulke in the shades is waiting anxiously to hear your reply.’
‘I can give only a provisional one, so far.’ Penelope had somehow not liked this particular fancy. ‘It’s rather unconnected with anything I’ve ever known, you see. I have a sense of this terrace as a stage, and the house behind it as an elaborate piece of stage carpentry. There ought to be a cast of not more than half a dozen people, entering and exiting through these various French windows, and building up rather a trivial leisure-class comedy.’
‘In other words, a typical Fulke Ferneydale effort. Have you seen many of his plays, or read many of the novels?’
‘None at all, as a matter of fact.’
‘Hush, hush, for heaven’s sake! Remember who’s listening.’
Penelope failed to look amused, since she disliked Bernie’s keeping up this particular joke. And it struck her that what she had revealed in so matter-of-fact a tone was really rather odd – particularly as coming from one who had been appointed to turn over the late playwright and novelist’s literary remains. Why had it never so much as occurred to her to get one of Fulke’s books out of the county library, which sent a van full of contemporary literature to park on the village green at Mallows every week? Why had Caspar never so much as suggested her taking a look at this or that, nor – so far as she could remember – kept anything of his brother’s on his own shelves? Bernie must judge the Mallows Ferneydales and Riches an uncommonly provincial crowd. Penelope had, in fact, read a good deal, but mainly in those earlier fields of literature with which she had become familiar at Oxford at a time when that University had officially regarded the entire book-making industry as having come to a stop with the death of George Meredith in 1909.
‘What enchanting news!’ she now heard Bernie saying. ‘You come with an absolutely virgin mind to that odd job of ours. Have you taken a dekko at any of those papers yet?’
‘I haven’t had the chance, so far as I can see. I assume they are all locked up in what must be rather a big room upstairs, which I don’t seem to have the key to.’
‘Stupid of me – and I’m so sorry. The key’s in my pocket now. The Cézanne’s up there, you know, and worth a huge fortune on its own. And the Sophie and Silvan affair turned me very security-minded.’
‘Sophie’s been here again, so I haven’t been entirely on my own. But she wasn’t interested in papers. It was just the Modigliani again. She feels that her son ought to have it for his rooms in Cambridge.’
‘I don’t believe that young lout will ever see Cambridge. I hope you were firm about it.’
‘I was – very. I may even have been rather rude. The woman is Fulke’s widow, after all.’
‘And had to put up with a great deal, no doubt.’ Bernie seemed to regret this graceless speech even as he uttered it. ‘But I don’t hold much of a brief for Sophie. Pots of money, and never done an honest day’s work in her life. Not that there isn’t a great deal to be said for money – particularly when you’re inconveniently quite without it.’
Penelope almost said that Bernie couldn’t be in that position now, since he had not so long ago had several thousand pounds from his late employer. But it was probably true that nobody much wanted to buy his pictures, and that penury had taken a peep at him early in his career. There seemed, indeed, no other explanation of his accepting such a blind-alley job as that of secretary to a popular writer.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that we ought to begin taking a look at those papers this afternoon. And I feel that quite a brief survey of them will tell me that I’m unlikely to be of any use at all about them.’ Penelope said this with a good deal of conviction. ‘Have you started doing anything about them yourself?’
‘I’ve calendared them in a rough and ready way. That means getting them into as much of a chronological order as seems possible. If Fulke is going to have some sort of posthumous vogue or permanent reputation – which seems unlikely to me – all that will come to be judged terribly important. Fortunately, you know, it’s all typescript; there’s scarcely a page of holograph anywhere, so far as I can see. And Fulke wrote a vile hand, so that painfully deciphering his false starts and abortive notions and great thoughts generally would be quite too awful for words. Not that there mayn’t be plenty of clever writing here and there. Fulke was clever. I came to feel that more and more as I worked for him. It’s not something it would occur to one to say about Tolstoy or any of the real swells.’
Penelope agreed that Fulke had been clever, but refrained from making Bernie’s further assertion a subject of debate. Bernie was undoubtedly clever too, and perhaps owned higher endowments as well. This, she told herself, she was unfitted to judge – and still less was she competent to pronounce upon the value of this or that among Fulke’s literary remains. She had a notion that Fulke at some stage of his career had been over-ambitious, going after a kind of excellence that was beyond his reach. Having acknowledged this to himself he had probably settled down to gratify the common reader, and his final quirky idea had been prompted by the just yet unflattering notion that his sister-in-law Penelope was exactly that. Penelope found that she didn’t care for this role at all. The situation was artificial and absurd, and she must get out of it as best she could. She liked Le Colombier, and to a rather surprising degree she liked Bernie; yet she wasn’t at all sure that at the back of her mind there didn’t lurk a strong and simple impulse just to go home. All this was behind her next remark.
‘What I’d like you to do,’ she said firmly, ‘is to sift through all those papers a bit ahead of me, and simply show me anything that you judge to be of consequence. I think that will be enough to fulfil any obligation I may be said to have been put under in accepting this house – and a sort of endowment, I gather, going along with it. It’s the common sense of the thing, Bernie, and I don’t feel that common sense often leads one far astray.’
‘Then I’ll start in this afternoon.’ Bernie may have been amused, but his immediate attitude was cheerful and without fuss. Was he, perhaps, too ready to acquiesce in any course of life that came his way? Wouldn’t he be more worthily employed if, instead of accepting a good deal of money to mess around with Fulke’s papers, he had called it a day so far as secretarial labour was concerned, and set himself up in some garret of a studio to wrestle with his own proper art? It was in Penelope’s nature to take satisfaction in the spectacle of people seriously employed to the limit of their capacities. So she felt that possibly she even had a duty to encourage Bernie to see things that way. He was still very young, certainly much younger than herself, and this made the dash of frivolity one could distinguish in him harmless and rather fun. Her own association with him was going to be quite transient. Perhaps she could give him a bit of a lead, all the same.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go briskly to work, and get it all out of the way. I’m sure there are other things you want to get back to, Bernie.’
‘Ring down the curtain, you mean, on this small comedy. Life is real! Life is earnest! Longfellow.’
So Bernie, who was quick to detect a train of thought, was laughing it her with a frankness that was part of his appeal. And Penelope – at least for the time – didn’t mind this a bit.
Nor did she mind his again preparing a meal that evening, although the fact of its being a second occasion of the sort carried with it an odd suggestion of domesticity. The very easiness of Bernie’s address enhanced this; they might have been a couple long habituated to just such a routine. But at least Bernie’s talk didn’t incline to the over-intimate. What he had to say referred mostly to his investigations of the afternoon.
‘There’s quite a lot of what they call juvenilia for a start,’ he said. One piece is amusing – or at least it’s an amusing idea. Shelley and Jane Austen. They’re having an Imaginary Conversation.’
‘Like in Landor?’
‘Yes. There was a vogue for such things on the radio, it seems, a good long time ago. Shelley and Miss Austen are alone in the inside of a stage coach. Shelley’s still at Eton, and he’s hugging what Miss Austen takes to be a tuck-box. But it’s really an infernal machine, which Shelley is preparing to loose off against the tyrants of the earth. It’s rather a nice situation or confrontation. Only Fulke seems to have been unable to think of anything for them to say to one another. It’s one of his earliest false starts. He may have written it while he was still at school himself.’ Bernie got to his feet in order to pour Penelope a glass of his late employer’s claret. ‘Then there’s an affair, almost equally abortive, which I’d date during his undergraduate days. It gets a little further, but I don’t know that you’d care for it. Two tarts – one a high-class courtesan and the other a drab – find themselves most improbably stranded together in the waiting-room of some deserted railway station here in France. They square up to one another a little, and then – more improbably still – a young Englishman strays in on them. Again there’s no development. But the piece is interesting, I suppose, as illustrating what was often going to be Fulke’s way of setting up a situation and just trusting that something would come of it.’
‘I’d imagine writers quite often go to work in that way.’ As she said this, Penelope seemed to recall having herself as a small girl embarked on the composition of fairy stories much after the same fashion.
‘Probably they do – and Fulke made quite a technique of it. It seems wasteful to me, just like embarking on a painting without having formed an overall design. If I was going to write a novel or a play, I wouldn’t put a word on paper until I’d thought of some single and completed action which was to be the substance of the thing.’
Bernie Huffer wasn’t only clever; judging by this Aristotelian pronouncement one had to credit him with being well-read too. Penelope felt that it would be a mistake to begin admiring Bernie. But he was at least a good deal more lively and attractive than, say, the majority of her father’s parishioners.
On the day following his return to the villa Bernie embarked upon a routine which might have been based on a tactful feeling that he ought not to impose too much of his society upon his new employer. Every morning, and while Penelope was for the most part exploring the region in which she had now become almost a landed proprietor, he worked alone in Fulke’s big library-room upstairs, sifting through a substantial batch of papers and singling out whatever he judged Penelope might like to see. The result was commonly of no great bulk, and he handed it over to her at lunch-time so that she might occupy herself with it for as much as she cared of the afternoon. Having thus, as it were, decently earned his keep, he retreated to his dovecot until the evening, and there presumably pursued his own proper artistic activities. Penelope approved of this programme. Whether or not the young man was going to turn out to be any sort of considerable painter she was without the competence to determine. But it was right that he should stick to the attempt. Being an artist must be vastly more rewarding than burrowing however effectively in a deceased author’s scrap-books.
Penelope could see, however, that the scrap-books and fugitive papers were not without interest at times. Fulke appeared to have done his thinking on a typewriter, and to have let his mind wander from one project to another with scarcely a pause in the clicking of the keys. Then periodically he would disengage the various fragments of something judged promising from their random context, and build up a more substantial synopsis of a play or novel with the help of scissors and paste. But since Penelope’s knowledge of his achieved works was so culpably non-existent she had no idea whatever of what, amid all this disorder, might be leading where. Fulke could not, of course, have foreseen this total incapacity on his sister-in-law’s part. As things were, she was without the means of determining the relative interest or importance of one fragment or another – although Bernie, presumably, would be able to do so. Those red-headed men in the Sherlock Holmes story who were set the task of copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica were not more uselessly employed than was Penelope in thumbing through Fulke Ferneydale’s notes and jottings. It was possible, no doubt, that some completed or nearly-completed works might turn up later – in which case she could stand in as the Common Reader he had appeared to envisage. Penelope had a mounting sense, however, that she was involved in an absurdity.
So, not unnaturally, her attention frequently strayed away from the typescript before her. She told herself how much more sensibly Bernie Huffer was employed in his dovecot, pencil in hand and paper before him – and perhaps before him, also, one (or conceivably two) of those giggling peasant girls. The image thus formed in Penelope’s mind gave her no pleasure; was, in fact, disturbing as well as indelicate. But it continued at times to come between her and the typescript page.
Then an afternoon turned up on which she frankly declared to herself that she was not a bond-slave to Fulke and his remains. If she preferred to all these disjecta membra another stroll under a marvellous June sky she was perfectly free to put in time that way. So she pushed aside her papers, and within a few minutes was wandering through the woods. By this time she had discovered how to preserve a general sense of her direction as she walked. Every now and then there was a glade, and in any of these she had only to pause and look overhead. For there would be the black kites, sweeping in their effortless arcs in what she knew to be the southern quarter of the sky. But in addition to this there were now individual trees that were familiar to her, just as there were in the spinneys and copses for several miles round Mallows vicarage. It thus came about that when she eventually made a certain change of direction it was with the full knowledge that she was now – as once before – approaching Le Colombier du cote de chez Huffer. Within minutes the colombier would be squarely before her. She was at least too honest with herself to treat this as a surprise. Indeed, she told herself that she was being idly overcome by feminine curiosity. Yet, after all, why not pay Bernie an afternoon call? It could be regarded as a sign that she was prompted to take a friendly interest in his more serious activities.
With this in her head, and while approaching the dovecot from the rear, she became aware of something that might well have made her hesitate. There was here a window on the ground floor, too high for any observation from without, but now standing open to the afternoon sun. And through it there came sounds not readily to be identified with any serious artistic pursuit: sounds of panting, slapping, and low sharp laughter, which were at least sufficiently explicable to tell Penelope that were she to persist in her notion of an afternoon call a considerable degree of embarrassment might ensue. But when she had half-achieved this change of plan, and the door of the dovecot was in consequence in view, it burst open and André tumbled through. Flushed and laughing, he took in Penelope at a glance, and then bolted round the building like a rabbit making for its burrow. He was buttoning up what clothing he wore as he ran.
Penelope, if surprised, felt relieved as well. She had to acknowledge to herself how much she had disliked the idea of Bernie at work upon those young women. But this afternoon, at least, he had opted for a male model, and André had been conveniently to hand. She had herself arrived when the session had ended in some piece of skvlarking of a decidedly juvenile sort. She would tease Bernie about this at dinner that evening.
But in fact she did not. What made her refrain she didn’t clearly know. She was aware only of a new and disturbing image of Bernie Huffer somewhere upon the borders of her mind.