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Sarah’s father was a born widower. As she had no memory of a mother, it was as though Mr. Holmes had none of a wife and had been created perpetually bereaved and knowing best. His conviction that he must act for two gave him a jocular heaviness that made the girl react for a dozen, but his jokes rode a limitless tide of concern. He thought Sarah was subjective and passionate, as small children are. She knew she was detached and could prove it. A certain kind of conversation between them was bound to run down, wind up, run down again: You are, I’m not, yes, no, you should, I won’t, you’ll be sorry. Between eighteen and twenty, Sarah kept meaning to become a psychosociologist. Life would then be a tribal village through which she would stalk soft-footed and disguised: That would show him who was subjective. But she was also a natural amoureuse, as some girls were natural actresses, and she soon discovered that love refused all forms of fancy dress. In love she had to show her own face, and speak in a true voice, and she was visible from all directions.

One summer, after a particularly stormy spring, her father sent her to Grenoble to learn about French civilization—actually, to get her away from a man he always pretended to think was called Professor Downcast. Sarah raged mostly over the harm her father had brought to Professor Downcast’s career, for she had been helping with his “Urban and Regional Studies of the Less Privileged in British Columbia,” and she knew he could not manage without her. She did not stay long in Grenoble; she had never intended to. She had decided beforehand that the Alps were shabby, the cultural atmosphere in France was morbid and stifling, and that every girl she met would be taking the civilization course for the wrong reason. She packed and caught a bus down the Napoleon Route to the Mediterranean.

Professor Downcast had been forced to promise he would not write, and so, of course, Sarah would not write her father. She wanted to have new friends and a life that was none of his business. The word “Riviera” had predicted yellow mornings and snowy boats, and crowds filling the streets in the way dancers fill a stage. Her mind’s eye had kept them at a distance so that they shimmered and might have been plumed, like peacocks. Up close, her moralist’s eye selected whatever was bound to disappoint: a stone beach skirted with sewage, a promenade that was really a through speedway, an eerie bar. For the first time she recognized prostitutes; they clustered outside her hotel, gossiping, with faces like dead letters. For friends she had a pair of middle-aged tourists who took her sight-seeing and warned her not to go out at night by herself. Grenoble had been better after all. Who was to blame? She sent her father a letter of reproach, of abuse, of cold reason, and also of apology—the postmark was bound to be a shock. She then began waiting round American Express for an answer. She was hoping it would be a cable saying “Come on home.”

His feelings, when he got round to describing them, filled no more than one flimsy typewritten page. She thought she was worth more than that. What now? She walked out of American Express, still reading her letter. A shadow fell over the page. At the same time a man’s soft voice said, “Don’t be frightened.”

She looked up, not frightened—appraising. The man was about twice her age, and not very tall. He was dressed in clean, not too new summer whites, perhaps the remains of a naval officer’s uniform. His accent was English. His eyes were light brown. Once he had Sarah’s attention, and had given her time to decide what her attention would be, he said his name was Roy Cooper and asked if she wouldn’t like to have lunch with him somewhere along the port.

Of course, she answered: It was broad daylight and there were policemen everywhere—polite, old-fashioned, and wearing white, just like Roy Cooper. She was always hungry, and out of laziness had been living on pizzas and ice cream. Her father had never told her to keep experience at bay. For mystery and horror he had tried to substitute common sense, which may have been why Sarah did not always understand him. She and Roy Cooper crossed the promenade together. He held her arm to guide her through traffic, but let go the minute they reached the curb. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for days now,” he said. “I was hoping you might know someone I knew, who could introduce us.”

“Oh, I don’t know anyone here,” said Sarah. “I met a couple of Americans in my hotel. We went to see this sort of abandoned chapel. It has frescoes of Jesus and Judas and …” He was silent. “Their name was Hayes?”

He answered that his car was parked over near the port in the shade. It was faster to walk than drive, down here. He was staying outside Nice; otherwise he wouldn’t bother driving at all.

They moved slowly along to the port, dragging this shapeless conversation between them, and Sarah was just beginning to wonder if he wasn’t a friend of her father’s, and if this might be one of her father’s large concrete jokes, when he took her bare arm in a way no family friend would have dared and said look here, what about this restaurant? Again he quickly dropped her arm before she could tug away. They sat down under an awning with a blue tablecloth between them. Sarah frowned, lowered her eyes, and muttered something. It might have been a grace before eating had she not seemed so determined; but her words were completely muffled by the traffic grinding by. She leaned forward and repeated, “I’d like to know what your motives are, exactly.” She did not mean anything like “What do you want?” but “What is it? Why Roy Cooper? Why me?” At the back of her mind was the idea that he deserved a lesson: She would eat her lunch, get up, coolly stroll away.

His answer, again miles away from Sarah’s question, was that he knew where Sarah was staying and had twice followed her to the door of the hotel. He hadn’t dared to speak up.

“Well, it’s a good thing you finally did,” she said. “I was only waiting for a letter, and now I’m going back to Grenoble. I don’t like it here.”

“Don’t do that, don’t leave.” He had a quiet voice for a man, and he knew how to slide it under another level of sound and make himself plain. He broke off to order their meal. He seemed so at ease, so certain of other people and their reactions—at any moment he would say he was the ambassador of a place where nothing mattered but charm and freedom. Sarah was not used to cold wine at noon. She touched the misty decanter with her fingertips and wet her forehead with the drops. She wanted to ask his motives again but found he was questioning hers—laughing at Sarah, in fact. Who was she to frown and cross-examine, she who wandered around eating pizzas alone? She told him about Professor Downcast and her father—she had to, to explain what she was doing here—and even let him look at her father’s letter. Part of it said, “My poor Sarah, no one ever seems to interest you unless he is

no good at his job;
small in stature; I wonder why?
‘Marxist-Leninist’ (since you sneer at ‘Communist’ and will not allow its use around the house);
married or just about to be;
in debt to God and humanity.

I am not saying you should look for the opposite in every case, only for some person who doesn’t combine all these qualities at one time.”

“I’m your father’s man,” said Roy Cooper, and he might well have been, except for the problem of height. He was a bachelor, and certainly the opposite of a Marxist-Leninist: He was a former prison inspector whose career had been spent in an Asian colony. He had been retired early when the Empire faded out and the New Democracy that followed no longer required inspection. As for “debt to God and humanity,” he said he had his own religion, which made Sarah stare sharply at him, wondering if his idea of being funny was the same as her father’s. Their conversation suddenly became locked; an effort would be needed to pull it in two, almost a tug-of-war. I could stay a couple of days or so, she said to herself. She saw the south that day as she would see it finally, as if she had picked up an old dress and first wondered, then knew, how it could be changed to suit her.

They spent that night talking on a stony beach. Sarah half lay, propped on an elbow. He sat with his arms around his knees. Behind him, a party of boys had made a bonfire. By its light Sarah told him all her life, every season of it, and he listened with the silent attention that honored her newness. She had scarcely reached the end when a fresh day opened, streaky and white. She could see him clearly: Even unshaven and dying for sleep he was the ambassador from that easy place. She tossed a stone, a puppy asking for a game. He smiled, but still kept space between them, about the distance of the blue tablecloth.

They began meeting every day. They seemed to Sarah to be moving toward each other without ever quite touching; then she thought they were traveling in the same direction, but still apart. They could not turn back, for there was nothing to go back to. She felt a pause, a hesitation. The conversation began to unlock; once Sarah had told all her life she could not think of anything to say. One afternoon he came to the beach nearly two hours late. She sensed he had something to tell her, and waited to hear that he had a wife, or was engaged, or on drugs, or had no money. In the most casual voice imaginable he asked Sarah if she would spend the rest of her holiday with him. He had rented a place up behind Nice. She would know all his friends, quite openly; he did not want to let her in for anything squalid or mean. She could come for a weekend. If she hated it, no hard feelings. It was up to her.

This was new, for of course she had never lived with anyone. Well, why not? In her mind she told her father, After all, it was a bachelor you wanted for me. She abandoned her textbooks and packed instead four wooden bowls she had bought for her father’s sister and an out-of-print Matisse poster intended for Professor Downcast. Now it would be Roy’s. He came to fetch her that day in the car that was always parked somewhere in shade—it was a small open thing, a bachelor’s car. They rolled out of Nice with an escort of trucks and buses. She thought there should have been carnival floats spilling yellow roses. Until now, this was her most important decision, for it supposed a way of living, a style. She reflected on how no girl she knew had ever done quite this, and on what her father would say. He might not hear of it; at least not right away. Meanwhile, they made a triumphant passage through blank white suburbs. Their witnesses were souvenir shops, a village or two, a bright solitary supermarket, the walls and hedges of villas. Along one of these flowering barriers they came to a stop and got out of the car. The fence wire looked tense and new; the plumbago it supported leaned every way, as if its life had been spared but only barely. It was late evening. She heard the squeaky barking of small dogs, and glimpsed, through an iron gate, one of those stucco bungalows that seem to beget their own palm trees. They went straight past it, down four shallow garden steps, and came upon a low building that Sarah thought looked like an Indian lodge. It was half under a plane tree. Perhaps it was the tree, whose leaves were like plates, that made the house and its terrace seem microscopic. One table and four thin chairs was all the terrace would hold. A lavender hedge surrounded it.

“They call this place The Tunnel,” Roy said. She wondered if he was already regretting their adventure; if so, all he had to do was drive her back at once, or even let her down at a bus stop. But then he lit a candle on the table, which at once made everything dark, and she could see he was smiling as if in wonder at himself. The Tunnel was a long windowless room with an arched whitewashed ceiling. In daytime the light must have come in from the door, which was protected by a soft white curtain of mosquito netting. He groped for a switch on the wall, and she saw there was next to no furniture. “It used to be a storage place for wine and olives,” he said. “The Reeves fixed it up. They let it to friends.”

“What are Reeves?”

“People—nice people. They live in the bungalow.”

She was now in this man’s house. She wondered about procedure: whether to unpack or wait until she was asked, and whether she had any domestic duties and was expected to cook. Concealed by a screen was a shower bath; the stove was in a cupboard. The lavatory, he told her, was behind the house in a garden shed. She would find it full of pictures of Labour leaders. The only Socialist the Reeves could bear was Hugh Dalton (Sarah had never heard of him, or most of the others, either), because Dalton had paid for the Queen’s wedding out of his own pocket when she was a slip of a girl without a bean of her own. Sarah said, “What did he want to do that for?” She saw, too late, that he meant to be funny.

He sat down on the bed and looked at her. “The Reeves versus Labour,” he said. “Why should you care? You weren’t even born.” She was used to hearing that every interesting thing had taken place before her birth. She had a deadly serious question waiting: “What shall I do if you feel remorseful?”

“If I am,” he said, “you’ll never know. That’s a promise.”

*  *  *  *  *

It was not remorse that overcame him but respectability: First thing next day, Sarah was taken to meet his friends, landlords, and neighbors, Tim and Meg Reeve. “I want them to like you,” he said. Wishing to be liked by total strangers was outside anything that mattered to Sarah; all the same, quickened by the new situation and its demands, she dressed and brushed her hair and took the path between the two cottages. The garden seemed a dry, cracked sort of place. The remains of daffodils lay in brown ribbons on the soil. She looked all round her, at an olive tree, and yesterday’s iron gate, and at the sky, which was fiercely azure. She was not as innocent as her father still hoped she might turn out to be, but not as experienced as Roy thought, either. There was a world of knowledge between last night and what had gone before. She wondered, already, if violent feelings were going to define the rest of her life, or simply limit it. Roy gathered her long hair in his hand and turned her head around. They’d had other nights, or attempts at nights, but this was their first morning. Whatever he read on her face made him say, “You know, it won’t always be as lovely as this.” She nodded. Professor Downcast had a wife and children, and she was used to fair warnings. Roy could not guess how sturdy her emotions were. Her only antagonist had been her father, who had not touched her self-confidence. She accepted Roy’s caution as a tribute: He, at least, could see that Sarah was objective.

Roy rang the doorbell, which set off a gunburst of barking. The Reeves’ hall smelled of toast, carpets, and insect spray. She wanted southern houses to smell of jasmine. “Here, Roy,” someone called, and Roy led her by the hand into a small sitting room where two people, an old man and an old woman, sat in armchairs eating breakfast. The man removed a tray from his knees and stood up. He was gaunt and tall, and looked oddly starched, like a nurse coming on duty. “Jack Sprat could eat no fat” came to Sarah’s mind. Mrs. Reeve was—she supposed—obese. Sarah stared at her; she did not know how to be furtive. Was the poor woman ill? No, answered the judge who was part of Sarah too. Mrs. Reeve is just greedy. Look at the jam she’s shoveled on her plate.

“Well, this is Sarah Holmes,” said Roy, stroking her hair, as if he was proving at the outset there was to be no hypocrisy. “We’d adore coffee.”

“You’d better do something about it, then,” said the fat woman. “We’ve got tea here. You know where the kitchen is, Roy.” She had a deep voice, like a moo. “You, Sarah Holmes, sit down. Find a pew with no dog hair, if you can. Of course, if you’re going to be fussy, you won’t last long around here—eh, boys? You can make toast if you like. No, never mind. I’ll make it for you.”

It seemed to Sarah a pretty casual way for people their age to behave. Roy was older by a long start, but the Reeves were old. They seemed to find it natural to have Roy and Sarah drift over for breakfast after a night in the guesthouse. Mr. Reeve even asked quite kindly, “Did you sleep well? The plane tree draws mosquitoes, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll have that tree down yet,” said Mrs. Reeve. “Oh, I’ll have it down one of these days. I can promise you that.” She was dressed in a bathrobe that looked like a dark parachute. “We decided not to have eggs,” she said, as though Sarah had asked. “Have ’em later. You and Roy must come back for lunch. We’ll have a good old fry-up.” Here she attended to toast, which meant shaking and tapping an antique wire toaster set on the table before her. “When Tim’s gone—bless him—I shall never cook a meal again,” she said. “Just bits and pieces on a tray for the boys and me.” The boys were dogs, Sarah guessed—two little yappers up on the sofa, the color of teddy-bear stuffing.

“I make a lot of work for Meg,” Mr. Reeve said to Sarah. “The breakfasts—breakfast every day, you know—and she is the one who looks after the Christmas cards. Marriage has been a bind for her. She did a marvelous job with evacuees in the war. And poor old Meg loathed kids, still does. You’ll never hear her say so. I’ve never known Meg to complain.”

Mrs. Reeve had not waited for her husband to die before starting her widow’s diet of tea and toast and jam and gin (the bottle was there, by the toaster, along with a can of orange juice). Sarah knew about this, for not only was her father a widower but they had often spent summers with a widowed aunt. The Reeves seemed like her father and her aunt grown elderly and distorted. Mrs. Reeve now unwrapped a chocolate bar, which caused a fit of snorting and jostling on the sofa. “No chockie bits for boys with bad manners,” she said, feeding them just the same. Yes, there she sat, a widow with two dogs for company. Mr. Reeve, delicately buttering and eating the toast meant for Sarah, murmured that when he did go he did not want poor Meg to have any fuss. He seemed to be planning his own modest gravestone; in a heightened moment of telepathy Sarah was sure she could see it too. To Sarah, the tall old man had already ceased to be. He was not Mr. Reeve, Roy’s friend and landlord, but an ectoplasmic impression of somebody like him, leaning forward, lips slightly parted, lifting a piece of toast that was caving in like a hammock with a weight of strawberry jam. Panic was in the room, but only Sarah felt it. She had been better off, safer, perhaps happier even, up in Grenoble, trying not to yawn over “Tout m’afflige, et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire.” What was she doing here, indoors, on this glowing day, with these two snivelly dogs and these gluttonous old persons? She turned swiftly, hearing Roy, and in her heart she said, in a quavering spoiled child’s voice, I want to go home. (How many outings had she ruined for her father. How many picnics, circuses, puppet shows, boat rides. From how many attempted holidays had he been fetched back with a telegram from whichever relation had been trying to hold Sarah down for a week. The strong brass chords of “I want my own life” had always been followed by this dismal piping.)

Roy poured their coffee into pottery mugs and his eyes met Sarah’s. His said, Yes, these are the Reeves. They don’t matter. I only want one thing, and that’s to get back to where we were a few hours ago.

So they were to be conspirators: She liked that.

The Reeves had now done with chewing, feeding, swallowing, and brushing crumbs, and began placing Sarah. Who was she? Sarah Holmes, a little transatlantic pickup, a student slumming round for a summer? What had she studied? Sociology, psychology, and some economics, she told them.

“Sounds Labour” was Mr. Reeve’s comment.

She simplified her story and mentioned the thesis. “Urban and Regional Studies of the Less Privileged in British Columbia,” as far as Mr. Reeve was concerned, contained only one reassuring word, and that was “British.” Being the youngest in the room, Sarah felt like the daughter of the house. She piled cups and plates on one of the trays and took them out to the kitchen. The Reeves were not the sort of people who would ever bother to whisper: She heard that she was “a little on the tall side” and that her proportions made Roy seem slight and small, “like a bloody dago.” Her hair was too long; the fringe on her forehead looked sparse and pasted down with soap. She also heard that she had a cast in one eye, which she did not believe.

“One can’t accuse her of oversmartness,” said Mrs. Reeve.

Roy, whose low voice had carrying qualities, said, “No, Meg. Sarah’s jeans are as faded, as baggy, as those brown corduroys of yours. However, owing to Sarah’s splendid and enviable shape, hers are not nearly so large across the beam end.” This provoked two laughs—a cackle from Jack Sprat and a long three-note moo from his wife.

“Well, Roy,” said Tim Reeve, “all I can say is, you amaze me. How do you bring it off?”

What about me? said Sarah to herself. How do I bring it off?

“At least she’s had sense enough not to come tramping around in high-heeled shoes, like some of our visitors,” said Mrs. Reeve—her last word for the moment.

*  *  *  *  *

Roy warned Sarah what lunch—the good old fry-up—would be. A large black pan the Reeves had brought to France from England when they emigrated because of taxes and Labour would be dragged out of the oven; its partner, a jam jar of bacon fat, stratified in a wide extent of suety whites, had its permanent place on top of the stove. The lowest, or Ur, line of fat marked the very first fry-up in France. A few spoonfuls of this grease, releasing blue smoke, received tomatoes, more bacon, eggs, sausages, cold boiled potatoes. To get the proper sausages they had to go to a shop that imported them, in Monte Carlo. This was no distance, but the Reeves’ car had been paid for by Tim, and he was mean about it. He belonged to a generation that had been in awe of batteries: Each time the ignition was turned on, he thought the car’s lifeblood was seeping away. When he became too stingy with the car, then Meg would not let him look at television: The set was hers. She would push it on its wheeled table over bumpy rugs into their bedroom and put a chair against the door.

Roy was a sharp mimic and he took a slightly feminine pleasure in mocking his closest friends. Sarah lay on her elbow on the bed as she had lain on the beach and thought that if he was disloyal to the Reeves then he was all the more loyal to her. They had been told to come back for lunch around three; this long day was in itself like a whole summer. She said, “It sounds like a movie. Are they happy?”

“Oh, blissful,” he answered, surprised, and perhaps with a trace of reproval. It was as if he were very young and she had asked an intimate question about his father and mother.

The lunch Roy had described was exactly the meal they were given. She watched him stolidly eating eggs fried to a kind of plastic lace, and covering everything with mustard to damp out the taste of grease. When Meg opened the door to the kitchen she was followed by a blue haze. Tim noticed Sarah’s look—she had wondered if something was burning—and said, “Next time you’re here that’s where we’ll eat. It’s what we like. We like our kitchen.”

“Today we are honoring Sarah,” said Meg Reeve, as though baiting Roy.

“So you should,” he said. It was the only attempt at sparring; they were all much too fed and comfortable. Tim, who had been to Monte Carlo, had brought back another symbol of their roots, the Hovis loaf. They talked about his shopping, and the things they liked doing—gambling a little, smuggling from Italy for sport. One thing they never did was look at the Mediterranean. It was not an interesting sea. It had no tides. “I do hope you aren’t going to bother with it,” said Tim to Sarah. It seemed to be their private measure for a guest—that and coming round in the wrong clothes.

The temperature in full sun outside the sitting-room window was thirty-three degrees centigrade. “What does it mean?” said Sarah. Nobody knew. Tim said that 16°C. was the same thing as 61°F. but that nothing else corresponded. For instance, 33°C. could not possibly be 33°F. No, it felt like a lot more.

*  *  *  *  *

After the trial weekend Sarah wrote to her father, “I am in this interesting old one-room guesthouse that belongs to an elderly couple here. It is in their garden. They only let reliable people stay in it.” She added, “Don’t worry, I’m working.” If she concealed information she did not exactly lie: She thought she was working. Instead of French civilization taught in airless classrooms she would study expatriates at first hand. She decided to record the trivia first—how visitors of any sort were a catastrophe, how a message from old friends staying at Nice brought Tim back from the telephone wearing the look of someone whose deepest feelings have been raked over.

“Come on, Tim, what was it?” his wife would call. “The who? What did they want? An invitation to their hotel? Damned cheek. More likely a lot of free drinks here, that’s what they want.” They lived next to gas fires with all the windows shut, yelling from room to room. Their kitchen was comfortable providing one imagined it was the depth of January in England and that sleet was battering at the garden. She wanted to record that Mr. Reeve said “heith” and “strenth” and that they used a baby language with each other—walkies, tummy, spend-a-penny. When Sarah said “cookie” it made them laugh; a minute later, feeding the dogs a chocolate cookie, Meg said, “Here, have a chockie bicky.” If Tim tried to explain anything, his wife interrupted with “Come on, get to Friday.” Nobody could remember the origin of the phrase; it served merely to rattle him.

Sarah meant to record this, but Professor Downcast’s useful language had left her. The only words in her head were so homespun and plain she was ashamed to set them down. The heat must have flattened her brain, she thought. The Reeves, who never lowered their voices for anyone, bawled one night that “old Roy was doting and indulgent” and “the wretched girl is in love.” That was the answer. She had already discovered that she could live twenty-four hours on end just with the idea that she was in love; she also knew that a man could think about love for a while but then he would start to think about something else. What if Roy never did? Sarah Cooper didn’t sound bad; Mrs. R. Cooper was better. But Sarah was not that foolish. She was looking ahead only because she and Roy had no past. She did say to him, “What do you do when you aren’t having a vacation?”

“You mean in winter? I go to Marbella. Sometimes Kenya. Where my friends are.”

“Don’t you work?”

“I did work. They retired me.”

“You’re too young to be retired. My father isn’t even retired. You should write your memoirs—all that colonial stuff.”

He laughed at her. She was never more endearing to him than when she was most serious; that was not her fault. She abandoned the future and rearranged their short history to suit herself. Every word was recollected later in primrose light. Did it rain every Sunday? Was there an invasion of red ants? She refused the memory. The Reeves’ garden incinerator, which was never cleaned out, set oily smoke to sit at their table like a third person. She drank her coffee unaware of this guest, seeing nothing but butterflies dancing over the lavender hedge. Sarah, who would not make her own bed at home, insisted now on washing everything by hand, though there was a laundry in the village. Love compelled her to buy enough food for a family of seven. The refrigerator was a wheezy old thing, and sometimes Roy got up and turned it off in the night because he could not sleep for its sighing. In the morning Sarah piled the incinerator with spoiled meat, cheese, and peaches, and went out at six o’clock to buy more and more. She was never so bathed in love as when she stood among a little crowd of villagers at a bus stop—the point of creation, it seemed—with her empty baskets; she desperately hoped to be taken for what the Reeves called “part of the local populace.” The market she liked was two villages over; the buses were tumbrels. She could easily have driven Roy’s car or had everything sent from shops, but she was inventing fidelities. Once, she saw Meg Reeve, wearing a floral cotton that compressed her figure and gave her a stylized dolphin shape, like an ornament on a fountain. On her head was a straw hat with a polka-dot ribbon. She found a place one down and across the aisle from Sarah, who shrank from her notice for fear of that deep voice letting the world know Sarah was not a peasant. Meg unfolded a paper that looked like a prescription; slid her glasses along her nose; held them with one finger. She always sat with her knees spread largely. In order not to have Meg’s thigh crushing his, her neighbor, a priest in a dirty cassock, had to squeeze against the window.

She doesn’t care, Sarah said to herself. She hasn’t even looked to see who is there. When she got down at the next village Meg was still rereading the scrap of paper, and the bus rattled on to Nice.

Sarah never mentioned having seen her; Meg was such a cranky, unpredictable old lady. One night she remarked, “Sarah’s going to have trouble landing Roy,” there, in front of him, on his own terrace. “He’ll never marry.” Roy was a bachelor owing to the fact he had too many rich friends, and because men were selfish.… Here Meg paused, conceding that this might sound wrong. No, it sounded right; Roy was a bachelor because of the selfishness of men, and the looseness and availability of young women.

“True enough, they’ll do it for a ham sandwich,” said Tim, as if a supply of sandwiches had given him the pick of a beach any day.

His wife stared at him but changed her mind. She plucked at her fork and said, “When Tim’s gone—bless him—I shall have all my meals out. Why bother cooking?” She then looked at her plate as if she had seen a mouse on it.

“It’s all right, Meg,” said Roy. “Sarah favors the cooking of the underdeveloped countries. All our meals are raw and drowned in yogurt.” He said it so kindly Sarah had to laugh. For a time she had tried to make them all eat out of her aunt’s bowls, but the untreated wood became stained and Roy found it disgusting. The sight of Sarah scouring them out with ashes did not make him less squeamish. He was, in fact, surprisingly finicky for someone who had spent a lifetime around colonial prisons. A dead mosquito made him sick—even the mention of one.

*  *  *  *  *

“It is true that Roy has never lacked for pretty girls,” said Tim. “We should know, eh, Roy?” Roy and the Reeves talked quite a lot about his personal affairs, as if a barrier of discretion had long ago been breached. They were uncomfortable stories, a little harsh sometimes for Sarah’s taste. Roy now suddenly chose to tell about how he had met his future brother-in-law in a brothel in Hong Kong—by accident, of course. They became the best of friends and remained so, even after Roy’s engagement was broken off.

“Why’d she dump you?” Sarah said. “She found out?”

Her way of asking plain questions froze the others. They looked as if winter had swept over the little terrace and caught them. Then Roy took Sarah’s hand and said, “I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t gallant—I dumped the lady.”

“Old Roy probably thought, um, matrimony,” said Tim. “Eh, Meg?” This was because marriage was supposed to be splendid for Tim but somehow confining for his wife.

“She said I was venomous,” said Roy, looking at Sarah, who knew he was not.

“She surely didn’t mean venomous,” said Tim. “She meant something more like, moody.” Here he lapsed into a mood of his own, staring at the candles on the table, and Sarah remembered her shared vision of his unassuming gravestone; she said to Roy in an undertone, “Is anything wrong with him?”

“Wrong with him? Wrong with old Tim? Tim!” Roy called, as if he were out of sight instead of across the table. “When was the last time you ever had a day’s illness?”

“I was sick on a Channel crossing—I might have been ten,” said Tim.

“Nothing’s the matter with Tim, I can promise you that,” said his wife. “Never a headache, never a cold, no flu, no rheumatism, no gout, nothing.”

“Doesn’t feel the amount he drinks,” said Roy.

“Are you ever sick, Mrs. Reeve?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, poor Meg,” said Tim immediately. “You won’t get a word out of her. Never speaks of herself.”

“The ailments of old parties can’t possibly interest Sarah,” said Meg. “Here, Roy, give Sarah something to drink,” meaning that her own glass was empty. “My niece Lisbet will be here for a weekend. Now, that’s an interesting girl. She interviews people for jobs. She can see straight through them, mentally speaking. She had stiff training—had to see a trick cyclist for a year.”

“I abhor that subject,” said Roy. “No sensible prison governor ever allowed a trick cyclist anywhere near. The good were good and the bad were bad and everyone knew it.”

“Psycho-whatnot does not harm if the person is sound,” said Meg. “Lisbet just went week after week and had a jolly old giggle with the chap. The firm was paying.”

“A didactic analysis is a waste of time,” said Sarah, chilling them all once more.

“I didn’t say that or anything like it,” said Meg. “I said the firm was paying. But you’re a bit out of it, Roy,” turning to him and heaving her vast garments so Sarah was cut out. “Lisbet said it did help her. You wouldn’t believe the number of people she turns away, whatever their education. She can tell if they are likely to have asthma. She saves the firm thousands of pounds every year.”

“Lisbet can see when they’re queer,” said Tim.

“What the hell do you mean?” said Roy.

“What did she tell you?” said Meg, now extremely annoyed. “Come on, Tim, get to Friday.”

But Tim had gone back to contemplating his life on the Other Side, and they could obtain nothing further.

Sarah forgot all about Mrs. Reeve’s niece until Lisbet turned up, wearing a poncho, black pants, and bracelets. She was about Roy’s age. All over her head was a froth of kinky yellow hair—a sort of Little Orphan Annie wig. She stared with small blue eyes and gave Sarah a boy’s handshake. She said, “So you’re the famous one!”

Sarah had come back from the market to find them all drinking beer in The Tunnel. Her shirt stuck to her back. She pulled it away and said, “Famous one what?” From the way Lisbet laughed she guessed she had been described as a famous comic turn. Roy handed Sarah a glass without looking at her. Roy and Tim were talking about how to keep Lisbet amused for the weekend. Everything was displayed—the night racing at Cagnes, the gambling, the smuggling from Italy, which bored Sarah but which even Roy did for amusement. “A picnic,” Sarah said, getting in something she liked. Also, it sounded cool. The Hayeses, those anxious tourists at her hotel in Nice, suddenly rose up in her mind offering advice. “There’s this chapel,” she said, feeling a spiky nostalgia, as if she were describing something from home. “Remember, Roy, I mentioned it? Nobody goes there.… You have to get the keys from a café in the village. You can picnic in the churchyard; it has a gate and a wall. There’s a river where we washed our hands. The book said it used to be a pagan place. It has these paintings now, of the Last Judgment, and Jesus, naturally, and one of Judas after he hung himself.”

“Hanged,” said Roy and Lisbet together.

“Hanged. Well, somebody had really seen a hanging—the one who painted it, I mean.”

“Have you?” said Roy, smiling.

“No, but I can imagine.”

“No,” he said, still smiling. “You can’t. All right, I’m for the picnic. Sunday, then. We’ll do Italy tomorrow.”

His guests got up to leave. Tim suddenly said, for no reason Sarah could see, “I’m glad I’m not young.”

As soon as the others were out of earshot Roy said, “God, what a cow! Planeloads of Lisbets used to come out to Asia looking for civil-service husbands. Now they fly to Majorca and sleep with the waiters.”

“Why do we have to be nice to her, if you feel like that?” said Sarah.

“Why don’t you know about these things without asking?” said Roy.

My father didn’t bring me up well, Sarah thought, and resolved to write and tell him so. Mr. Holmes would not have been nice to Lisbet and then called her a cow. He might have done one or the other, or neither. His dilemma as a widower was insoluble; he could never be too nice for fear of someone’s taking it into her head that Sarah wanted a mother. Also, he was not violent about people, even those he had to eliminate. That was why he gave them comic names. “Perhaps you are right,” she said to Roy, without being any more specific. He cared for praise, however ambiguous; and so they had a perfect day, and a perfect night, but those were the last: In the morning, as Sarah stood on the table to tie one end of a clothesline to the plane tree, she slipped, had to jump, landed badly, and sprained her ankle. By noon the skin was purple and she had to cut off her canvas shoe. The foot needed to be bandaged, but not by Roy: The very sight of it made him sick. He could not bear a speck of dust anywhere, or a chipped cup. She remembered the wooden bowls, and how he’d had to leave the table once because they looked a little doubtful, not too clean. Lisbet was summoned. Kneeling, she wrapped Sarah’s foot and ankle in strips of a torn towel and fixed the strips with safety pins.

“It’ll do till I see a doctor,” Sarah said.

Lisbet looked up. How small her eyes were! “You don’t want a doctor for that, surely?”

“Yes, I do. I think it should be X-rayed,” Sarah said. “It hurts like anything.”

“Of course she doesn’t,” said Roy.

Getting well with the greatest possible amount of suffering, and with your bones left crooked, was part of their code. It seemed to Sarah an unreasonable code, but she did not want to seem like someone making a fuss. All the same, she said, “I feel sick.”

“Drink some brandy,” said Lisbet.

“Lie down,” said Roy. “We shan’t be long.” It would have been rude not to have taken Lisbet on the smuggling expedition just because Sarah couldn’t go.

In the late afternoon Meg Reeve strolled down to see how Sarah was managing. She found her standing on one foot hanging washing on a line. The sight of Sarah’s plaid slacks, bought on sale at Nice, caused Meg to remark, “My dear, are you a Scot? I’ve often wondered, seeing you wearing those.” Sarah let a beach towel of Roy’s fall to the ground.

“Damn, it’ll have to be washed again,” she said.

Meg had brought Roy’s mail. She put the letters on the table, facedown, as if Sarah were likely to go over the postmarks with a magnifying glass. The dogs snuffled and snapped at the ghosts of animal-haters. “What clan?” said Meg.

“Clan? Oh, you’re still talking about my slacks. Clan salade niçoise, I guess.”

“Well, you must not wear tartan,” said Meg. “It is an insult to the family, d’you see? I’m surprised Roy hasn’t … Ticky! Blue! Naughty boys!”

“Oh, the dogs come down here and pee all over the terrace every day,” said Sarah.

“Roy used to give them chockie bits. They miss being spoiled. But now he hasn’t time for them, has he?”

“I don’t know. I can’t answer for him. He has time for what interests him.”

“Why do you hang your washing where you can see it?” said Meg. “Are you Italian?” Sarah made new plans; next time the Reeves were invited she would boil Ticky and Blue with a little sugar and suet and serve them up as pudding. I must look angelic at this moment, she thought.

She said, “No, I’m not Italian. I don’t think so.”

“There are things I could never bring myself to do,” said Meg. “Not in my walk of life.”

The sociologist snapped to attention. Easing her sore ankle, Sarah said, “Please, what is your walk of life, exactly?”

It was so dazzling, so magical, that Meg could not name it, but merely mouthed a word or two that Sarah was unable to lip-read. A gust of incinerator smoke stole between them and made them choke. “As for Tim,” said Meg, getting her breath again, “you, with all your transatlantic money, couldn’t buy what Tim has in his veins.”

Sarah limped indoors and somehow found the forgotten language. “Necessity for imparting status information,” she recorded, and added “erroneous” between “imparting” and “status.” She was still, in a way, half in love with Professor Downcast.

She discovered this was a conversation neither Roy nor Lisbet could credit. They unpacked their loot from Italy on the wobbly terrace table—plastic table mats, plastic roses, a mermaid paperweight, a bottle of apéritif that smelled like medicine, a Florentine stamp box … “Rubbish, garbage,” Sarah said in her mind. “But Roy is happy.” Also, he was drunk. So was Lisbet.

“Meg could not have said those things,” said Roy, large-eyed.

“Meg doesn’t always understand Sarah,” said Lisbet. “The accent.”

“Mrs. Reeve was doing the talking,” said Sarah.

“She wouldn’t have talked that way to an Englishwoman,” said Roy, swinging round to Sarah’s side.

“Wouldn’t have dared,” said Lisbet. She shouted, “Wouldn’t have dared to me!”

“As for Tim, well, Tim really is the real thing,” said Roy. “I mean to say that Tim really is.”

“So is my aunt,” said Lisbet, but Roy had disappeared behind the white net curtain, and they heard him fall on the bed. “He’s had rather a lot,” said Lisbet. Sarah felt anxiety for Roy, who had obviously had a lot of everything—perhaps of Lisbet too. And there was still the picnic next day, and no one had bought any food for it. Lisbet looked glowing and superb, as if she had been tramping in a clean wind instead of sitting crouched in a twilit bar somewhere on the Italian side. She should have been haggard and gray.

“Who was driving?” Sarah asked her.

“Took turns.”

“What did you talk about?” She was remembering his “God, what a cow!”

“Capital punishment, apartheid, miscegenation, and my personal problems with men. That I seem cold, but I’m not really.”

“Boys, boys, boys!” That was Meg Reeve calling her dogs. They rolled out of the lavender hedge like a pair of chewed tennis balls. They might well have been eavesdropping. Sarah gave a shiver, and Lisbet laughed and said, “Someone’s walking on your grave.”

The sunlight on the terrace next morning hurt Roy’s eyes; he made little flapping gestures, meaning Sarah was not to speak. “What were you drinking in Italy?” she said. He shook his head. Mutely, he took the dried laundry down and folded it. Probably, like Meg, he did not much care for the look of it. “I’ve made the picnic,” Sarah next offered. “No reason why I can’t come—we won’t be doing much walking.” She stood on one leg, like a stork. The picnic consisted of anything Sarah happened to find in the refrigerator. She included plums in brandy because she noticed a jar of them, and iced white wine in a thermos. At the last minute she packed olives, salted peanuts, and several pots of yogurt.

“Put those back,” said Roy.

“Why? Do you think they’ll melt?”

“Just do as I say, for once. Put them back.”

“Do you know what I think?” said Sarah after a moment. “I think we’re starting out on something my father would call The Ill-Fated Excursion.”

For the first time ever, she saw Roy looking angry. The vitality of the look made him younger, but not in a nice way. He became a young man, an ugly one. “Liz will have to drive,” he said. “I’ve got a blinding headache, and you can’t, not with that.” He could not bring himself to name her affliction. “How do you know about this place?” he said. “Who took you there?”

“I told you. Some Americans in my hotel. Haynes—no, Hayes.”

“Yes, I can imagine.” He looked at her sidelong and said, “Just who were you sleeping with when I collected you?”

She felt what it was like to blush—like a rash of needles and pins. He knew every second of her life, because she had told it to him that night on the beach. What made her blush was that she sensed he was only pretending to be jealous. It offended her. She said, “Let’s call the picnic off.”

“I don’t want to.”

She was not used to quarrels, only to tidal waves. She did not understand that they were quarreling now. She wondered again what he had been drinking over in Italy. Her ankle felt in a vise, but that was the least of it. They set off, all three together, and Lisbet drove straight up into the hills as if pursuing escaped prisoners. They shot past towns Sarah had visited with the Americans, who had been conscientious about churches; she saw, open-and-shut, views they had stopped to photograph. When she said, “Look,” nobody heard. She sat crumpled in the narrow backseat, with the picnic sliding all over as they rounded the mountain curves, quite often on the wrong side.

“That was the café, back there, where you get the key,” Sarah had to say twice—once very loudly. Lisbet braked so they were thrown forward and then reversed like a bullet ricocheting. “Sarah knows about this,” said Roy, as if it were a good thing to know about. That was encouraging. She gripped her ankle between her hands and set her foot down. She tested her weight and managed to walk and hop to the cool café, past the beaded curtain. She leaned on the marble counter; she had lost something. Was it her confidence? She wanted someone to come and take her home, but was too old to want that; she knew too many things. She said to the man standing behind the counter, “J’ai mal,” to explain why she did not take the keys from him and at once go out. His reaction was to a confession of sorrow and grief; he poured out something to drink. It was clear as water, terribly strong, and smelled of warm fruit. When she gestured to show him she had no money, he said, “Ça va.” He was kind; the Hayeses, such an inadequate substitute for peacocks, had been kind too. She said to herself, “How awful if I should cry.”

The slight inclination of Roy’s head when she handed the keys to him meant he might be interested. She felt emboldened: “One’s for the chapel, the other’s the gate. There isn’t a watchman or anything. It’s too bad, because people write on the walls.”

“Which way?” Lisbet interrupted. She chased her prisoners another mile or so.

Sarah had told them no one ever came here, but they were forced to park behind a car with Swiss license plates. Next to the gate sat a large party of picnickers squeezed round a card table. There was only one man among them, and Sarah thought it must be a harem and the man had been allowed several wives for having been reasonable and Swiss until he was fifty. She started to tell this to Roy, but he had gone blank as a monument; she felt overtaken by her father’s humor, not her own. Roy gave the harem an empty look that reminded her of the prostitutes down in Nice, and now she knew what their faces had been saying. It was “I despise you.” The chapel was an icebox; and she saw Roy and Lisbet glance with some consternation at the life of Jesus spread around for anyone to see. They would certainly have described themselves as Christians, but they were embarrassed by Christ. They went straight to Judas, who was more reassuring. Hanged, disemboweled, his stomach and liver exposed to ravens, Judas gave up his soul. His soul was a small naked creature. Perceiving Satan, the creature held out its arms.

“Now, that man must have eaten Sarah’s cooking,” said Roy, and such were their difficulties that she was grateful to hear him say anything. But he added, “A risk many have taken, I imagine.” This was to Lisbet. Only Sarah knew what he meant. She fell back and pretended to be interested in a rack of postcards. The same person who trusted visitors not to write their names on paintings had left a coin box. Sarah had no money and did not want to ask Roy for any. She stole a reproduction of the Judas fresco and put it inside her shirt.

Roy and Lisbet ate some of the picnic. They sat where Sarah had sat with the Americans, but it was in no way the same. Of course, the season was later, the river lower, the grass drooping and dry. The shadows of clouds made them stare and comment, as if looking for something to say. Sarah was relieved when the two decided to climb up in the maquis, leaving her “to rest a bit”—this was Lisbet. “Watch out for snakes,” Sarah said, and got from Roy one blurred, anxious, puzzled look, the last straight look he ever gave her. She sat down and drank all the brandy out of the jar of plums. Roy had an attitude about people she had never heard of: Nothing must ever go wrong. An accident is degrading for the victim. She undid the toweling strips and looked at her bloated ankle and foot. Of course, it was ugly; but it was part of a living body, not a corpse, and it hurt Sarah, not Roy. She tipped out the plums so the ants could have a party, drank some of the white wine, and, falling asleep, thought she was engaged in an endless and heated discussion with some person who was in the wrong.

She woke up cramped and thirsty on the backseat of the car. They were stopped in front of the café and must have been parked for some time, for they were in an oblique shadow of late afternoon. Roy was telling Lisbet a lie: He said he had been a magistrate and was writing his memoirs. Next he told her of hangings he’d seen. He said in his soft voice, “Don’t you think some people are better out of the way?” Sarah knew by heart the amber eyes and the pupils so small they seemed a mistake sometimes. She was not Sarah now but a prisoner impaled on a foreign language, seeing bright, light, foreign eyes offering something nobody wanted—death. “Flawed people, born rotten,” Roy went on.

“Oh, everyone thinks that now,” said Lisbet.

They were alike, with fortunes established in piracy. He liked executions; she broke people before they had a chance to break themselves. Lisbet stroked the back of her own neck. Sarah had noticed before that when Lisbet was feeling sure of herself she made certain her neck was in place. Neurotic habit, Sarah’s memory asked her to believe; but no, it was only the gesture of someone at ease in a situation she recognized. Tranquil as to her neck, Lisbet now made sure of her hair. She patted the bright steel wool that must have been a comfort to her mother some thirty-five—no, forty—years before.

I am jealous, Sarah said to herself. How unwelcome. Jealousy is only … the jealous person is the one keeping something back and so …

“Oh, keys, always keys,” said Roy, shaking them. He slammed out in a way that was surely rude to Lisbet. She rested her arm over the back of the seat and looked at Sarah. “You drank enough to stun a rhinoceros, little girl,” she said. “We had to take you out behind the chapel and make you be sick before we could let you in the car.” Sarah began to remember. She saw Roy’s face, a gray flash in a cracked old film about a catastrophe. Lisbet said, “Look, Sarah, how old are you? Aren’t you a bit out of your depth with Roy?” She might have said more, but a native spitefulness, or a native prudence, prevented her. She flew to Majorca the next day, as Roy had predicted, leaving everyone out of step.

Now Roy began hating; he hated the sea, the Reeves, the dogs, the blue of plumbago, the mention of Lisbet, and most of all he hated Sarah. The Reeves laughed and called it “old Roy being bloody-minded again,” but Sarah was frightened. She had never known anyone who would simply refuse to speak, who would take no notice of a question. Meg said to her, “He misses that job of his. It came to nothing. He tried to give a lot of natives a sense of right and wrong, and then some Socialist let them vote.”

“Yes, he liked that job,” Sarah said slowly. “One day he’d watch a hanging, and the next he’d measure the exercise yard to see if it was up to standard.” She said suddenly and for no reason she knew, “I’ve disappointed him.”

Their meals were so silent that they could hear the swelling love songs from the Reeves’ television, and the Reeves’ voices bawling away at each other. Sarah’s throat would go tight. In daytime the terrace was like an oven now, and her ankle kept her from sleeping at night. Then Roy gave up eating and lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling. She still went on shopping, but now it took hours. Mornings, before leaving, she would place a bowl of coffee for him, like an offering; it was still there, at the bedside, cold and oily-looking now, when she came back. She covered a tray with leaves from the plane tree—enormous powdery leaves, the size of her two hands—and she put cheese on the leaves, and white cheese covered with pepper, a Camembert, a salty goat cheese he had liked. He did not touch any. Out of a sort of desperate sentiment, she kept the tray for days, picking chalky pieces off as the goat cheese grew harder and harder and became a fossil. He must have eaten sometimes; she thought of him gobbling scraps straight from the refrigerator when her back was turned. She wrote a letter to her father that of course she did not send. It said, “I’ve been having headaches lately. I wind a thread around a finger until the blood can’t get past and that starts a new pain. The headache is all down the back of my neck. I’m not sure what to do next. It will be terrible for you if I turn out to have a brain tumor. It will cost you a lot of money and you may lose your only child.”

One dawn she knew by Roy’s breathing that he was awake. Every muscle was taut as he pulled away, as if to touch her was defilement. No use saying what they had been like not long before, because he could not remember. She was a disgusting object because of a cracked ankle, because she had drunk too much and been sick behind a chapel, and because she had led an expedition to look at Jesus. She lay thinking it over until the dawn birds stopped and then she sat up on the edge of the bed, feeling absolutely out of place because she was undressed. She pulled clothes on as fast as she could and packed whatever seemed important. After she had pushed her suitcase out the door, she remembered the wooden bowls and the poster. These she took along the path and threw in the Reeves’ foul incinerator, as if to get rid of all traces of witchery, goodness, and love. She realized she was leaving, a decision as final and as stunning as her having crossed the promenade in Nice with Roy’s hand on her arm.

She said through the white netting over the door, “I’m sorry, Roy.” It was not enough; she added, “I’m sorry I don’t understand you more.” The stillness worried her. She limped near and bent over him. He was holding his breath, like a child in temper. She said softly, “I could stay a bit longer.” No answer. She said, “Of course, my foot will get better, but then you might find something else the matter with me.” Still no answer, except that he began breathing. Nothing was wrong except that he was cruel, lunatic, Fascist—No, not even that. Nothing was wrong except that he did not love her. That was all.

She lugged her suitcase as far as the road and sat down beside it. Overnight a pocket of liquid the size of a lemon had formed near the anklebone. Her father would say it was all her own fault again. Why? Was it Sarah’s fault that she had all this loving capital to invest? What was she supposed to do with it? Even if she always ended up sitting outside a gate somewhere, was she any the worse for it? The only thing wrong now was the pain she felt, not of her ankle but in her stomach. Her stomach felt as if it was filled up with old oyster shells. Yes, a load of old, ugly, used-up shells was what she had for stuffing. She had to take care not to breathe too deeply, because the shells scratched. In her research for Professor Downcast she had learned that one could be alcoholic, crippled, afraid of dying and of being poor, and she knew these things waited for everyone, even Sarah; but nothing had warned her that one day she would not be loved. That was the meaning of “less privileged.” There was no other.

Now that she had vanished, Roy would probably get up, and shave, and stroll across to the Reeves, and share a good old fry-up. Then, his assurance regained, he would start prowling the bars and beaches, wearing worn immaculate whites, looking for a new, unblemished story. He would repeat the first soft words, “Don’t be frightened,” the charm, the gestures, the rituals, and the warning “It won’t always be lovely.” She saw him out in the open, in her remembered primrose light, before he was trapped in the tunnel again and had to play at death. “Roy’s new pickup,” the Reeves would bawl at each other. “I said, Roy’s new one … he hardly knows how to get rid of her.”

At that, Sarah opened her mouth and gave a great sobbing cry; only one, but it must have carried, for next thing she heard was the Reeves’ door, and, turning, she saw Tim in a dressing gown, followed by Meg in her parachute of a robe. Sarah stood up to face them. The sun was on her back. She clutched the iron bars of the gate because she had to stand like a stork again. From their side of it, Tim looked down at her suitcase. He said, “Do you want—are you waiting to be driven somewhere?”

“To the airport, if you feel like taking me. Otherwise I’ll hitch.”

“Oh, please don’t do that!” He seemed afraid of another outburst from her—something low-pitched and insulting this time.

“Come in this minute,” said Meg. “I don’t know what you are up to, but we do have neighbors, you know.”

“Why should I care?” said Sarah. “They aren’t my neighbors.”

“You are a little coward,” said Meg. “Running away only because …” There were so many reasons that of course she hesitated.

Without unkind intention Sarah said the worst thing: “It’s just that I’m too young for all of you.”

Meg’s hand crept between the bars and around her wrist. “Somebody had to be born before you, Sarah,” she said, and unlocked her hand and turned back to the house. “Yes, boys, dear boys, here I am,” she called.

Tim said, “Would you like—let me see—would you like something to eat or drink?” It seemed natural for him to talk through bars.

“I can’t stay in the same bed with someone who doesn’t care,” said Sarah, beginning to cry. “It isn’t right.”

“It is what most people do,” said Tim. “Meg has the dogs, and her television. She has everything. We haven’t often lived together. We gradually stopped. When did we last live together? When we went home once for the motor show.” She finally grasped what he meant by “live together.” Tim said kindly, “Look, I don’t mean to pry, but you didn’t take old Roy too much to heart, did you? He wasn’t what you might call the love of your life?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Dear, dear,” said Tim, as if someone had been spreading bad news. He seemed so much more feminine than his wife; his hands were powdery—they seemed dipped in talcum. His eyes were embedded in a little volcano of wrinkles that gave him in full sunlight the look of a lizard. A white lizard, Sarah decided. “This has affected Meg,” he said. “The violence of it. We shall talk it over for a long time. Well. You have so much more time. You will bury all of us.” His last words were loud and sudden, almost a squawk, because Meg, light of tread and silent on her feet, had come up behind him. She wore her straw hat and carried her morning glass of gin and orange juice.

“Sarah? She’ll bury you,” said Meg. “Fetch the car, Tim, and take Sarah somewhere. Come along. Get to Friday. Tim.” He turned. “Dress first,” she said.

The sun which had turned Tim into a white lizard now revealed a glassy stain on Meg’s cheek, half under her hair. Sarah’s attention jumped like a child’s. She said, “Something’s bitten you. Look. Something poisonous.”

Meg moved her head and the poisoned bite vanished under the shade of her hat. “Observant. Tim has never noticed. Neither has Roy. It is only a small malignant thing,” she said indifferently. “I’ve been going to the hospital in Nice twice a week for treatment. They burned it—that’s the reason for the scar.”

“Oh, Meg,” said Sarah, drawn round the gate. “Nobody knew. That was why you went to Nice. I saw you on the bus.”

“I saw you,” said Meg, “but why talk when you needn’t? I get plenty of talk at home. May I ask where you are going?”

“I’m going to the airport, and I’ll sit there till they get me on a plane.”

“Well, Sarah, you may be sitting for some time, but I know you know what you are doing,” said Meg. “I am minding the summer heat this year. I feel that soon I won’t be able to stand it anymore. When Tim’s gone I won’t ever marry again. I’ll look for some woman to share expenses. If you ever want to come back for a holiday, Sarah, you have only to let me know.”

*  *  *  *  *

And so Tim, the battery of his car leaking its lifeblood all over French roads, drove Sarah down to Nice and along to the airport. Loyal to the Reeve standards, he did not once glance at the sea. As for Sarah, she sat beside him crying quietly, first over Meg, then over herself, because she thought she had spent all her capital on Roy and would never love anyone again. She looked for the restaurant with the blue tablecloths, and for the beach where they had sat talking for a night, but she could not find them; there were dozens of tables and awnings and beaches, all more or less alike.

“You’ll be all right?” said Tim. He wanted her to say yes, of course.

She said, “Tim, Roy needs help.”

He did not know her euphemisms any more than she understood his. He said, “Help to do what?”

“Roy is unhappy and he doesn’t know what he wants. If you’re over forty and you don’t know what you want, well, I guess someone should tell you.”

“My dear Sarah,” said the old man, “that is an unkind thing to say about a friend we have confidence in.”

She said quickly, “Don’t you see, before he had a life that suited him, inspecting people in jails. They didn’t seem like people or jails. It kept him happy, it balanced …” Suddenly she gave a great shiver in the heat of the morning and heard Lisbet laugh and say, “Someone’s walking on your grave.” She went on, “For example, he won’t eat.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” cried Tim, understanding something at last. “Meg will see that he eats.” Right to the end, everyone was at cross-purposes. “Think of it this way,” said Tim. “You had to go home sometime.”

“Not till September.”

“Well, look on the happy side. Old Roy … matrimony. You might not enjoy it, you know, unless you met someone like Meg.” He obviously had no idea what he was saying anymore, and so she gave up talking until he set her down at the departures gate. Then he said, “Good luck to you, child,” and drove away looking indescribably happy.

*  *  *  *  *

Sarah kept for a long time the picture of Judas with his guts spilling and with his soul (a shrimp of a man, a lesser Judas) reaching out for the Devil. It should have signified Roy, or even Lisbet, but oddly enough it was she, the victim, who felt guilty and maimed. Still, she was out of the tunnel. Unlike Judas she was alive, and that was something. She was so much younger than all those other people: As Tim had said, she would bury them all. She tacked the Judas card over a map of the world on a wall of her room. Plucked from its origins it began to flower from Sarah’s; here was an image that might have followed her from the nursery. It was someone’s photo, a family likeness, that could bear no taint of pain or disaster. One day she took the card down, turned it over, and addressed it to a man she was after. He was too poor to invite her anywhere and seemed too shy to make a move. He was also in terrible trouble—back taxes, ex-wife seizing his salary. He had been hounded from California to Canada for his political beliefs. She was in love with his mystery, his hardships, and the death of Trotsky. She wrote, “This person must have eaten my cooking. Others have risked it so please come to dinner on Friday, Sarah.” She looked at the words for seconds before hearing another voice. Then she remembered where the card was from, and she understood what the entire message was about. She could have changed it, but it was too late to change anything much. She was more of an amoureuse than a psycho-anything, she would never use up her capital, and some summer or other would always be walking on her grave.