I’d made up my mind to tell her I knew Marco, and to try to get her side of the story. But it was no easier in the flesh than on the phone. I prevaricated, asking what she was doing with herself these days. She told me about a charitable organization she’d joined, which raised money for refugees. In a roundabout way she led me to understand that she was one of the public faces of this organization, and although she spoke of the role in a self-deprecating tone, I got the feeling she was proud of it.

“The way I see it, if I can turn the tiny bit of fame I once had to good use, then why not do it? I like being useful to other people. I wish I’d learned that about myself earlier on in life . . .”

Images of her from the past continued surfacing in my mind as she talked, blooming and dispersing. I remembered reaching to lift a wire for her on a country walk in my teens, not realizing it was electrified, my yelp of shock prompting a peal of laughter from her, followed by an unexpected touch on my shoulder of magical tenderness and sympathy. I remembered the party at our house where my mother first introduced her to that young ­American, Ralph Pommeroy, and the expressions on their faces as they circled each other in those first moments; Ralph’s a little stunned as if he thought he might be dreaming, Julia’s mirthful, with that air of being deep in some private revel while at the same time alertly conscious of her own effect.

“And you?” she said. “What have you been doing all these years?”

I told her about my life in America: writing, teaching, living out in the woods with my family.

“How romantic!”

“It was nice.”

“Was? It’s over?”

“No, but the kids have left.”

“Ah.”

She crossed her legs and tilted her head back a little, the broad planes of her cheeks catching the waning daylight from the balcony window. She was still striking to look at; beautiful by any measure, with her handsome head like something sculpted for a Roman fountain. And in fact I’d listed attributes of certain goddesses in the notes I’d made, copying out lines from Homer on Athena’s daylight-sharpening powers, her “slate-flecked silver eyes,” as well as a passage about Artemis from Camille Paglia: “Artemis is pre-Christian purity without spirituality . . . She has nerve, fire, arrogance, force . . . She is pristine. She never learns. In her blankness and coldness, she is a perfect selfhood, a sublime energy.”

“Tell me about your wife . . .” she said.