‘What have you been doing in America?’

She looked up slowly from her chocolate and, her splendid, serious eyes in mine, said: ‘Don’t you know? I’ll tell you about it sometime. I’ve been a mug. I thought I was in love with someone, but it didn’t turn out that way.’ And my mind went back ten years to the evening at Brideshead, when that lovely, spidery child of nineteen, as though brought in for an hour from the nursery and nettled by lack of attention from the grown-ups, had said: ‘I’m causing anxiety, too, you know,’ and I had thought at the time, though scarcely, it now seemed to me, in long trousers myself, ‘How important these girls make themselves with their love affairs.’

Now it was different; there was nothing but humility and friendly candour in the way she spoke.

I wished I could respond to her confidence, give some token of acceptance, but there was nothing in my last, flat, eventful years that I could share with her. I began instead to talk of my time in the jungle, of the comic characters I had met and the lost places I had visited, but in this mood of old friendship the tale faltered and came to an end abruptly.

‘I long to see the paintings,’ she said.

‘Celia wanted me to unpack some and stick them round the cabin for her cocktail party. I couldn’t do that.’

‘No…is Celia as pretty as ever? I always thought she had the most delicious looks of any girl of my year.’

‘She hasn’t changed.’

‘You have, Charles. So lean and grim; not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him. Harder, too.’

‘And you’re softer.’

‘Yes, I think so…and very patient now.’

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head that I used to think quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine; not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.

Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of la Gioconda; the years had been more than ‘the sound of lyres and flutes’, and had saddened her. She seemed to say: ‘Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?’

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.