I thought of the youth with the teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts. ‘It’s not what one would have foretold,’ I said. ‘I suppose he doesn’t suffer?’

‘Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is – no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him….I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love…’ and then in condescension to my paganism, she added: ‘He’s in a very beautiful place, you know, by the sea – white cloisters, a bell tower, rows of green vegetables, and a monk watering them when the sun is low.’

I laughed. ‘You knew I wouldn’t understand?’

‘You and Julia…’ she said. And then, as we moved on towards the house, ‘When you met me last night did you think, “Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works”? Did you think “thwarted”?’

It was no time for prevarication. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I did; I don’t now, so much.’

‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘that’s exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with nanny. “Thwarted passion,” I thought.’

She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflexion of mockery which descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back to me poignantly.

Julia wore the embroidered Chinese robe which she often used when we were dining alone at Brideshead; it was a robe whose weight and stiff folds stressed her repose; her neck rose exquisitely from the plain gold circle at her throat; her hands lay still among the dragons in her lap. It was thus that I had rejoiced to see her nights without number, and that night, watching her as she sat between the firelight and the shaded lamp, unable to look away for love of her beauty, I suddenly thought, ‘When else have I seen her like this? Why am I reminded of another moment of vision?’ And it came back to me that this was how she had sat in the liner, before the storm; this was how she had looked, and I realized that she had regained what I thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, ‘Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?’

That night I woke in the darkness and lay awake turning over in my mind the conversation with Cordelia. How I had said, ‘You knew I would not understand.’ How often, it seemed to me, I was brought up short, like a horse in full stride suddenly refusing an obstacle, backing against the spurs, too shy even to put his nose at it and look at the thing.

And another image came to me, of an arctic hut and a trapper alone with his furs and oil lamp and log fire; everything dry and ship-shape and warm inside, and outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white heap sealing the door, until quite soon when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in a block would move, slide, and tumble, high above, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.