He rose and pulled one of the shutters, so that her face was shielded from sunlight. With indignation and longing, he felt disqualified from kissing her as he turned to leave. It was almost as if he did not dare to.

“If I were you,” she said, elaborating their estrangement, “If I were you, I should have a look at the car before we go.”

Pondering the discomfort of having hurt her husband and the relief afforded by his departure, Harriet folded her hands across her breast. Somewhere, one of the maids was ironing, her soft singing accompanied by the thump and clash of the iron. Down at the road, a dog and a scooter barked together through the roar of a truck climbing the hill; a woman called; a child cried out.

Harriet stared at the ceiling, the physical displacement of her sorrow expanding within her—difficulty of respiration, and an aching in ears and eyes. She wondered if this were, after all, the worst moment of the day, and thought of the scene in the kitchen every morning when the letters came. (It was the butcher who brought the mail from Florence once a day; his small gray delivery car trundled up the drive about eleven o’clock. Occasionally he was late. There was talk with the maids before the bundle was laid down, with the day’s meat, on the kitchen table, and there were papers, circulars, letters to be turned over before Harriet could be sure that there was nothing for her. Sometimes there was an envelope with an English stamp, and for a moment anxiety would be replaced by apprehension—for what could now be written that she might want to read?)

She knew she must not weep, and she watched the ceiling with the same impassive face and dry eyes she had turned to her husband in the garden. It seemed to her that the tears were flowing inside her head.

The wheel of her mind turned laboriously on a familiar route, as though a required number of revolutions might set it in easy motion. The ray of sunlight lay flat on the farthest wall, patterned by the vines about the window frame. The house at this hour became a well of greenish light filtered through the color of its shutters. From time to time, a cicada droned from the garden, pressing upon the silence a weight that seemed to seal it completely. The afternoon swung Harriet, immobilized, between sleeping and waking, and slowly closed on the distraction of pain.

When Francis came downstairs, he found Marina preparing to go into the garden.

“It’s all right,” she told him, lifting her hand a little to check his protest. “I’m going to tie up one or two plants and come straight back.” There had been a storm the night before.