Mr. Fenwick, at his window, was relieved to see the young man get up and come inside; the sun was downright dangerous. Surely the summer should be over by now, even here, he expostulated to himself. He would have expostulated to Mrs. Fenwick, but a deep, regular breathing from the bed promised him little response. She had taken off her shoes and lain down to sleep, with a scented handkerchief on her forehead, as soon as they came upstairs from lunch. But Mr. Fenwick maintained, at the window, something approaching a vigil, holding his book (Trollope: Phineas Finn) firmly on his knee. Someone must, after all, keep their wits about them.

When he saw Francis leave the garden, Daniele closed and latched his shutters and sat down in an armchair. He propped his feet on the end of the bed and laid his open book (Ausonius: Mosella) upside down in his lap. Marina asks for this, he told himself—invites confidences, implies sympathy, and then isn’t prepared to go through with it. She is as incapable of living, of truly living, as I, he conceded—with a suggestion of high praise. She likes to preside serenely over the emotions of others, but she doesn’t care to participate. And those who do participate seem shrill or untidy by comparison.

This wave of resentment, subsiding, was replaced by an image, as true as if he had risen to confirm it from the window, of Marina alone in the garden in the heat, patiently restoring the dahlias.

Still, he continued to himself (effortlessly, because he considered these things almost every afternoon), we are unreal. We shall never do anything now except go on here, feeling the extent of our losses. We’ve been obsolete since … (Here he left in his mind the row of dots that stood for Fascism, the war, debts, the last illness of his father, the death of Marina’s husband, who had had a heart attack in 1949 while hanging a painting in his house in Milan—matters now too familiar to cause pain or merit reiteration.)

On the other hand, he concluded, Harriet and Francis—exasperating as they may be at the moment—are real. He pictured Harriet intrepidly hailing a London bus or standing in a crowded room with a glass in her hand. (He himself never entered a shop or made a new acquaintance without reluctance and apprehension.) And there was something admirable about being close enough to love to be able to quarrel over it. The thought of Harriet, now, lying tormented on her bed—crying, possibly—because of love, filled him with wonder and envy.

He turned his book over and switched on the lamp at his side.