Jimmy said, interrupting himself in mid-recital, “Let’s take a look at the fire.”

They were in no hurry to do so, conscientiously putting out cigarettes, setting down brandy glasses. There was of course something obscene about the fire regarded simply as a spectacle; yet it was there, sooner or later they would be drawn back to it.

“Marian, you had a sweater.”

“It’s in the car.”

I shouldn’t have said that, thought Helena Palmer, about the righteous. It sounded straight out of the Bible Belt. It made sense, but it didn’t sound right. Oh, one has to be so careful.

Now here is what I meant about Italy, Robin wanted to say, stepping outdoors among the jasmine and the lemon trees in tubs, and tasting the thin scorched scent that embittered all the others. There is always some question or other.

“I hope the tortoise isn’t about,” said Janet. “I don’t want to tread on the tortoise.”

“A tortoise, how sweet.”

“Only a little one. But forty years old. He was wounded in the war by a piece of shrapnel.”

“Ours or theirs?”

“Oh, how can you ask?”

The light from the house scarcely reached to the gateway, which they walked under to darkness, their footsteps hesitating from stone into gravel.

Below, one car remained at the turn of the road. It was occupied by a pair of lovers.

The tail-light of this car was turned on, a tiny stroke of red. Where the fire had been there was nothing but the dark. If they stayed there long enough looking out into this darkness they would eventually be able to distinguish the outline of a hill, like a great wave against the sky. But their eyes were unused to the night, after the lighted house; and as it was they could do no more than sense the hillside’s charred presence, there where they had seen it in flames, as they stood in a group outside the gate—the two couples clasping hands; and Miss Palmer with her arms folded over her breast, not in judgment but because the night had turned cool.

SIR CECIL’S RIDE

The taxi might have been out of control, rattling off down the mountain, rounding the curves by luck. Constantin stood putting the change away, filthy little tickets of money that he buttoned in the pocket of his shorts. A dark-green Humber that came whirring sedately over the pass hesitated alongside them offering wordless rescue—the car itself raising eyebrows at two Europeans on the roadside in the heat. (This driver was white, coming up from the club at Deep Water Bay.) The second car slipped over the precipice with finality, like an emissary that has offered terms and been rejected: let battle commence.

“You wanted to walk,” Constantin said. “And now we’re going to walk.”