But occasionally he did feel her suffering—as it were, through the screen of his own. The night before, they had lain down in silence, immensely remote from each other in this comfortable bed in his mother’s best guest room. He had behaved so cruelly to Miranda all day that he knew he could not decently approach her (here he made a mental note to be more careful this evening), and they slept without touching. But that morning he had wakened very early and watched her sleeping—her grief showing even then, for her closed fist was pressed against her mouth as if she had fallen asleep stifling her sobs. For a moment he had wanted intensely to awaken and reassure her, to take her out of sleep back into his embrace before she could recollect what stood between them. For that moment he had lain wanting her to know that help was at hand. But the moment passed, and with it the impulse to rescue her. He could not face her surprise, her pleasure, her tears. He could not face his own inability to sustain this moment of sanity, and the absolute certainty of her disappointment.

“I must say these things, you know,” he told her, in a fairly pleasant voice. “I don’t care for them either, but they do come out, ugly as they are.”

She turned round on the stool and looked at him. “Russell, tell me why.”

He lowered his eyes from the ceiling and looked at her again, still with his hands behind his head. “I suppose they represent me at the moment—I mean, that I am ugly. Wouldn’t you think? Something like that?”

“No.”

“I tell you yes, Miranda. That’s the way it is. Envy-and-calumny-and-hate-and-pain, darling—the bloody lot.” He smiled at her. “Where’s the paper?”

“I didn’t bring it up. I think Constance wanted to see it.”

“Oh, she’s turned nasty again, has she? God, darling, I can’t see you sticking out the summer here. Even the city in a heat wave is better than Constance.”

“She’s not so bad. You have to know how to handle her.”

“Which, as it happens, neither of us does.”

Miranda laughed. She took off her rose-colored gown and started to dress.

“Could you hand me those folders.” He sat up and took a bundle of travel leaflets from her. She sat on the bed at a little distance from him, buttoning her dress. Between them, over the blanket, he spread a topographical map of the Greek peninsula and the islands. “You understand that I have to do this?” he asked her, for the twentieth time. “That I have to be away—be alone?”