Even under the trees, the heat was intense. She lifted her hands from the table and closed them around the cold glass.

“There’s a bus in half an hour,” he said. “We should just do it. We may even see it coming down from Tivoli.” He thought she seemed tired, but then they had been walking all afternoon. And they hadn’t decided anything—although at one point, he remembered, she had told him that it was impossible. She was looking at him, and for a moment he thought he would be able to tell her that nothing else mattered (or whatever it was). But they had walked too far; his head ached slightly from the sun. And now she had turned aside.

CLIFFS OF FALL

“If you have to be unhappy,” Cyril said, “you must admit that there couldn’t be a better place for it.”

He was speaking to Elizabeth Tchirikoff, who sat on his right at the breakfast table. His wife, Greta, was at his left. They were seated this way, in a row, because the table was on the terrace and commanded across the lake a fine view of the Alps. At their back, past the side of the house, the garden merged into fields and vineyards on the flat green plateau and appeared to stretch, with the interruption of scarcely a single house, to the range of the Jura. On the Jura, this magnificent September, there was no snow whatever. Even on the Alps the snow line was exceptionally high, revealing great jagged precipices of black rock that had seldom seen the sun. Along the lake, the bathing places were still crowded in the afternoons, the weekend traffic was still lethal on the Route Suisse, the tourists still sat outside in the cafés of Geneva. It was weather more majestic, less distracted than summer, and untouched by decay—the improbably fine weather, without evocation or presentiment, that is sometimes arrested in a colored photograph.