Greta looked up warningly at Cyril, but Elizabeth had smiled—as he meant her to—and even made an uncompleted gesture of touching his hand with hers. As if he had set off some small mechanism in her, she made a few more motions with her hands—brushing a wasp away from the strawberry jam and placing the melting butter in the shadow of a loaf of bread—before settling back again in the white wooden chair and closing her eyes against the sun. She had been staying with the Stricklands for three weeks and was very brown, browner than she had ever been in her life. The brown of her breast and back and shoulders fitted exactly to the cut of the blue-and-white striped sun dress she wore almost every day. Her feet were patterned with the lines of sandal straps, and the outline of sunglasses was palely imprinted over her cheekbones. “I feel quite well,” she told herself as the sun made circles of yellow and mauve through her eyelids. “If I feel anything, it is that: quite well.”

“But then I really don’t feel anything,” she had told Greta on the day of her arrival, driving back from the Geneva airport. “At the beginning there was the shock, but now I don’t feel anything.” And when Greta explained in a lowered voice to visitors—the women who came for tea in little pale-blue or gray cars, and the couples who came for dinner—that she was still suffering from the shock (“They had only just been married. He was killed in an accident”), Elizabeth had a sensation of receiving their concern under false pretenses—and of spoiling their visits, since no one could decently enjoy themselves in her presence. For I don’t feel anything at all, she told herself. Before leaving New York, she had been given prescriptions for pills that would stimulate her, or calm her, or help her to sleep. In plastic containers, the pills (green and triangular, white and circular, red and cylindrical) lay in a pocket of her suitcase, along with tablets for airsickness and a bottle of cold-water soap. She had not needed any of them.

She opened her eyes a little and looked at the sky, which was now violet, cloudless. A hawk had risen from the pines bordering the road that ran toward the lake; it plunged and soared over the house, dispersing smaller birds, its flight sustained on still, spread wings. It looked, Elizabeth thought, like a child’s kite on a string. Will I ever feel anything again, she wondered. Unfeeling, she felt strangely imperiled, as though she might now perpetrate any crime, commit any indiscriminate act, say any unspeakable thing, unless she consciously applied a restraint that had formerly been instinctive—as people who have lost the sense of heat and cold will touch fire and burn themselves, uninhibited by pain.