At four o’clock, they stopped work and went inside to bathe and dress. Unless visitors were expected to tea, Greta got the car out and they drove to Geneva. In the town they did a little shopping and had café crème and pastel-colored cakes outside the Hôtel des Bergues. Tall, delicate women in pretty dresses came and went at the hotel, or walked their small dogs in and out of shops. The avenue along the lake was full of traffic on those beautiful afternoons. Foreign cars drew up at the hotel; elderly men rode slowly past on bicycles, holding limp brief cases over the handlebars. It could be seen from the way in which people drove, or rode, or walked, that everyone was conscious of the weather. Weather was the chief topic of conversation in the café—it was incredible, it wouldn’t last, it was warm, it was too warm; the Mont Blanc had been visible every day for a week. No one could recall such a September.

When it was time to pick up Cyril, Greta and Elizabeth took their packages to the car and drove to the Palais. In the stream of people issuing from the main building, Cyril would be the only man without a brief case, the only person without sunglasses. He was not tall; he had blue eyes and receding yellow hair, and a curious rolling walk. (“You are the only human being I know who limps with both legs,” Greta had once told him.) His greeting was always the same. “Move over,” he would say, as he squashed them into the remainder of the front seat and kissed Greta abruptly on the side of the head. They would sit there, squeezed in the hot car, deciding how to spend the evening. Sometimes they crossed the lake and had dinner in the Old City. Occasionally, they crossed the border into France and dined at the inn of some village in the hills. More often, they had dinner at home, where they sat at the kitchen table, by the windows, and watched the sun dying in the fields and the Jura flickering with high and lonely lights. They talked all the time. Cyril entertained them with outrageous impressions of bureaucracy, his office having apparently been designed to provide him with a daily supply of absurdities; or he read aloud from the evening paper accounts of the local crimes passionnels—a remarkable number of which were apparently committed at the foot of Calvin’s statue. Elizabeth got used to the sound of her own laugh, which she had at first found faintly improper. She discovered that she could speak about her life in New York without any awkwardness. If the occasion demanded it, she said “we” or “us” with no hesitation, and in a voice that sounded to her completely natural.