There was a silence then—a long silence during which Helen had time to regret the tone she had used and to appreciate that she might just have made a strategic mistake. Pascal’s anger seemed to have gone; his eyes rested on her face; she could sense—and it perturbed her—both disapproval and regret.

“I give her my love,” he said at last. “Isn’t love the best gift?”

He had spoken very quietly. Helen turned away with a small gesture of distress.

“Yes, well,” she said quickly. “You’re right. I wouldn’t argue with that—who would? Don’t make me feel small, Pascal.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“No. Maybe not. Oh, dammit—you could always do this. And I thought I was cured…” To his surprise he saw she was suddenly close to tears. She brushed them aside angrily, then steadied her voice. “I shouldn’t have said that about Marianne. It was cheap. And as for Gini—” She hesitated. “I do try to be impartial. I do genuinely like her. I do want it to turn out well for you both. I don’t want Gini to end up as unhappy as I was. I don’t want you to end up miserable and embittered and alone. I’d like this particular fairy tale to have a happy ending… in my better moments I do want that.”

She looked at him with a wan smile.

“And some of what I said—it wasn’t that wide of the mark, was it?”

“No.” He shrugged. “Your analysis of my defects—that was accurate, at least. Helen, look—I should go.”

“Don’t forget tomorrow.” She moved toward him. “You have to collect Marianne, and stay with her, and bring her back. You have to provide fatherly moral support—at which you’re excellent when you choose.”

Pascal gave her a shrewd look in which she detected a glint of amusement, but he made no comment.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll collect Marianne around nine-thirty. Good night.”

Pascal had arranged to borrow a friend’s apartment in Montparnasse. He stood at its windows, looking down over Paris, winking back over Helen’s words. He could sense desperation very close. Angrily, he opened a bottle of whiskey, poured a large glass, and tossed it back.

He waited, furious with himself. The alcohol refused to kick in. He remained stone-cold sober, and with a cold sobriety he examined his own behavior, the patterns of his life.

He could see now, with a painful clarity, that if Gini had erred, he had erred also. He should not have allowed his obsession with his work to keep him in Bosnia so long; he should have understood the depth of her distress. It had, of course, been convenient for him to be reassured by her letters and telephone calls, to tell himself that since she was coping so well, so much better than he had anticipated, it was acceptable to remain another week, and then a week after that. Working, he had little sensation of time passing. He measured it in terms of the pictures he obtained. To put his personal life on hold, to concentrate entirely on documenting events that would eventually become part of history—indeed, as Helen had said, he had reverted to that state of being too easily and too immediately. He now deeply regretted that. Yet beyond that failing lay another—deeper and less easy to assess. He should have seen Gini’s desire for a child; he should have understood its source. In the play and flex of their relationship, it was necessary that he be tempered by her qualities as she was tempered by his. Her reaction to the events they had witnessed, a reaction he could sense but not analyze too effectively, seemed to him peculiarly female; trying to define it, he thought of it as watery, as springing up from the ground, as carrying all before it, as subject to currents, as flowing, so that between those she encountered—that boy in Mostar, for instance—and herself, there was and could be no divide: something Pascal could not define, an outflowing of spirit perhaps, passed from these people and rushed into Gini herself.