“I’m on the pill, Rowland,” she replied, and looked down. She stared at the carpet, at the patterns that separated them. She watched him approach. He stood for a while, looking down at her without speaking. Then, very gently, he lifted her face and inspected it.

“You’re not telling me the truth,” he said in a quiet voice. “I understand why—but don’t lie to me, Gini, not about something as important as this. Look at me. I want you to make me a promise. All right, I’ll go now. But when you know for certain, either way, then you send me a telegram, or you make one telephone call. Just tell me, Yes, I am—or no, I’m not. You promise me you’ll do that?”

“Yes. I do.”

He took her hands in his. “If the answer is no, very well, I’ll obey your wishes. I’ll stay away. I’ll get on with the rest of my life. But if the answer is yes, I don’t care where you are in the world, or whom you’re with, I’m on the next plane. And you won’t find it so easy to persuade me to leave then. Are you clear about that?”

He watched her face change, and her eyes flood with assent. At that point, curiously certain that he would eventually be recalled, he had intended to leave, and even turned to go. But she made some inarticulate sound, or gave some inarticulate gesture, and then—being human, being male, and far less resolved than he wished to appear—he gave way and kissed her on the mouth. Sensing her response, he might have stayed even then, especially then, but she took him by the hand, led him firmly to the door, and closed it quietly but firmly on him before either of them could risk further speech.

Chapter 22

LEAVING THAT PARIS HOTEL, Rowland had felt blind. He felt blind in the elevator, blind to the airplane, blind to the customs formalities in London. It was with a sense of surprise that he found himself, sometime later, in his own house. Disconcerted, he looked around his living room, a room that had always given him pleasure: for the first time it seemed to him cold, alien, and bare.

For two weeks after that he functioned on automatic, certain a summons from Gini must come. He anticipated, and feared, the mail each morning; he tensed at each telephone call. In February, late one Friday afternoon, the telegram finally arrived. It consisted of a one-word negative, followed by her name. He knew why she had been so terse—had he himself not even suggested it?—but the brevity of the message and its finality caused him great pain.

He sat for a long while, holding the scrap of paper, watching the future he had unconsciously been planning for those past two weeks shrivel before his gaze. Then, angry at himself, he called an airline and made a reservation on that evening’s last flight to Scotland. Packing his climbing equipment later, catching a cab out to the airport, he felt almost calm. He knew the cure for this, he told himself; he had taught himself how to live without love before.