If the love could well up then, why not now? What was wrong? And he then began to believe that conscious action and careful speech would achieve nothing. They needed some near divine intervention for which he had no apposite term. Willpower was no use to them; love could not be willed. With fear, he began to believe that love was as mysterious as the welling-up of water in the desert: in essence, it was a gift.

If so, the gift proved elusive. He redoubled his efforts, as she did. Their mutual politeness pained them both. In long discussions late into the night, they planned new kinds of futures together: these visions—civilized, caring, egalitarian—convinced neither of them very much, he felt. He promised that he would either abandon war coverage altogether or restrict such work to a few months every year. She countered that this was unacceptable; she would not allow him to give up this work, this vocation, for her sake. Pascal listened to her arguments, remembered the comments of his ex-wife, and made his own private resolves: this mistake he could at least avoid again. Others also: one day he found the contraceptive pills she had begun taking again the previous month, and threw them away. They quarreled violently over this—and yet that action, that quarrel, proved a turning point. Pascal made love to her that night, and for weeks afterward, with a new and fixed determination: this act he intended to have consequences: Conception. Then, and only then, would she be repossessed.

This determination, they both found, altered the tenor of a familiar act. Pascal abandoned endearments and gentleness. He could sense some resistance in her, and so he set about fucking her into submission, then out the other side of submission. When this had finally been achieved, he knew that they were alone at last, and that he had found a route back.

For such a change, of course, you could not set a precise time or date, but some change they had both recognized: it was there when they fell asleep exhausted, and there again in the morning when they woke. It grew, day by day, after that; it came stealing back to them, not through the medium of words at first, but through glance and through touch. He had sensed a new calm, a cessation of striving, then the ghost of an old contentment, and finally, one evening, just there, unsummoned, an assured peace.

He rose now, suddenly eager to be with her, and quickly pulled on some clothes. He went barefoot down the stairs, and in the room below paused. He could sense something in the air of this room, some alteration in it, the eddyings of some unseen force.

He moved forward slowly and silently and looked into the kitchen beyond. Gini had not heard his footsteps; she was concentrating on some task with an eagerness that touched him to the heart. On the blue tray in front of her she was arranging a plate, a cup and saucer, and a glass. The glass was a champagne glass. Pascal frowned. He watched her take a flower from a vase on the windowsill, and cut its stem, and then arrange the flower on the tray. Its exact placing seemed to preoccupy her. She laid it first on the plate, then on the blue napkin, and finally next to the glass. She was wearing a nightdress, surmounted by one of his sweaters that was several sizes too large for her. The garments gave her the unstudied grace of a young girl; her head was bent over her arrangement; her hair, longer now, almost reaching to her shoulders, was tousled from sleep.