“Does it indeed?”

“God—what a glorious day!”

Lindsay lifted her face to the sky. Rowland watched her do this but made no comment. He escorted her through the gardens to the rear lawn, where formal Max, who liked ceremonies, had organized a resplendent marquee. Lindsay, among friends, began to enjoy herself, although every so often Markov would materialize at her elbow and remind her, in a sepulchral whisper, to look tragic.

“Jesus,” he hissed, toward evening, when the party was winding down. “You’re supposed to have a broken heart. Go off somewhere on your own. Linger in the distance, looking kind of pensive. Don’t argue. And give me that damn champagne.”

Lindsay obeyed him. It was actually quite natural to do so, because all afternoon Rowland McGuire’s polite attentions had been marked. He had ensured, for over three hours, that she was plied with canapés and cake, and that her glass was filled. He had ensured that, when trapped, she was extricated, and when stranded, she was not alone. As a result, Lindsay felt somewhat tipsy, but pleasantly and not dangerously so. She felt a benign dreaminess that might have been due to the attention as much as the champagne.

She wandered off from the remaining crowd of adults and children to the far end of the garden, where there was a lopsided summerhouse, constructed several years before by Max for his sons, and—thanks to Max’s inexpert joinery skills—now half falling down. It had a pleasing dilapidated air, and was canopied with a strangulation of roses and vines.

Lindsay sat down on the rickety bench beneath it and breathed in the scents of flowers. The light was just beginning to fade, becoming mauve on the flanks of the far hills. She could hear voices, and was glad they were distant and muted, and glad she was alone.

She closed her eyes and listened to these unfamiliar and welcome country sounds: birdsong and birds’ wings, from the field just beyond the hedgerow, the soft, velvety breathing of cows. In one more month, she thought, I shall be thirty-nine years old. She sighed contentedly; this fate, which had previously struck her as terrible, now did not seem so terrible at all.

“Are you all right?” said a voice. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Lindsay opened her eyes. There, outlined against the light, was the tall, dark-suited figure of Rowland McGuire.

“I’m fine,” said Lindsay, forgetting to act the tragic heroine. “I’m glorying in all this.” She gave a broad, encompassing gesture of the arm. “The smell of grass and flowers. The shade. The birds. The cows.”

“I’m interrupting you.”

“No, no—not at all.”

Rowland looked unreassured. He hesitated and then sat down next to her. He crossed his long legs, then uncrossed them again, then frowned in the direction of the fields.

He might have been calculating their exact acreage, Lindsay thought after a silence had fallen and endured for several minutes.

“Your friend Markov,” Rowland ventured, after a while. “He’s an interesting man. Not what I expected at all.”