The rich food and the warmth of the wood fire were making her sleepy. She settled still deeper in her chair. How she loved this house, she thought, and this room. How unlike London, how nice this was!

Across from her, Charlotte and Gini sat side by side on a huge battered sofa. The older boys, bored with toastmaking, were departing upstairs to play; Danny had picked up a picture book. Charlotte was persevering with Gini. She was coaxing her beyond monosyllables, and had begun to succeed, it seemed, in persuading Gini to talk.

Not about Bosnia—Charlotte was too intelligent to risk that subject—but first about neutral things, then Gini and Pascal’s apartment—Charlotte longed to see it, begged Gini to describe it—and then, finally, Pascal himself.

“I miss him,” Charlotte said with her customary warmth. “Do you remember that dinner we all had to celebrate your joining the paper? In that tiny French restaurant Pascal found? I still dream about the food—it was just so good. When he gets back we must all go there again. And I want you to bring him here, of course. Would he be bored in the country? No, I don’t think he would.”

“No. He’s never bored. He—I’m sure he’d like that very much. And he likes the country. He grew up in the country. In a village in Provence.”

“Provence? I never realized that. I think of him as so—high-powered, I suppose. International. Always catching planes, speeding off to the next job, taking those extraordinary photographs. They’ve broken my heart, some of his photographs. It must cost him so much to do that, year after year—and yet, when you meet him—I expected him to be somber, haunted by what he’s seen. Yet he seems so”—Charlotte frowned as she sought the right word—“so filled with energy and ideas. And so happy too. But then, I first met him with you. And everyone’s happy when they’re that much in love.”

It was a compliment, and an overture, Lindsay thought, listening. She watched as painful color washed into Gini’s cheeks. For an instant, gratitude and reassurance flooded her face, then she tensed and looked away, as if afraid that Charlotte, having made her overture, would follow it with questions.

Charlotte, who could be subtle, did not do so immediately. She talked on for a while, and Lindsay felt her thoughts begin to drift. She closed her eyes. Charlotte, living in the country, had met Pascal on only a few occasions, and knew him less well than Lindsay. She knew none of the background to this romance, was not aware, as Lindsay was, of the strange circumstances of Pascal’s original meeting with Gini. Charlotte had not witnessed, as Lindsay had, the force of Gini’s reaction when they met again after years apart. It might be difficult to imagine now, while Gini was such a ghost of her former self, but Gini was a passionate woman, and Pascal—as Charlotte had been attempting to convey—was a passionate man. Passion alarmed Lindsay, and occasionally embarrassed her; she shrank from its manifestations, and she shrank from the word. Yet a passion that went far deeper than the electrically obvious sexual attraction between them could be felt whenever Pascal and Gini were together. It sparked across a room; it charged the air around a dinner table—and it had, on occasion, made Lindsay deeply envious. Pascal Lamartine had a beautiful, fiercely expressive face: to watch him watching Gini, to observe his unwavering loyalty, and concern, his constant attunement to her, and hers to him, had been, for Lindsay, a painful experience. She was honest: she knew she was witnessing something she herself had never felt, or inspired.