The most passionate love Lindsay had ever felt was reserved for her son; his welfare, well-being, and future happiness were her dominant concerns—and in some ways she was glad of this. Such love was unalterable; passion between a man and a woman, different in nature, and combustible, was less sure.

“So, tell me, Gini,” she heard as she drifted on the edge of somnolence. “How do you manage—can you call him?”

“Yes. And he tries to call me every day. Sometimes the lines are bad. And we write, of course.”

“Often?”

“Oh—every day if we can. Pascal writes wonderful letters. I can hear his voice when I read them. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, they get through very fast. Sometimes they take weeks to arrive. I haven’t heard from him this week, but that will mean he’s been somewhere remote. He’s not always in Sarajevo. He constantly moves around.”

Lindsay, listening more closely now, paid silent tribute to Charlotte, who had prized this much information from Gini—more specific information than she herself had obtained in two months. She hoped that Gini was telling the truth, and was deluding neither Charlotte nor herself. But Lindsay was no longer sure that this communication did continue as reliably as Gini claimed. Since Christmas, watching the deterioration in Gini, she had begun to believe that some quarrel, perhaps a final quarrel, had taken place in Bosnia, and that the affair, originally begun in a war zone, had now ended in one, as suddenly concluded as it had suddenly begun. Nothing else, she was beginning to believe, could account for Gini’s continuing unhappiness, and her continuing unshakable reserve. It would be very characteristic of Gini to refuse to admit it, should the affair be over. Gini rarely took people into her confidence, and by nature she was proud.

She would mention the possibility to Charlotte later, Lindsay thought; Charlotte might be able to elicit the truth before this weekend was over. Or not. Gini had just turned the conversation back to more neutral topics, she noted. She was now prompting Charlotte to talk about her family, this village, the Cotswolds, her questions as forced as those of some nervous stranger at a cocktail party.

Poor Gini: she was trying so hard. Lindsay glanced again at her own watch, caught Charlotte doing exactly the same thing in a furtive manner, and roused herself at once. Coming to Charlotte’s aid, and giving Gini the opportunity to be silent, which she obviously sought, Lindsay began to chatter away. She discussed, in quick succession, the traffic they had endured on the trip down, the inadvertent detour they had made through the hell of Oxford’s one-way streets, the excellence of Charlotte’s baking, and then—finding the subject suddenly popped into her head—Rowland McGuire, the character of Rowland McGuire, and the many defects of Rowland McGuire.

She warmed to her theme. She said several times that it would be very pleasant indeed to spend an entire two days away from Rowland McGuire, in a place where she never need hear his name mentioned—and then she stopped.