Rowland thought how much he liked this house, which was very old and rambling, which smelled of woodsmoke and cooking, and which seemed to him to enshrine the settled pleasures of family life. He watched Charlotte, who was wearing an old fisherman’s sweater and a long, embroidered Rajasthani skirt as she moved among her guests. She was the calmest and most maternal woman he knew, and sometimes Rowland envied Max for marrying her. Very occasionally, it would occur to Rowland, who lived alone and liked to live alone, that Max had outstripped him in the years since Oxford. Rowland’s own circumstances were little changed since leaving Balliol: Max had four sons, a happy marriage. Max was anchored; above and beyond his work he had meaning and purpose in his life. He himself was without religion, family, or strong political creed; he was neither Irish nor truly English; he was an outsider, a spectator, and likely to remain so for the rest of his life.

The thought drew his eyes to Genevieve Hunter, also an outsider, he suspected, neither quite American nor quite English: his first impression of her, which remained, was of a woman adrift.

She seemed intent, he thought, on camouflaging herself. She had been wearing gray, indeterminate clothes when he arrived. She was wearing something different, but also gray and indeterminate, now. Twice she had left the room to make a telephone call, and twice returned, almost immediately, with a tense white face. He considered the information about her that Max had given him earlier, and it seemed to him that it raised more questions than it answered. He moved forward a few paces. She had a low voice, and he found himself curious to overhear the little she said.

She had been trapped now, for some time, by one of the other local guests, an American woman in her early forties to whom Rowland had been introduced earlier, and from whom he had immediately, and not very courteously, escaped. The woman’s name was Susan something—Susan Landis, that was it. Her husband, an officer at some nearby U.S. air base, a tall loud-voiced man, was now boasting about his golf handicap to Lindsay.

Mrs. Landis was overdressed in English terms for an occasion such as this. She was the only woman present wearing heavy makeup, high-heeled shoes, and a tailored suit. She was nervous, socially ill at ease, and she had latched on to Gini as the only other American present. Gini, Rowland noted, had been making a stiff but polite attempt to draw her out.

Scraps of their conversation drifted across to Rowland. Susan Landis was extolling the delights of the Cotswolds; she found old Elizabethan houses quaint. She and her husband lived only a few miles away, and were settling into the area very well. Everyone was just so friendly and hospitable, why, if she and her husband accepted all the invitations they received, they’d be out every night. And her daughter—she had a daughter called Wilhelmina, or Mina for short—she just adored it here, had made so many friends—was at the Cheltenham Academy, such a fine, exclusive school, and—imagine—was staying overnight in this very village with a school friend, in the manor, had Gini seen the manor? Well, it was historic; it had cost the school friend’s mother—a very well-known interior designer—the better part of a million, or so people said.