Then Isabel was inside the house, so different from any house she had ever seen, slipping her coat off, as she slid down to the edge of a wornout leather armchair with tufts of white cotton batting showing through. On the walls, faded blue, there were sepia photographs of an old man who looked like a minister and two seascapes in big ugly gold frames. Her hosts had gone into the kitchen to get drinks, she supposed, for she could hear a murmur of voices and the sound of ice cubes falling out of a tray. She looked down at the table beside her, where a pipe lay on top of a pile of magazines she had never heard of—Nature, Science, The London Economist. In a room where everything else made her uncomfortable, she turned gratefully toward the fire. She felt very dazed. I’m so dreadfully ignorant, she said to herself, to be Edward’s sister.

It was a strange thought, one she had never had before—or not since she was a child. In it she recognized that here she came as a representative, for Edward’s sake, not for her own. And she was frightened, wished for a second that she had not come, or had pleaded fatigue and asked to be taken straight to the hotel. At least she could look for the bathroom and escape for a few moments. When she came downstairs again, she found them waiting for her, Julia stretched out comfortably with her feet on a hassock, Mr. Phillips standing with his back to the fire.

“You must be dreadfully tired,” Julia said, at the same time as her husband was saying, “There’s a drink there beside you.”

“Sit down, Mrs. Ferrier, and relax,” Julia was saying.

“I can’t,” Isabel confessed. She sat on the edge of the chair, in a state approaching panic.

“It’s a terrible ordeal for you, all this. We’re so sorry”—Damon’s cigarette wagged up and down grotesquely in his mouth. She had so dreaded these hawk faces, the faces of the intellectuals, the enemy. Now that she saw they were kind, not like Edward hammering at her all the time, she turned to Damon with childlike relief. “You see, I don’t belong here,” she said, taking a swallow of her drink. “Edward pushed me out of his life long ago.”

The words were so entirely unexpected coming from the woman who spoke them, that Damon peered at her with something like embarrassment and then glanced over at Julia as if to say, You handle this.

“He wasn’t easy on any of us, you know. He wasn’t an easy person,” Julia said.