“I’ve always known,” she whispered and knew she was crying because she felt hot splotches on her hands. She pushed Henry away almost roughly, pushed her hands up to her face as if they were someone else’s hands and rubbed the tears away. “I shall have to find out about planes. Can you come with me?” No, of course not. She knew the answer before he said it. He had two operations, one serious one. They could not be put off. “Of course not,” she said. “It’s just that”—she got up and walked up and down in her stocking feet, wringing her hands—“I’m scared, Henry.”

“Take it easy, darling,” he said, picking up the phone. “The first thing is to get a reservation.”

Very far away she could hear him talking, noting the time and time of arrival. She gave him the address she had written down and heard him send a wire to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard University was, where she had never been, where she must go in a few hours alone.

“There’s a seven o’clock plane. That means I can put you on it and just make it at the hospital. I’m going to make you some hot chocolate now,” he said, moving toward the door.

“Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Please.” For now panic seized her. “I can’t stay here alone.”

“Come along then,” he said in his kind, careful voice, his doctor’s voice. “You can sit on the kitchen stool while I make it.” He took her by the hand and she followed as if she were blind.

She walked into a stranger’s kitchen; she was, she felt, in a stranger’s house. It had never seemed quite real and now she was set way outside it, looking in, looking at the carefully planned shelves, the automatic dishwasher, the little herb cupboard, the red tiled floor, looking at herself Isabel Cavan—no, Isabel Ferrier—and her husband, the distinguished surgeon, pouring milk into a saucepan with all the care with which he might have used a scalpel, as if nothing else for the moment existed.

For so long she had fought off the sensation that all this was make-believe, that reality was somewhere else; now she did not fight it. She sat, passive, on the high stool and knew that only Edward was real. Edward lying on a stone slab, she imagined, with his chest crushed to a pulp. He had not suffered, the old professor had said. Suddenly she laughed, a loud rude laugh.

“What?” Henry said.

“No, don’t worry,” she said quickly. “I’m not hysterical. But that professor said Edward didn’t suffer. It was too quick, he said. Just a lifetime—just under fifty years,” she said with heavy irony.