It’s no good, he thought, none of this is the point. I failed him. It is worse to fail an antagonist worth your mettle than a friend. There had been a moment there in the dingy study at Warren House only three days before—or when was it?—when if he could have made a really human gesture, he and Edward might have come to terms, might have allowed the love buried so deep under their antagonism, to flow out. Admitting this now, knowing it to be the truth, pain and grief took possession of Ivan Goldberg so intensely that he walked up and down hugging himself with the force of it. Why couldn’t I? What is wrong with me that I cannot be human as other people can, that I am always so afraid of giving myself away? And what did it mean to be respected and feared if one was not loved, could not be loved because one was not lovable? Edward had been loved, God knows. Difficult, rude as he often was out of sheer passion, this rudeness was always forgiven because it came from passion, whereas the smooth hard surface he, Ivan, presented to the world was unforgivable like the barren fig tree. “It’s too expensive to keep the door open, Ivan, can’t you see?” But it was I who shut the door, not he—and all the time there was Edward right beside him in the room, alive. “Oh God,” Ivan tore out of the study and up the stairs to find his wife. Angela was reading aloud to Cissy who was in bed with a sore throat. For once Ivan hardly noticed Cissy whose face always lit up in such an enormous smile when she saw her father. He pulled Angela away almost roughly, unable to say a word.

“Daddy’s crying, Mummy,” the clear piping voice called after them. “Don’t cry, Daddy.”

Angela, soft, warm, pretty Angela had never seen her husband cry. He was sitting in the hall on a hard bench in the window, hugging himself as if he had a pain, shaken with sobs.

She stood beside him, not daring even to put a hand on his shoulder, as if, bowed over, hugging himself, he had become suddenly majestic and unknown like a god.

“It isn’t your fault, darling.”

Ivan pulled her to him then, driving his head against her belly as if to bury himself there. Very gently she stroked his springy black hair and waited. The tense racking sobs finally came at less regular intervals, and his hold on her, which had been painfully hard, relaxed. But still he said nothing. They were not people who communicated by words, but by the invisible waves of feeling and breathing and touch and silence.