Yes, she was in a very bad way, said Bobby Putnam, she’d banged up her knee, skinned her chin, and there was blood down the front of her dress. She was ranting about nothing, about the moon and I can’t even remember what — Lilian wanted to press him but realized he’d never listened to Irene, not really — her eyes were blazing and whirling, he said, those black eyes. She was drunk! And then she got onto this idea about wanting to call the children and working herself into a state about Julie’s being — oh, I don’t know what, she wanted to call them to see if they were all right, she acted as if she’d just discovered they were in some kind of danger. She was hysterical, ridiculous, and when I put my arms around her to help her up, she wouldn’t budge, but she’d gotten so thin it wasn’t hard to lift her. I told her the children were fine. They can do just fine without us, I said, and she looked at me in a relieved, close way. I remember because it was like the eye of the storm the way she was suddenly still and lucid and very nearly reasonable, and she said, Do you really think so? in a soft tone, as if that’s what had been troubling her all along, so I said, Of course I do, encouraging her, you know. I should have said something else, I see now.

In the morning they slept past breakfast, had a basket lunch made, and drove to an empty beach. Irene was quiet; they were both hung over. She wrote the children a letter, and drew a pen and ink sketch of the bay. Bobby Putnam had asked the English couple to join them, not feeling they had anything to do with the hysteria of the night before, and maybe they didn’t. They arrived, the man in khaki, the woman with a midnight blue scarf around her head. They poured drinks under the umbrella and chatted. Irene had the look of wanting to tell her husband something, he thought of it afterwards, or maybe he’d imagined it. But he was tired after lunch and fell asleep. When he woke the sky was clouded over, and he saw it was past his reserved golf time. Irene said she didn’t want to leave — it was so peaceful there, she said — so Bobby Putnam caught a ride back with the English couple.