This Wednesday the ladies had all come out to Brookline to Sis Sedgwick’s new house. Sis gave them a tour and all expressed satisfaction with the living room, seeing as it wasn’t much different from each of their own living rooms. It was the end of March with the branches bare against a blue and white sky. As soon as the ground thawed Sis and Cap were putting in a swimming pool, an extravagance Sis admitted, given the state of the country.

Hugging themselves without their coats on, they followed Sis out to the back terrace to see the area to be dug. Sis’s thin legs poked out from her Scotch plaid kilt. She instructed Jane Ives down on the lawn in her tie shoes which stick meant which corner, and where the deep end would be.

Lilian stood at the edge of the brick terrace and looked back at her friends. Marian Wiggin, pregnant again, sat in an iron garden chair with her feet apart, waving her short arms in the air like seagrass, her fingernails Chinese red. She was distressed at having got fat, but said so with a lift of her eyebrows which showed the opposite. Dolly Vernon looked polished as usual, hair slicked back, wearing a hat with a little peak, her lips magenta. To Lilian, they all seemed more attached to life than she. She was a foot or two further from people than they were from one another.

Irene Putnam arrived late, just as they were sitting down in the light blue and white cameo dining room to the plates of beet salad. On her forehead was a dewy flush and she explained distractedly she’d not noticed the time. No one paid much attention; that was just Irene.

She got a drink from Jonesy as soon as she sat down and lit a cigarette. She fingered her collarbone with a nervous, gloved finger. Strands of her light brown hair had come loose from her hat, and she was wearing the same dark dress with the sweetheart collar she’d had on the last few times Lilian had seen her.

Sis served quail which she said Cap had shot on their last trip to Cheeacaumbe, the Sedgwicks’ plantation in North Carolina where jangling hay carts transported cocktail bars from one blind to the next.

Look at the lovely little humps, said Irene as the platter came around.

Dolly said, I don’t guess you brought back any fish from the tropics, Jane?

Jane smiled tightly. No, she said, one wasn’t allowed to take the fish out.

Dolly Vernon was forever trying to get information out of Jane Ives. Jane rarely spoke of her relations with people. Once Jane had told Lilian she didn’t have the least understanding of her husband Jack and didn’t really want to. I like the sound of his voice, she said, and the way he looks when he’s concentrating on the sail.