Then it was Jane’s turn. She sang with perfect confidence, a voice rising out of her throat with no more sign of effort than an ordinary breath might take, an exhalation. There was no trickery, or trilling or false notes. Something to do with gypsy boys and gypsy girls, their lives under the trees. You could not listen to it without smiling.

Lacroix watched her closely. It is permitted, of course, to watch the singer—nor did he think she was one who would object to being looked at. Was she not used to it from childhood? The girl on the stool, the angel. At some point near the end of the song it suddenly occurred to him—the unbuttoned spencer, the curve of her dress, her full breasts—that she was not merely luxurious of form, but pregnant.

When it came to his own turn he chose the prelude he had played in the boat to the islands, and though it did not sound—would never sound—quite as it had that night at sea, it sounded well enough and they were full of compliments for him.

They tried to find music they all knew, swapped titles, hummed snatches of a tune, settled on “Greensleeves.” Lacroix carried the melody, Jane sang, Emily played the four, five chords the piece required. Cornelius joined in. He too could sing a little, and for several minutes, as the song spooled out in the dimness of the room, the summer grey, they were self-forgetful and unopposed to the world. Their private histories, the private suffering of their bodies, released them. They escaped their names. Religion and its shamings might never have been thought of. Even their own fates, separate and shared, appeared to them with subtle alterations that altered everything. One more round, one more verse. Pleasure crept up their limbs like hemlock.

Lacroix lifted his bow from the strings. Everyone looked at everyone at once. It seemed possible. And in the silence that followed, the two or three seconds before the weight of “what next” came in, the music’s echo ebbed away towards the whispered beating of the sea, as if for safe keeping.

Cornelius filled his glass and raised it to the musicians. “The Frends and Lovall,” he said. “Lovall and the Frends! Is it not perfect?”

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