Mrs Kerr, half-way across the dining-room, looked about her in surprise. Discounting her own lateness, she seemed to wonder if the other visitors had been dispersed miraculously. Her eyebrows said ‘How odd!’ but did not seem to ponder over this. She sat down and looked out at the orange tree; then took up her Tauchnitz and without another glance at the room began to read.

Tessa and Sydney had been sitting on interminably; they had watched from rise to fall of the curtain the whole drama of lunch. The fact was, Tessa did not think it wise to hurry. She turned round and round pensively their basket of fruit, took each orange up, pinched it, and put it back again. The nicest-looking were never the softest: another of life’s perplexities.

‘I think,’ she said at last, ‘that I will take another orange, but I won’t eat it here. I shall take it up to my room with me and eat it there. I’m quite sure, you know, that oranges are good … But don’t let me keep you, Sydney, if you want to go and talk to Mrs Kerr.’

‘Why should I want to go and talk to Mrs Kerr?’ asked Sydney in an unconcerned voice that echoed round the big, deserted, crumby, orange-scented dining-room.

4

Bathroom

THE HONOURABLE MRS and Miss Pinkerton occupied two wide-balconied rooms at the end of the first-floor corridor. Five times across the Hotel, each on a floor, these corridors ran – dark, thickly carpeted, panelled with bedroom doors. The front rooms looked over the town into dazzling spaciousness, sky and sea; the back rooms were smaller, never so bright, and looked over the road with its chestnut trees on to the side of the hill. Into these the north light came slanting; no sky was visible until one leant far out, only the scrambling olives and scared little faces of the villas. Eyes from the villas could have peered down into the vacant eyes of newly awakened sleepers. At this side of the Hotel, screened by opaque glass from the possibility of observation, were the bathrooms.