There was the spring I spent in Florence, Adelaide said. With the Berwicks. They’re bores, of course, she apologized. But one can’t always choose one’s company. And I used to slip away. Florence is full of profitable people, if one knows.

Adelaide had many entrées, for which she perpetually apologized. She took Eden’s hand as she spoke. They drove in the sleigh along the identical Swiss roads, in the cool, powdery spray of snow, of Adelaide’s directionless conversation, purposeful only in that it begged, beseeched Eden to listen. She did. Even the warmth and cold, Adelaide’s hand and the February air, had the temperature of unreality. And the figures that moved in Adelaide’s landscape, her husband Gerald, the uncle who had the horses, the Spanish attaché, they walked with their faces averted from Eden Standish, the way the characters do, the characters you’ll never meet, in somebody else’s narrative.

But Adelaide persisted. You enjoyed her like a warm bath, the complete negation of ideas. You sat with her in the evening on the edge of a hotel orchestra. You became a familiar combination, not without its distinction too, Adelaide increased this, something that strangers and servants passed with deference, the manager hovered more frequently behind your chair.

Then you had found a friend, the manager said, in a tone that suggested he had reserved Adelaide for you alone.

Yes, you said. This Mrs Blenkinsop was very – very –

You searched for a label for Adelaide that was both ordinary and distinguished. You hesitated over interesting and decided on charming.

Lady Adelaide, suggested the manager, cooler, and with emphasis, was a great ornament to the Haus.

Eden received her gaffe stiffly. It was not so much the gaffe as the moral consequence of her discovery, the label attached to Adelaide, it was the change in herself, it was the change in Adelaide. It was the moment of consciousness in the sugar world of Switzerland. It would be nice to cherish this, she felt. But out of the distant playing of the orchestra, the sharp, aguish phrases of the saxophone began to prick.

Adelaide had been to fetch chocolates.

I hope you’re not bored, she said, with a tremor that demanded contradiction. I should hate to bore you. I thought, I thought we might see something of each other in London. That is, if it doesn’t.

Yes, Adelaide. By all means.

But Adelaide was not convinced.

She was afraid. She lived in perpetual fear, not of being bored, but of boredom in her friends. She could not be responsible for this. She rejected it, trembling. As compensation for her own stupidity, she frequently sacrificed her dignity by telephoning celebrities and asking them to lunch.

Of course, you’re an intellectual, she said, sensing frigidity in Eden.

But Eden laughed. It made Adelaide tremble again.

If things were only as easy as that. Come and watch the moon with me, Adelaide. Then we’ll go to bed.

The prejudice that Adelaide must not sense, standing by moonlight, on the terrace, in a tingling of fresh snow, was still there, you felt. One of the ineradicable absurdities. But you were coming alive. In three days, fully alive, you would pack, you would leave the lethal atmosphere of the Swiss landscape and of Adelaide Blenkinsop’s conversation. Not that you hadn’t bathed in this willingly enough, but not as yourself. You could feel a disconsolate Adelaide, her arm.