It was too much, she felt, after many hours of waiting, after going to bed early, after many hours of reconstructing the possibilities of what Willy was to Maudie Westmacott. She lay in a hot torment of sheets and the dubious comfort of eau-de-Cologne. Her throat either choked with anger, or softened with a helpless tenderness. A bell, in the next square, ignoring her existence, tolled for people on another star.

Willy, she called, when she heard him in his room. Willy, come here a moment?

Prepared with strategies, these left her with Willy present in the room.

Willy, she said, I haven’t been well.

She sounded fretful through eau-de-Cologne.

Why, darling, he said, and he was so solicitous he made her cry; you’ve been taking too many walks.

No, she said, through that hot throat. Just my usual, she said. I strolled a little in the Park.

She couldn’t say it herself. It got itself said through that swollen throat. And the heavy darkness.

As long as you don’t do too much, he said.

She could feel his hand on her arm. She wanted to return to the Park. She wanted to say, but the Park, and Maudie in the Park.

Have a good day, dear? she sighed.

She might have been almost asleep.

So-so, he said. Worked while I had the light. Anything I can get you? he asked.

Was there anything he could get, when she knew, when her hand, and touching her arm with his hand, and then her face, if he could put his hand through and touch the real state of her feelings, she longed for that, Willy withdrawing a burnt hand. Because now it was more anger. Alone, she was furious. She put on the reading lamp when he had gone and lay there rigid in her impotent anger.

So it became a game of knowing and watching. She made him feel how remote and superior and all-informed she was, without either of them ever really coming to the nature of the information. But her smile suggested she saw through Willy Standish, his gestures and his motives. So Willy frowned frequently, as he always had at that swinging motion of the leg. His eyebrows met above the eyes in a dark, almost a perpetual frown.

Working? she sometimes asked in the evening.

Her voice, her smile transposed the word, giving it an accent of disbelief.

Yes, and no, he said.

It irritated him to hear her ask about his work as if it was a game, and it was, which was what made it hurt. Everything was a game. Especially this game played by Catherine and Willy Standish in the evening, before he could decently escape by going out. Willy’s life was full of evasions. She told herself reassuringly that Willy was weak, but knowing it, that never helped matters a bit.

Catherine, he said one evening (he had never called her Catherine before). We’ve got to draw in our horns.

What do you mean? she said, with a not altogether deliberate surprise.