Kitty, he said, come and sit down. There’s so much we’ve got to talk about.

Yes, she said, doubtfully. Yes, but there’s Rhoda, Rhoda Swansey, we’re travelling home together from Rémy. I promised I’d be at the hotel at twelve.

Yes, on second thought, Rhoda Swansey was imperative. If unconvincing. Their words blew about them in little furtive gusts. Looking sideways at each other, there was still too much comment, too much surmise in the half-glance. Willy was thinner, greyer. She was beginning to let herself go. But however speculative the individual mind, they dealt publicly in the kind of words that are used for conveying information. The calm, friendly unembellished words of letters written after the recovered temper, to settle things with dignity, to discuss the details of separation. Or you wrote from time to time, again informative, inquiring or telling about the children, spilling a platitude on war, stating the degree in which you personally had been involved, but not emotionally, of course, commissions and nursing and that sort of thing. So that conversation, once started, once you had chosen your definite line, was easy enough, up to a point. Then it began to get difficult again.

It’s nice, she began, trusting to a lame inspiration, it’s nice to have seen you again, Willy, and know that you’re safe and – well, safe.

It petered out. It left her standing in a cold wind, in a hostile Rue de Rivoli, talking to an English officer.

Kitty, we’ve got to have dinner tonight. Get rid of this woman. Somehow. Lock her in her room. I insist.

It was Willy talking in a uniform, his hand that her arm felt through the sleeve, which was more than an encounter of flesh and bone. She found herself regretting his smile. It was so deliberate, but like a convention, you accepted it.

This one evening. After all.

Then it began to seem stupid, and complicated, the whole business of two people with their over-complications, their immense capacity for entanglement. It was too much, in the middle of the street, to make the fumbling approach to your own or anyone else’s motive, to correct anyone’s mistakes. Feeling on her face the lean October wind, and looking not exactly in Willy’s eyes, she said slowly:

All right then. Where shall we meet?

Now she was sitting, had been sitting in the restaurant Willy named, she had been sitting there twenty minutes past the time that Willy had decided on. None of this matters, she said, and yet I shall want to kill Willy. Restraining her hands from bread, she thought up the things that perhaps she would say. Nowadays there was little to say. The War. Even if this was not Willy, it made a limited alternative, there was only the War, and personal emotions, and shop. At Rémy all these were closely and inevitably interwoven. She read a chapter from a book to a group that sat in the summer shade or winter sun. But books had become disconnected from life. They were mostly written before. The present was composed of maps and lint, rumour, and the opinions of a surgeon, of the frequent encounter with feverish hands, of the many soldiers who lay in Mme de Bonneville’s house, and who sat or strolled in her gardens, in the different stages of recovery. There was no way out into another world. Even sentimental engagements, or the bleaker adventures of the body, described an additional circle inside the existing one. That made her wonder again about Willy Standish’s emotional life, if and how he had become involved. Maudie Westmacott sang still, the same song though they changed the name. They called it ‘You Can’t Say No to a Soldier’, probably with relevance. However you deplore a popular song, it usually has relevance. Catherine Standish bit her cheek. This will never do, she felt, pouring water out of the carafe.