Sorry, Kitty, he said, with just that accent of sincerity which always stopped your rage.

Willy’s charm always cheated. It was so close to the border line. You couldn’t argue out of your defeat. She looked at what had been Willy Standish, safely now that he was ordering the dinner, at what he had become, this separate existence. The bald details she had got in letters were as informative as a Who’s Who. If you could lean forward, as the innocent sometimes did, and say: Now tell me about yourself – have it arrive on a plate with the soup. If you wanted to. And she was not sure that she wanted, exactly, that she wanted to become involved again in any but the official biography of Willy Standish. She tried the hotness of her soup.

Do you remember? he said.

It was going to be like that. It was also without malice. Because for Willy Standish it could afford to be, looking with the detachment of a stranger at this woman who had been his wife. It was his distinctness that he enjoyed. Emerging out of the vague, possessive years of marriage, to find you were yourself, distinct, your own thoughts and inclinations, no longer the fumbling composite of your own and another person’s desires. So he could afford to be jovial. He could deal kindly with his own mistakes, and the supreme mistake, which was Kitty, sitting in front of him now in her unbecoming uniform. Garish, with her head of uncompromising hair, she didn’t fit inside the uniform. Without it, she would have tried to Express Herself, you felt. With it, she merely looked a little odd.

Willy made her self-conscious, his eyes. Switching from the particular to the general, she began to say something about the tonal differences of French and English. She could feel the accent of affectation creeping upward into her voice. In a moment she would be talking books.

Remember the Pernods? he asked. The Pernods at Dieppe? If ever you hated me, Kitty, it was then.

Oh yes, I hated you! she said, with that over-arch conviction, in a too high voice.

But she needed protection. Either books or war. Not the emotions. With Willy Standish, at any rate. Walking beneath the charmille at the bottom of Mme de Bonneville’s terrace, there was the young English lieutenant, he had the crisp, clipped, terrier look of so many healthy young Englishmen, who have also the bewilderment of dogs. You talked to the young English lieutenant as you would to a nice bewildered dog, firmly, reassuringly, with your mind on something else. Allowing him to talk about home, you heard your foot slur along the gravel in the stillness of a green evening, heard the breath catch on the desperate approach, the hand felt, and the texture of strange clothes. It was not exactly physical. You were too detached. Like stroking a dog.

After the War, Willy was saying, as if it would end, ever, he was thinking about Australia, he said.