Willy telling her his plans. She struggled with a piece of meat that was strange, dark, unpleasant, almost anything that the imagination cared to name. She hated that piece of recalcitrant meat.

Australia, she said, in jerks. Well, I suppose there are always apples.

Because she just couldn’t take it out on the meat. Because she also wanted to see in Willy just one little trace of bitterness. But he sat talking about Australia, ignoring a would-be clever remark, reminding her of her clumsiness. Willy, she realized, was dependent on himself. She could not tear through the envelope. Just as the young lieutenant at the time, his clumsy, touching hands, had made no impression on her own distinctness, in spite of her consent. She had been a bit afraid at first, sleeping with a strange man, who amounted to so many conversations, the encounter under the charmille, before the pretence of intimacy. She lay there listening to his breath, to his voice. She felt the clumsiness of hands. In two more days he would go, he said. Lying in the darkness, he had gone already. It was something more emphatic than time or space.

You’ve changed, Kitty, she heard.

It was Willy growing sentimental, Burgundy having its way.

None of us stand still, she said.

Sharper than she meant, when she did not mean, she wanted to lean across the table, she had the courage of Burgundy. Forms melting, the gold and the plush, had a tenderness of line for Catherine Standish after just that extra glass.

We’ll have to meet again, he said. You can’t talk in restaurants. Or letters. It can’t be done.

Yes, she agreed, warily.

She had leant a little far perhaps. If you could think clearly, know how much you wanted to give or take. She was getting fuddled, she thought. She looked in the mirror and straightened her hat.

It was too late, too blurred, the voices at tables, the songs in the street. The evening was a white tablecloth with the little map of Burgundy. She watched her hand pouring salt.

Funny pouring salt, she said. I’ve never quite believed.

She watched her finger rubbing salt into the map of Burgundy. They were leaving from the next table. They were catching trains.

Walking back to the hotel, she could feel his arm. Silent mostly, they waited for words. They could feel the pressure of unreleased words. Dark and cold, with a cat mewing down a cul-de-sac. More urgent, more personal than Europe, the mewing of a formless cat. That was the trouble, she felt, behind a mastered hiccup, if you strayed aside from the open path of bare official events. That was why you talked war. To resist the pressure of the personal that you wanted and at the same time feared.

The night porter’s face was yellow with sleep. He waited, bleary and indifferent.

To say now, she felt, to say Willy, or no.

Good night, Kitty, he said.

He was waiting perhaps, she was waiting, they were waiting for this ultimate overflow of words.