Hildegard is quiet, the Frau Doktor said.

It was the spring weather, Hildegard said, that sometimes depressed her. The moist, steamy atmosphere. Sometimes she felt she could not breathe.

She went to the window and jerked it up.

It was air, air that she needed, she said.

Frau Fiesel shivered. She said that draughts.

It was nonsense. It was fresh air, Hildegard said.

Her voice caught.

Herr Dr Rosenheim said that on Friday they had heard Tiefland at the Opera. His wife was a lover of music. As if this were an additional virtue in her favour, he could not stop loading her with these. His eyes lingered appreciatively on the small, pink lobe of her ear. Mentally he touched it.

Hildegard cleared the coffee things. A sharp, discordant rattle of cups.

Elyot, she said, you will bring the plates.

In the kitchen he looked at her back. He could look right through Hildegard now.

Well, she said, turned still. Now you will think I have lied.

Why? he asked. How?

About Dr Rosenheim. But it’s true, she said. It’s mortifying. I feel I can’t look him in the eyes.

As if you have the opportunity. You forget the Frau Doktor, he said.

But this was no special victory, suspecting some time now that Hildegard lied, whether eyes or voice. She had looked beyond him at someone else. He had stood proxy for a second person. It was too far back to the moment when he might have been hurt. Time had left him detached.

What was he trying to suggest, she asked.

Once as a child he had stuck a caterpillar with a pin, watched the writhing, and a green liquid. Disgusted, he had felt sick.

We must go back, he said. We’re forgetting Dr Rosenheim.

Only now he didn’t feel sick. He gave an additional twist to the pin. He left her and went out into the passage.

Frau Rosenheim’s laughter reassured. Her voice in speaking had a little, warm glissando. Banishing winter, stirring the golden ball of cowslips, ruffling them with her fingers, her voice had come spontaneously, with a sensuous conviction. He envied Frau Dr Rosenheim, or her husband, they were the same, and interchangeable. He remembered his mother in the copper coloured dress, spread out on the winter path so that it touched the spikes of flowers. He remembered the edge of Ard’s Bay, where you looked down into pools, into the mouths of anemones. Because there is a kind of connexion between all positive moments. These are also interchangeable.

Through the living-room door Frau Rosenheim was telling of a walk they had gone near Goslar. It was a story of no particular point. But it disturbed him. More likely than not, he would never see the Rosenheims again.

Probably it was mostly like this. He would always regret the flutter of flown pigeons. You stood with a few feathers in your hand, afterwards, in the empty turret. In the same way, he regretted luggage labels. You will catch such and such a train, wrote Uncle Stephen, the term at Cambridge starts on such and such a day.