This curious lie can only be accounted for by a wish to keep his love. But it turns out she has never had it, not for one minute, not love as she imagines it.

“I should have made things clear to you at once,” he says. How was he to know she would mistake a random disruption for lasting attachment? He is decent enough to feel ashamed. He only wanted. He never intended. He has no business. If only she.

She seems to hear cloth ripping behind her eyes. The syntax of culpability-he’s drowning in it, and trying to drown her too. She watches him closely, and the sight of his touching, disloyal mouth restores her composure. Courtesy demands that she rescue him and save herself at the same time. This isn’t shrewdness talking, this is good manners, and there is nothing more economical, she believes, than the language of good manners. It costs nothing, it’s portable, easy to handle, malleable, yet pre-formed. Two words are all that are required, and she pronounces them slippingly, like musical notes. “Forgive me,” she says.

There. It’s said. Was that so hard?

There is a certain thing we must all have, as Georgia Willow has learned in the course of her long life. We may be bankrupt, enfeebled, ill or depraved, but we must have our good stories, our moments of vividness. We keep our door closed, yes, and move among our scratched furniture, old photographs, calendars and keys, ticket stubs, pencil ends and lacquered trays, but in the end we’ll wither away unless we have a little human attention.

But no one seems to want to give it away these days, not to Georgia Willow. It seems she is obliged to ask even for the unpunctual treats of human warmth. A certain amount of joyless groping is required and even then it’s hard to get enough. It is especially painful for someone who, after all, is a personage in her country. She has her pride, her reputation-and a scattering of small bruise-colored spots on the back of her long thin hands. It makes you shudder to think what she must have to do, what she has to say, how she is obliged to open her mouth and say please.