Yet here is a contradiction. My contacts were with waiters, chamber maids, receptionists, hostesses. I shared the occasional meal with some international commuter as rootless as myself. I remember one time, when only a little drunk, I and a man I never saw again argued as to which country we were in and agreed to differ. I forget who was right—neither perhaps. Then again, there was always bar talk. All the same, bit by bit it came over me. I was lonely.

How mixed all this is! But I had reached sixty that time when I flew into Zurich and I had drunk far too much on the plane. To put it mildly, I needed somewhere to recover and the airport doctor advised Schwillen on the Zurich lake.

Chapter III

So I made another of the predestined steps in my life. Schwillen was inevitable and so was meeting them. It was my first morning in Schwillen that it happened and I’d drunk a little, not too much, and was feeling just about right. I climbed a little bluff over the lake where there was a monument to some Lithuanians. There was a park and a castle and green-painted chairs to sit on. So I sat. I remember contemplating with some pleasure the fun it would be to have an aristocracy all named after cheeses and contrariwise. Le gratin indeed! Then I became aware of a large figure standing between me and the sun.

“Wilfred Barclay, sir? Wilf?”

“Good God.”

“If I might—”

He was huge—really huge. Or perhaps I had shrunk.

“I can’t stop you sitting down, can I?”

“It’s really great to see you!”

“How are my dependent clauses?”

“I ought to explain, Wilf—”

“Don’t bother. Go away and teach.”

“Sabbatical, Wilf. Every seven years.”

“So long? It seems only yesterday.”

“Seven years, Wilf, sir.”

“You served seven years for Leah. Her eyes will be weak.”

“No, sir. She’s Mary Lou. I guess you don’t know her. There.”

I looked where his eyes showed me. A girl was just stepping on to the gravel patch where we were sitting. She was very young, twenty, I thought. She had a pale face and dark, cloudy hair. She was slim as a cigarette.

“Mary Lou, look who’s here!”

“Mr Barclay?”

“Wilfred Barclay.”

“Mary Lou Tucker.”

Rick gazed down at her proudly and fondly.

“She’s a real fan, Wilf.”

“Oh, Mr Barclay—’

“Wilf, please. Rick, you lucky young devil!”

I shed forty years in a flash. Correction: I felt as if I had shed forty years. Rick was my friend. They were both my friends, this one in particular.

“Felicitations, Mary Lou!”

Somehow it was obvious they were just married, or if not “just”, why, she looked like that, all grace and glow! I took her by the shoulders and kissed her. I don’t know what she thought of the Swiss wine—Dôle—that I’d been drinking as early in the morning as that. I thrust her away, examined her from low, pale brow to delicate throat. Her cheeks had mantled. That was the only word and before you could repeat it her cheeks had paled and mantled all over again. Everything inside was at the surface in a flash; but then, it hadn’t far to go.