I walked back through the city when it was all over. I felt elated, I felt as though I could walk all night. I was on the way to my restaurant to have dinner and was passing my apartment building when I saw Jorge and his father ringing the doorbell. They had been at the demonstration too, and were worried that I would be harassed because of my Englishness. I told them that there had been no problems, and I began to feel as we stood there that they had called because they needed to talk to someone, that their own company, in this crisis, was not enough for them. When they invited me to come back with them for dinner, I said that it was too late, but they insisted that dinner would not be for a while, and that other people would be coming around. I went with them to their car and we drove to San Isidro, where they lived. They were both excited; they still believed, as everybody else believed, that the British were merely threatening to send a flotilla, but they would not, and that world opinion, and especially North American opinion, would support us. They knew, we all knew that night, that something had opened up in the public life of Argentina which would not easily close down again: even if we had won the war, I think, the generals could not have lasted, but we did not know that then. All we knew was that we needed to talk, and there was a novelty about our need and our freedom to talk that made us want to stay up until the early hours.

There was an armed guard at the gate of their house who let us in when he saw the car. The house was new and painted white—I don’t know why I should have expected it to be old—with a flat roof and a long lawn in front with trees and shrubs. When I asked Jorge’s father if he had built the house, he nodded gruffly, saying that there had been a much smaller house on the site in bad repair when he bought it.

A log fire was lighting in the grate in the dining room and the table was set for ten or twelve people. Señora Canetto came bustling into the room with a jug of iced water; she, too, had been changed by the invasion, her movements were jerky and busy and her face was flushed. She said she had been so worried about me when she read an anti-English article in La Nación or Clarín or one of the magazines. She thought that it was a time for people to stick together and she was glad I was in the house. Soon, a number of men in their fifties arrived, old colleagues of Señor Canetto’s from his days in the military academy, and then an older man, a retired general whose name I vaguely recognized. The ex-general exuded a dignity and gravity which affected us all as we sat down at the table, like actors in a great and noble tragedy.