I said vaguely with some large and meaningless gestures that he’d had to go to the gallery. Monica would make allowances for us because I was not wholly English and Robert was an artist. I said he would be along in the course of time and asked if I might go to my room. Margaret took one of the suitcases and I noticed that she did not look healthy. She didn’t look as though she would be able to lift a matchbox let alone a suitcase, and also she looked half-witted. When we got to the bedroom she put down the suitcase and stood in the middle of the floor with her shoulders hunched. I thought how satisfying it would be to shake people who stood looking like that. To take them and shake them until their eyelids rolled up in astonishment and they were made to understand that there was life on other planets and other life on this planet. Margaret was locked in some solitary misery and unaware even of me. I couldn’t have that. I never, never did like to be seen as negligible, not so much out of vanity as because it made me doubt my own existence. I was a dancer and I danced because people have to look at people dancing. They can’t be ignored. No, I wasn’t that bad. I felt sorry for Margaret. I really did. I was not going to question her about the events in Egypt when Monica had sent her off to stay with Marie Claire, although I was curious to have her version. Marie Claire—who, I will say immediately, was a terrible pain in the neck—had said that poor little Margaret had fallen madly in love with her son, the silly little Nour. Marie Claire suffered under the delusion that both she and her child were utterly irresistible to persons of the opposite sex, and while it was not impossible that Margaret had indeed fallen prey to the wretched boy, I had laughed dismissively and told Marie Claire not to derange herself about it. That had annoyed her. I told her I had spoken to Margaret’s friends, the nuns at the convent where I went to Mass when I stayed with Marie Claire and they had said she was merely homesick. I was lying. Mother Joseph had said she believed that the petite anglaise had a true vocation, but I wasn’t going to tell Marie Claire that because she would instantly say that broken-hearted girls often took the veil. I hadn’t really been very interested in Margaret and her problems for, after all, I hadn’t seen her for years, and Marie Claire had grown angry. She said Nour had told her that Margaret had done something wicked and I asked what. She wouldn’t tell me and, without actually saying so, I had indicated with smiles and flourishes that I knew Nour to be a terrible, terrible liar.