When Marguerite and Gillo were together they went to the pubs, or they walked Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly Circus late at night to play the penny machines in the squalid little amusement galleries, hoping to win cigarettes, still hard to find in England. Sometimes they sat in the park at Great Russell Square across from the British Museum. Often he spoke aloud in Italian with the sad, cadenced tones of his Veneto accent about some private woes she could not understand. But the intuitions of those nights hurt her, left her startled and uncertain. He filled her with tenderness one moment, and because of the cynicism that showed in his eyes, with unease the next.

“Why are you unhappy?” she asked.

“You’d prefer me to smile like the American guys, isn’t it true? The Happy Man is my real part. I should remember it when I get too serious. They told me at Padua that I could be the most valuable man of my generation—and look at me, what do you see besides a buffoon like everyone else?”

“Why are you like this, Gillo? Because you wanted to write as an artist, not as a critic or a professor? You can do both!”

“Yes, you pioneering Americans! Always ready to go on. Have you never understood the beauty of futility and of not wishing anymore for anything?”

“I wish I understood you, Gillo, but you won’t let me.”

“No, my baby, you are wrong. I have let you in the best, most complete way. It is up to you to know it.”

The burden of their relationship was on her. It was for her to know if she loved Gillo. The question was, Did she? That oldtime library book, What a Girl Should Know About Sex, had put it to her: “If your mother was loving and kind and you learned to love her, you learned to love. This is the greatest asset of your life.” The old lingo of assets. What the book hadn’t mentioned was deficits: parental duties attended to, but the very sweetness of life withheld. What if her capacity for love had shrunk, atrophied from disuse; what if she were not able to receive or return love because she wasn’t familiar with it?

They decided to go for a weekend to Lavenham. She made the arrangements, chose the inn, found out the train schedules, and got them to the right station at the right time.

“Why Lavenham?” he had said on the train, a light smile playing over his features, the sarcasm ready.

“It’s got a famous inn, a famous church, and even some famous people.”

“Who?”

“Somebody who’s supposed to be Shakespeare, for one; and the lady who wrote ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star.’”

“I think I prefer her.”

“And I prefer you. Even though you don’t know I’m here half the time.”

“I do feel something for you.”