She laughed, a laugh quickly crimped shut as if by a wry second thought, with a look to one side, putting her sharp nose in profile. “Jock hates Spain, he says they’re all Gypsies and Fascists. He really only likes England, where they speak his language, though he says the pub hours are ridiculous.” As she talked and looked at Owen, her eyes widened as if to say that Jock wasn’t really what they wanted to talk about. Her face, bony and narrow, seemed slightly too small for her features—the large hazel eyes, the mobile mouth, the arched brows pencilled darker than the hair on her head. But her hips were wide in the pool-table felt and her upper arms bare and white and dotted with freckles like small pin-pricks; she was real enough, not a dream he was having.

He dared confess, to stop her from walking away, “I have been down, I guess. I missed my daughter’s birth, and really she must be the last child.”

Faye nodded. “You and Phyllis,” she dryly pointed out, “don’t seem to have a fertility problem.”

Did she and Jock? They had two pale children, frail-looking and shy compared with their animated, hard-living parents. Owen told her, “It’s not as if we screw all the time, either. I hardly know how it happens.” This was too much to confide, probably. He felt he was leaning out over a little abyss—the fresh soft grass at his feet, the gleam of his third gin-and-tonic. But Faye, as wide-eyed as infant Eve, took it in gravely, her lips parted in suspense. Owen went on, “And then, when I was out in California, I saw how these new companies are feeding off of one another, swapping people back and forth. They call it Silicon Valley. I came away thinking that that’s where Ed and I should be, and wondering if hardware instead of software isn’t where it’s at, at least until the Japanese move in.”

“How fascinating,” Faye said, in a tone that seemed to come from another conversation; Phyllis had appeared at his side.

“Baby,” his wife said to Owen, “I know you’re having a wonderful time talking with our charming hostess, but we promised the babysitter six, and I need to see Eve. And she me.” Phyllis’s breasts embarrassed him, they were so big, stuffed with milk, straining against the top of the oversize cotton dress, plain beige, with which she had covered a body still somewhat distended by childbirth. Yet Phyllis had her princessly air still, and said loftily to Faye, “Such a glorious day, Faye, and such a good idea for May. ‘Sumer is icumen in.’ ”

“Can’t you stay, then? Some people will, when most have gone. We have a ham. Please.”