Three days later, looking like a good dog, Willie laid her letters on the dressing-table.

‘I don’t approve of what I am doing,’ he said. ‘But then I don’t approve of anything I am doing.’ After a pause, he added, ‘I think I wish I were dead.’

‘Not really,’ she answered. ‘Not really, my dear.’

They looked at each other in the mirror, then. In the mirror she watched him lay his head on her shoulder—deposit it there, as though it were a sick animal.

But it was from that hour—as though by the restitution of her letters a ghost had been laid or a cork drawn—that Willie began to recover, to ascend from being a mournful cipher in her preparations to becoming their animating spirit. The last joint days at Pond House were spent in a kind of battered exhilaration, with Willie circumventing inquiring droppers-in, beating carpets and sewing on buttons. It was not just speeding the parting guest. He had, 8somehow or other, to dispose of the mounting excitement with which he awaited Annelies, and to be the life and soul of Barbara’s departure was at once a safety valve and a tribute to conjugality.

‘Write to me, won’t you?’ he had said, tying on the last luggage label.

‘We said we wouldn’t write, except on business,’ she had replied. ‘It would hurt Annelies. You know how sensitive she is, how the least thing makes her suffer agonies.’ (She could not deny herself this shaft, and anyhow it did not penetrate.)

‘You owe me a letter, Barbara. I gave you back the others. I didn’t want to, but I did. I have never been so unhappy as I was that morning.’ It was true, as true as that he was now much less unhappy. ‘At least write and tell me that you are settled in, that you are all right, that the roof doesn’t leak, that there aren’t black beetles. It might be called a letter of business, really—though it isn’t.’

‘I will write,’ she had said.

Now she took up Shakespeare, in whose orisons all our sins are comprehended, and patted him. ‘Dear Swan!’ she said aloud, her voice, in the unexplored depths of the lofty London room, sounding like the voice of a stranger. She could feel her body furtively relaxing while she sat on the sofa, and beginning to enjoy itself. It sighed, and stretched its legs, and burrowed deeper into the cushions, and her nostrils quickened to the smell of furniture polish, as though there were promise in it. She had been happy in her former solitude; presently she would be solitarily 9happy again. Like the furniture, she would settle down in the old arrangement, and the silence of the room would not intimidate her long; it was no more than a pin-point of silence in the wide noise of London. The kettle was on the hot-plate, filled and ready to be heated. The room sat around her, attentive, ready for her to begin. But first she must write to Willie.