‘Oxford’s only thirty miles on, and you wanted to show me Oxford.’ Her voice shook as if she had been running.

Glancing round, he saw that she looked pale. Oxford be damned, with its bells and its buses, and its admirers settling with veneration on all the fakes! ‘Oxford can wait,’ he said, and turned off for Idenborough.

If only I could sometimes tell the truth, if only I could learn to speak out, she thought—and remembered how, earlier in the day, Winter had praised her for her sincerity. But now it was too late. Deceit must accumulate on deceit, and with her second husband she would visit Idenborough, where she had cuckolded her first one. Winter was assuring her how much she would like Idenborough, and comparing its grape-coloured roof-tiles with roofs in Burgundy, while, faithless once again, she sat staring ahead, licking her lips with excitement as she waited for the first recognition. The 198lane ran into a main road. Ahead was a wide, placid street, and the silhouette of a church tower, old and owlish. She did not particularly recognize anything, but no doubt that was because they were entering from another direction. The tower had been there, of course, for she remembered the bells chiming the hours and the quarters, and Harry saying that he had an uncle whose conversation was precisely similar. And, in fact, what did she remember of Idenborough? So little—only everything. But when Winter stopped in front of a porch surmounted by a mild bear painted plum colour, she nearly said, ‘This isn’t the right hotel.’

While he was garaging the car, she followed the servant to the room allotted to them, her legs moving under her like the legs of some other person, legs imperfectly attached and rather too short for her. Strewing her coat and gloves and bag on twin beds of blameless springs, she went to the window. Roofs of weathered tiles, fig trees and lilacs emerging from walled gardens, the leaden haunches of a church, and beyond, a row of tall poplars … She knew those trees. They signalled everything into place. The hotel where she had stayed with Harry must be at the farther end of the town. There was the true Idenborough. The poplars grew close to that hotel, aligned along a bridle-path that led to a cemetery and the gasworks. There they had walked up and down, in a gentle drizzling rain, saying that it was really too wet to stay out any longer and yet continuing to walk up and down. And there she had known the inexhaustible melancholy of youth, extending below her like an ocean 199and endlessly surrounding her while she floated onward, immortally buoyant and serene.

When Winter came in, she turned from the window, saying, ‘I am so glad we came here instead of Oxford. Shall we go out for a little walk?’

‘Not till you’ve had a drink. I only hope I haven’t gone and overtired you, jaunting about all day. Besides, it’s nearly dinner-time.’