September

'Yes.'

'I don't think I was ever happy.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I liked being rich but I wasn't happy. I was homesick and I missed the dogs. Do you know what he was called, the man I ran away with?'

'I don't think I was ever told.'

'Harold Hogg. Can you imagine anybody eloping with a man called Harold Hogg? After our divorce, the first thing I did was to change my name back to Blair. So I didn't keep his name, but I did keep much of his money. So lucky, to be divorced in California.'

Edmund said nothing.

'And then, when it was all over, and after I'd changed my name back to Blair, do you know what I did?'

'I have no idea.'

'I went to New York. I'd never been there before, didn't know anybody. But I checked in at the classiest hotel I could find and then I walked down Fifth Avenue and knew that anything I wanted I could buy. For myself. And then I didn't buy anything. That's a sort of happiness, isn't it, Edmund? Knowing that you can buy anything you want and then discovering that you don't want it.'

'Are you happy now?'

'I'm home.'

'Why did you come back?'

'Oh, I don't know. Reasons. Lucilla and Jeff were there to drive me. I wanted to see Archie again. And then, of course, the irresistible lure of Verena Steynton's party.'

'I have a feeling that Verena Steynton has little to do with it.'

'Perhaps. But it's a nice excuse.'

'You never came home when your parents died.'

'That was unforgivable, wasn't it?'

'You said it, Pandora. I didn't.'

'I wasn't brave enough. I didn't have the nerve. I couldn't face funerals, graves, condolences. 1 couldn't face anybody. And death is so final, just as youth is so sweet. I couldn't bear to accept that it was all over.'

'Are you happy in Majorca?'

'I'm home there too. All these years, and the Casa Rosa is the first home I've actually owned.'

'Are you going back?'

All the time they had been talking, they had not looked at each other. Instead, they had watched, with patent intent, the croquet players. But now he turned to face her, and her head came around, and her remarkable eyes, fringed with thick black lashes, stared into his own. Perhaps it was because she had become so painfully thin, but they seemed to Edmund more enormous and lustrous than they had ever been.

She said, 'Why do you ask?'

'I don't know.'

'Perhaps I don't know either.'

She laid her head back on the faded striped cushions and returned her attention to the croquet. Their conversation, such as it was, appeared to be over. Edmund watched his wife. She stood in the middle of the verdant lawn, leaning on her mallet, while Jeff lined up to play a tricky shot. She wore a checked shirt and a short blue denim skirt, and her legs were long and bare and brown, and her canvas sneakers very white. Fit, slender, bursting into laughter at Jeff's abortive attempt to get his ball through the hoop, she radiated the sort of vitality that Edmund associated with glossy magazine advertisements for sports clothes, Rolex watches, or sun-tan oil.

Virginia. My love, he told himself. My life. But for some reason the words were empty as incantations that were never going to work, and he found himself racked by despair. Pandora had fallen silent. He could not imagine what she thought about. He turned to look at her and it took him no time at all to realize that she was fast asleep.

So much for his entertaining company. He was torn between chagrin and amusement, and this healthy reaction to her perfidy served to fend off for the time being the deadly sensation that he had come to the end of his rope.

6

Monday the 'Twelfth

Monday was one of Edie's mornings for helping Virginia at Balnaid, and Virginia was grateful for this arrangement. She had never relished Mondays, with the weekend over and Edmund gone from her once more, dressed in his city suit, and leaving the house at eight o'clock in order to get into Edinburgh and his office before the worst of the rush-hour traffic. His departure left an emptiness, a flatness, a sense of anticlimax, and it was always something of an effort to get down to day-to-day living again and cope with all the tedious demands of simply keeping the house going. But hearing the bang of the back door as Edie let herself in always made everything, instantly, a bit more bearable. To know that Edie was there. There was someone to talk to, someone to laugh with, someone to dust the library and vacuum the dog hairs off the hall carpet. The clatter from the kitchen was comforting. Edie, dealing with the breakfast dishes, loading the washing-machine with a weekend's worth of dirty clothes, and talking to the dogs.

'Now don't you get under my feet, or you'll get your tail trodden on.'

Virginia, in her bedroom, changed the sheets on their big double bed, her regular Monday-morning chore. Henry had gone shopping. His mother had given him five pounds, and he had set off to the village, to visit Mrs. Ishak, and buy the allotted amount of sweets, chocolates, and biscuits that he was permitted to take to Templehall in his tuck-box, and which were meant to last him for a full term. He had never before been given so much money to spend on sweets, and the novelty of this, for the moment, had diverted his attention from the fact that tomorrow he was leaving home for the first time. Eight years old and going away. Not for ever, it was true. But Virginia knew that when she saw him again, he would already be a different Henry because he would have seen things and done things and learned things totally dissociated from his mother's life. Tomorrow, he was going. The first day of ten years of regular separation from his parents and his home. The beginning of his growing up. Up and away from her.

She folded pillowcases. They had only another twenty-four hours. All through the weekend she had resolutely put his inevitable departure out of her mind; pretended to herself that Tuesday was never going to happen. Henry, she guessed, had done the same, and her heart bled for his innocence. Last night, saying good night to him, she had steeled herself for a dam-burst of tears and lamentations. The weekend's over. Our last weekend. I don't want to go to school. I don't want to leave you. But Henry had simply told her that he'd quite liked playing with Hamish, he'd hung by one leg from Hamish's trapeze; and then, worn out by the day's activity, had fallen almost instantly asleep.

She spread crisp, ironed sheets. I'll get through today and make it fun for him, she told herself. And then, somehow, I'll get through tomorrow. After Edmund has taken Henry, after they've driven away and I can't hear the car any longer, I'll think of something diverting or industrious to do. I'll go and see Dermot Honeycombe and spend hours looking for a present for Katy Steynton. A bit of china, or an antique lamp, or perhaps a little piece of Georgian silver. I'll write a long letter to Gramps and Grandma. I'll turn out the linen cupboard, sew buttons on Edmund's shirts… And then Edmund will come home, and after that the worst will be over, and I can start counting the days until Henry's first weekend home.

She bundled up the soiled sheets and flung them out onto the landing, then put away a few random clothes and shoes, straightened a cushion. The telephone rang. She went to answer it, sitting on the edge of the freshly made bed.

'Balnaid.'

'Virginia.' It was Edmund. At a quarter past nine in the morning?

'Are you in the office?'

'Yes. Got here ten minutes ago. Virginia. Look. I have to go to New York.'

She was not particularly perturbed. His flying off to New York was a regular occurrence.

'When?'