The Blood Oranges

Yesterday? Only yesterday.

I was taking slow uphill strides and smelling the flowers, asking myself why I had had such unhappy luck with Catherine, wondering how I was ever to win her to all the sensual possibilities of the intimacy I had in mind, persuade her to give me her complete attention, to look at me, to live on with Cyril.

Yes, I thought, there in all this suffusion of flowers is the familiar Physanthyllis tetraphylla. The ripe and fruity vinelike plant with its wet green leaves, yellow buds and faint traces of silver hair, lay spread across the entire surface of the dusty village street, and I could hardly fail to note its tendrils drifting off into silence, its nodules cup-shaped, as usual, in pulpy succulence. And wasn’t that the Pisum elatius? Yes, I thought, Fiona’s favorite.

But Catherine, I asked myself, why doesn’t Catherine know by now that I am enough, that she is enough, that we are all interchangeable, so to speak, and that our present relationship is already as unlimited and undeniable as our past affair? After all, there is something glorious about standing together in time as two large white graceful beasts might stand permanently together in an empty field. And yet how could I convey the truth of all this to Catherine?

At least she was wearing her pea-green slacks (glancing over my shoulder, waiting for her to close the gap between us, frowning at her obvious reluctance to catch up with me), exactly as if her children had yet to smear their little hands in the folds of my dissolving tapestry and we, the four of us, had yet to follow the angular black-haired shepherd into the still grove and then beyond to sun, sea, joyous ruins, long nights, distant piping. At least the pea-green slacks, a white sweater, an old pair of heavy dried-out leather sandals on bare feet. At least there was the clear sound of her matter-of-fact exertion — the sounds of her breath, the grating comfortable sound of the sandals. But nothing more. No corresponding glance at my own black suit and white shirt open at the collar and golden hair beginning to curl at last into tight sprightly barbs over the ears and down the back of my neck. No smile. No music in the way she moved. Nothing for Cyril.

And then? Then it burst upon us, so to speak, the spectacle, the processional, the very message of our actuality. Suddenly the narrow street was looping again, rising more steeply than ever, and in one single instant priest and children and barefoot men and white boat were poised above us. Suddenly Catherine and I were thrust against high stone walls on opposite sides of the narrow street. The two of us stood upright and facing each other with our flesh and even our bones flush to the rock, precisely as the village priest tried to wave us back down the street and out of the way of the white boat whose lunging destructive descent was prevented only by the crowd of men.

“Don’t move,” I said across the space between us, “there’s plenty of room.”

“What are they doing?”

“Just trying to launch their boat. Don’t worry.”

The entire procession was upon us in clamorous motion. Gesticulating priest and darting boys and barefoot men strained backward against the full weight of wood and brass and shouted to each other, calling out in violent square-mouthed appeal to some archaic and obviously indifferent deity. But only the wide, high-prowed boat itself appeared to move as it groaned, listed to one side and then dragged its ragged half-naked attendants another few feet down the steep grade toward Catherine and me. I saw the golden fish on the white prow above my head, watched the broad gunwales swelling from stone wall to wall and filling the street. And if they let go? Or if one of them stumbled or too many turned away to drink from the several black wine bottles passing from man to man? And if the enormous white sun-struck prow then veered toward Catherine, veered toward me?

“We’ll let them pass,” I called, “and then we’ll join the procession. OK?”

But already the great curve of the towering white prow was slipping between us, stopping, inching on again. Now Catherine and stone wall and little street were gone, obliterated by the white enamel sweep of the boat and the sudden presence of the men who were clutching her gunwales, clutching her sides, and struggling, sweating, laughing, warning each other of collision and disaster. High on the prow they had fastened a handful of Lobularia maritima, and I found myself nodding because the flowers were white and implied fleeting tenderness on the part of even these boatbuilding villagers.

How like them, I thought, to lay the keel in some tin-roofed shed up here on the high edge of the village, laboring with crude tools and rusty old circular saw until their boat finally stood finished not within reach of the dark tide but gleaming and massive beside the boatbuilder’s cottage. Of course they were a dark-eyed people, I reminded myself, and not entirely ignorant, because if they had built this enormous empty vessel up here amidst their tethered goats, and had employed typical perversity and illogicality in its construction, nonetheless they had managed to lift it, transport it, move it down these steep and treacherous streets with a display of what I could only call true primitive ingenuity. Despite their sweat, their shuffling, their grunts of fagag, crespi fagag and their shouts of croak peonie, the desperate movements of their naked feet, the anger and sudden lapses to childish carelessness, wasn’t all this anomalous effort nonetheless an unmistakable example of their practicality?

Yes, I told myself, of course it was. Because these very men who were adept at mending nets and whose feet were bare and cracked and whose voices were tuned to nothing more than shouting to each other throughout their long hours of night fishing, even these same men had apparently held council. Suddenly and together they had leapt from emotionalism to cogency, from baffled dream to rationality, and in one moment of lucid silence had overcome the problem of a graceful and necessary white boat constructed witlessly in the wrong part of the village.

Simple, I thought, and pure, mysterious, crudely logical (seeing Catherine’s head and then her shoulders reappearing gradually on the other side of the enormous white canted hull), because it all depended on a few oblong blocks of cream-colored wood and on the agility and stamina of two small boys who were sweating even more than the shouting and laughing men. Yes, I thought, how like them to rely on children and to see in a few pieces of scarce wood a somehow religious solution to a mechanical problem. They had cut the blocks, shaped them, in the center of each had chiseled a half-moon indentation broad enough and deep enough to hold the boat’s keel. In that tin-roofed shed above us, out of sight, they had raised the prow and forced the front block beneath the keel and shoved, pushed, pulled, and had driven the second block beneath the keel. They had continued this process until the greased wooden blocks were spaced out evenly in the form of a movable and slippery track across which their enormous empty white boat was sliding painfully but safely down through the entire steep length of the village toward the beach and sea.

Religious insight. Primitive ingenuity. And the two small boys? Even now they were moving in their assigned positions, one of them staggering forward with a great block in his arms and reaching the prow, daring to stoop and drop the heavy block directly in the path of the advancing keel. The second small crouching boy fell to his knees and tugged, dragged, lifted into his arms the full weight of another cream-colored block that had emerged from beneath the stern and, grimacing and wobbling, ran forward to dispose of his load as had the first small boy.

But did it matter to Catherine, I wondered, that they had greased their dozen or so oblong blocks of wood with a dark thick shiny substance that was obviously blood? Amidst flowers, noise, dust, the tilting of the black wine bottles, the sudden lurching of the boat and shouts of fear, had Catherine begun to discern the religious insight implicit in their use of partially coagulated blood as a rich and appropriate lubricant? Perhaps, I told myself, deciding that in all likelihood Catherine had in fact observed the thickening stains of blood just as she must have seen the few loose sprays of Lobularia maritima affixed to the high prow of the boat. Priest, blood, Lobularia maritima, procession — how could it have been more plain?

“You’re strong,” she was saying then, “why don’t you help them?”

Together, side by side, slowly we retraced our steps downhill at the rear of the crowd as if I had never been the headless god nor she my mistress, but as if she and I were simply the two halves of the ancient fruit together but unjoined. The dust was rising, Catherine was pushing up the sleeves of her sweater, her very profile made me think that she was responding at last to me as well as to the white hull. Why not assume that she was beginning to value my mental landscape? Why not assume that a now invulnerable Catherine and reflective Cyril were starting over? Why not?

“Let’s get closer,” she was saying, “I want to see.”

All the sounds in the air were suddenly co-ordinated to Catherine’s voice. There below us the priest was chanting prayers across the bright water, someone was striking authoritarian chords on one of their old stringed instruments, dogs were barking.

“It’s a big affair,” I heard myself saying above the noise. “Like it?”

“Yes. I like it.”

“Remind you of anything?”

She was looking at me, shrugging, beginning to smile, preparing to express some kind of recognition. But suddenly we were pushing downhill with the rest of them, past open doors and hanging nets, pursuing the white hull that was rocking and grinding down the last incline of the village street. For one instant the entire crowd flung hands and shoulders against the sides and stern and ran, shoved, not attempting to restrain the descent of the boat but rather leaning into it and contributing to the possibility of that very crash which all this time they had been attempting to avoid.

And then the shuddering cessation, the shock of stopping, the thick and absolute immobility of the boat’s dead weight on the beach. The hour had fled, the light had changed, the stones and doorways of the dark village had given way to a thin strip of gray sand and the smell of the sea. Behind us the rising village, to our left the distant fortress, somewhere off to the right but hidden from view the cypresses and the twin villas, in front of us the brilliant sea. And men and boys were laughing and standing still while the priest stood shouting brutal, imperative instructions to an agile old man with a deformity between his shoulders and the face of a goat. The high white prow was pointed directly toward the horizon, unmoving and yet soaring, an aesthetic actuality that belied the work required to convey all this curving weight across the sand to the life of the foam. Surely the grace of the boat itself went far beyond the necessity to feed a few dark mouths from the depths of the sea.

So our feet were deep in the sand, I lit a cigarette, the boat was balancing between the loosely divided halves of the launching party. Beneath the plane tree, a young man was seated alone beside a bare wooden table, and it was he who played the archaic heart-shaped stringed instrument. I took it all in — the assembled villagers, the enormous white crescent of the waiting boat, and the dogs, the children, the black shawls, the impoverished young man whose metallic Eastern music was now reaching out toward the rolling sea. And here we were, Catherine and I together at last in the festive air. The sun was overhead but close to us, close and orange. Once more the invisible nets were spread.

“It’s all right,” I murmured, “take the glass. The old fellow just wants you to toast his boat.”

At that moment the old goat-faced man himself was suddenly before us and smiling, holding out to Catherine a little battered tin tray bearing not one of their black bottles but a small dirty glass half filled with a colorless drink more powerful, I knew, than the dusty wine. He extended the tray, raised one shoulder, looked into Catherine’s eyes and into mine. Little more than a commonplace event, an instant in time, only a small disreputable old man with a gray shirt ripped open to the waist and partially unbuttoned trousers loose at the large hips. But thanks to his agility and bright blue eyes and stubby fingers, I realized immediately that he was a friendly guide who at a glance had read Catherine’s past and mine in the very shape of our middle-aged bodies that were so much larger than his.

“Take a sip,” I said. “I’ll drink the rest.”

Catherine held the glass to her lips, I nodded my approval of the clear fierce taste that suggested both the salt of the sea and the juice of the heavy lemon. I left him a few drops which he licked with his fingers, laughing and tilting the little dirty glass above his burnished head. For another moment the glass hung high in the air while the old man patted Catherine’s arm, shook my hand, pointed with expansive admiration toward the boat still propped upright and waiting for the first touch of the uncontrollable sea.

The glass fell to the beach, the grip of the vanished hand lingered in my empty hand, Catherine smiled exactly as if the old man had not yet disappeared. But he was already gone and even now was rousing the villagers to the final effort of pushing the majestic slow boat across the sand to the sea.

“Well,”I heard myself saying, “recovered yet?”

I glanced at Catherine, the heart-shaped instrument leapt between two or three high notes and one smashing chord, Catherine held her bared elbow still tingling, no doubt, from the touch of that unfamiliar hand.

“I don’t know why I feel this way.”

“Excited?”

“It’s lucky he found us.”

“Look,”I murmured, “here come the oars.”

Two youthful figures ran down the beach with a pair of long virginal oars suspended between them. The distant fortress was cupped in the shriveled palm of desolation. The orange sun descended, the open sea undulated in slow fleshy waves. The old man and the angry priest were arguing about a few half-submerged brown rocks which apparently lay directly in the path of the boat. Catherine smiled. Heavy-headed Cyril smiled. The boat was in motion.

Yes, in motion, and Catherine had already removed her sandals, already I anticipated the sight of Catherine’s green slacks wet to the knees and the sensation of my own black trousers weighted at least to my bulky calves with dark sea water.

The upheld oars protruded above the sweat-dampened heads of those men straining at the stern of the boat, to one side and at the edge of the beach the priest stood with his skirts awash and the large and radiant silver cross held aloft in both extended fists. Again the two small boys were filled with self-importance and were hard at work. The forward motion of the boat was slow, painful, continuous, unmistakable, and bore no relation to priest, struggling men, old women. No, I thought, that white boat was moving only for the sake of Catherine, me, and for one agile and ageless village elder obviously deformed at birth. Quietly I smiled at the symmetry of orange sky, chunks of bloodied wood, oars that projected into nothing more than air, boat that still lay several yards from the vast tide that would float it into life and yet would one day reduce it to nothing more than a few cracked wooden ribs half buried in sand.

“Remind you of anything?”

My smile was embedded in those slow words, and as soon as I spoke I knew that my voice was exactly as audible to Catherine as it was to me, as if all those other sounds (water, music, laborious breathing, grinding of wood on wood) were only a silence for me to fill or existed only that Catherine and I might listen more attentively to what each of us had to say. Catherine glanced over her shoulder and her eyes were larger than I remembered.

“I’m not sure. Tell me.”

“How about the day we met?”

Had I gone too far? Summoned too abruptly our missing shadows? Merely ripped open old graves, old secret bowers? Exposed myself to more conventional grief and unjustified accusation? Was she less perfectly healed than I had begun to assume? But no, her hands were on her womanly green hips, her head was turned in my direction, the immediacy of her amber-colored eyes was still undimmed. Yes, I thought, she was looking directly at my golden spectacles and into my warm eyes and the white boat was exerting more than ever its pull on the fringes of Catherine’s consciousness.

She spoke without insistence, without emphasis, clearly: “I never expected to talk to you again.”

“I know,” I murmured, lending her strength.

“But I’ve changed my mind.”

“Catherine. Doesn’t it remind you of a wedding?”

“Not ours.”

“Positive?”

As if my voice and the very depths of my broad chest were not enough, suddenly our heads were together. We stooped, splashing ankle-deep in the first slow reddish swell, stooped just in time to see the rounded bottom of the bow slide within inches of the red tile and the first clear drops of spray already trickling in a bright pattern of transparent bubbles down the steep curve of that thickly enameled white wood. Was Catherine gasping? Was I gasping too? But even as Catherine and I perceived the clear bubbles splattered like an ever-changing necklace on the lower portion of the gleaming and steeply pitched white bow, the bow itself moved forward and sank, obliterating the first signs of spray and foam at the very moment they leapt up and settled expressly, I thought, for Catherine’s pleasure and mine.

“Careful,” I said, “not too close.”

The men fell back. The boat was free. Catherine laughed. We were wading in soft water up to our thighs, and all around us the men were floundering, the villagers were wading in behind us, the golden fish on the bow of the boat was flashing. A figure leapt high (hair wet, face contorted in both grief and joy) and snatched away the white flowers and flung them off to float bereft and abandoned on the surface of the deep sea tinted with blood.

“Look, Catherine. There he is.”

“I see him.”

Yes, he was there. Yes, we saw him. Impish, angular, energetic, indomitable, immersed to his armpits but ready to spring, ready to take possession of what was his, dark head and narrow shoulders distinctly visible as the white stern twisted and rose above him and the orange sun came down, coagulated, turned time itself into a diffusion of thick erotic color.

“Help him,” Catherine said.

“Don’t have to.”

We waited. Our shoulders touched. The water that was saturating Catherine’s pea-green slacks was filling my pockets. Somebody shouted, the oars clattered, the white stern came down. And then the old man jumped and seized some fragment of glossy wood and in full view of ancient women, small boys, shouting friends, two strangers whose spiritual relationship he somehow shared, propelled himself upward so that in the next instant, as the now orange-white stern towered above us all once more, the old man also towered above us, balancing up there on his spread knees that were wiry, insensitive to pain, and naked. Yes, naked, because he had had the forethought to rip off his ragged trousers before committing himself to frenzy and determination, had kicked them off at the edge of the beach before the white boat had rolled, pitched, begun to float. The stern was at the top of its arc, Catherine and I were staring up into the orange brilliance of the old man’s aged nakedness, and his shanks were dripping, his buttocks were dripping, his obviously unspent passion was hanging down and rotating loosely like a tongue of flame.

We looked, we waved, Catherine’s eyes met mine.

“Starting over,”I murmured and laughed, straightened my spectacles, wiped the spray from my face. Catherine smiled. At last, I thought, we had come under the aegis of the little crouching goat-faced man half naked at the end of the day. What more could we ask?

WE BROKE, WE RAN, WE SCATTERED UPWARD ON THE FACE of our favorite hill like birds or like children, and because I was last in line, lowest figure in that bright pattern, and was holding back as usual (tail of the kite, conscience and consciousness of our little group), I found myself generalizing the visceral experience of the moment itself, found myself thinking that our days were idyls, our nights dreams, our mornings slow-starting songs of love. On my extreme right Fiona was already halfway up the hill (hands waving, large woolen bag slung over her shoulder army-style and bouncing on a lean hip), Hugh was angling in sly pursuit, off to my left Catherine was stumbling loosely and happily toward the bare crest of that familiar hill, while behind them all and on a clear tangent between Hugh and Catherine I brought up the rear heavily, gracefully, varying my speed, saving my breath, and wondering what effect this kind of dawn exertion might have on the ruthless fist lodged in the blackness of Hugh’s chest. The early morning trip to the hill was Fiona’s idea, of course, and I suspected that even had she known of Hugh’s secret ailment, which apparently she did not, there would have been no change in Fiona’s plans, no slacking of Fiona’s pace.

“Come on, boy,” Hugh shouted over his shoulder, “quit lagging.”

I waved him on. In the chilly air and on the tawny slope between two darkly nesting growths of small olive trees, the four of us constituted the four major points of the compass oddly compressed, distorted, oddly disarrayed, and Fiona sprinted girlishly toward the top where the silence had no direction and the sun in another moment or two would be rising.

Like birds, I thought, like children. In a glance I recorded Catherine’s dark brown slacks, Hugh’s black bell-bottoms, Fiona’s white shorts cut low on the waist and high on the thighs (tight elasticized garment winking above me in the dawn light), my own soft cord trousers hastily donned in semidarkness and stuffed into the tops of large and only partially laced chamois boots now slow and rhythmical on the stubbled surface that smelled of dead grass, sharp spice, sweet dust. My faded denim shirt still unbuttoned and flowing away from massive breast with its bronze luster and sleep-matted hair, Hugh’s black turtleneck, Catherine’s plain mustard-colored blouse, Fiona’s pink shirt unbuttoned and merely tied at the waist — even these simple details of careless dress reminded me of Fiona’s whimsical leadership and unaccountable energy. Thanks to a nudge from Fiona’s elbow and the sound of her voice, we were all four of us only minutes away from the twin villas and still sleeping children. A few details of clothing revealed at least to me our haste, our dawn dishevelment, our desire to please each other, our sense of well-being against that panorama of steepening hillside and wiry dark green trees.

“Don’t say anything, Cyril. Don’t spoil it.”

The top. The silence filled with the smell of thyme. And I who might well have been first came last, climbed over the crest and smiled at Fiona’s eager words and squeezed into my place on the fragment of stone wall between Catherine, who was out of breath, and Fiona, who was always breathless yet never out of breath. I drew up my heavy knees and wiped my mouth on the back of my arm and sighed. Hugh’s heart was pounding, Catherine’s dark hair was loose. From Fiona’s bare stomach came a faint brief purling sound of some internal agitation, Hugh cleared his throat, Catherine shifted audibly on the cold stones. And clasping my knees and leaning to the rear so that I was able to glance at Hugh behind Fiona’s firm curving back, for a moment I caught Hugh’s eye and smiled. Was he attempting to convey some kind of masculine detachment in the grip of Fiona’s enforced silence and rather theatrical poetic expectancy? I could not be sure. At least I could afford to nod and smile at the narrow sweat-drenched stony face and did so.

“What’s all this about the sunrise, boy?”

But before I could answer: “Shut up, Hugh. For God’s sake.”

I respected Fiona’s need for silence, always respected the stillness that contained her sudden electrical sense of purpose, and so refrained from remarking that dawn was Fiona’s hour and that everything about my wife suggested the flights of dawn and excitement of the first light, despite her admitted shivers of theatricality and the interference of Hugh’s crude temperament. Behind Fiona’s tight back I shrugged, glanced away from Hugh, and allowed this first clear chilly breath of morning to fill my chest. Fiona said nothing more, Catherine leaned forward and crossed her legs. Like Fiona, I tilted my head back into the rising light and contented myself with the paradox that while Fiona was concentrating on the sunrise Catherine was no doubt thinking of nothing more than the possibility of turning and placing a gentle hand on my bare chest. Again Hugh cleared his throat.

So we sat together, waited together, on a fragment of stone wall in this sacred spot. At our feet lay the abrupt and nearly vertical and rock-strewn descent, and down there the windy darkness of the miniature valley contained one field of waist-high grass (remembered now from previous occasions rather than seen) as well as a single line of small pungent olive trees marching, so to speak, across the soft floor of that sheltered contour of darkness, gloom, silence. But beyond it all, beyond perfect valley and rock wall and Fiona, Hugh, Catherine and me (four witnesses seated flank to flank in the uninterrupted tension of Fiona’s rare feminine interest in natural phenomena), three low purple hills and a sweep of bare silvery horizon belied witnesses, lyricism, grape-bespattered joys of love, sleeping children, sleeping invisible village, belied the sunrise itself. Once more it occurred to me that the splendor of ominous distance reflected a side of Fiona and even an aspect of my own personality which Hugh, for instance, would never appreciate. After all, Fiona enjoyed the sight of moody colors and somber landscape — why not? Only Hugh’s compulsive interest in Fiona’s more obviously active life blinded him, I decided then, to the understandable necessity of Fiona’s silences. Fiona was sexual but hardly simple.

“Look, baby,” she whispered clearly, “an eagle.”

“Big one,” I murmured, “a real beauty.”

“Where, boy? I don’t see any eagle.”

“Take another look,” I said after a moment. “He’s there.” It was a small matter, of course, and yet the sky, it seemed to me, was empty except for rolling darkness and cold bands of silver. I looked, I squinted (seeing dark hills, inhuman sky, nothing more) and assumed that this was merely another instance of Fiona’s occasional inaccuracy for the sake of a deeper vividness, for the sake of an important mood. Between Fiona’s voice and Hugh’s sometimes brusque insistence on reality there was, for me, no choice.

“I see him,” Catherine said, and pointed. “Up there.”

“She’s right, boy. He’s unmistakable.”

Nodding, suddenly identifying the crooked speck at the end of Catherine’s finger: “A sign,” I murmured deeply, agreeably, “it’s a doubly significant sign, Hugh, don’t you think?”

“Keep quiet, baby. Please.”

Correct and incorrect, I thought, right and wrong. And yet at bottom my sense of the situation was essentially true, and I felt only pleasure at the sight of this new justification of Fiona’s vision and my own supportive role. Unmistakably, as Hugh had said, the eagle was now hooked almost directly above us on bent but stationary wings in the black and silver medium of the empty sky. Stark, unruffled, quite alone, a featureless image of ancient strength and unappeased appetite, certainly the distant bird was both incongruous and appropriate, at once alive and hence distracting but also sinister, a kind of totemic particle dislodged from the uninhabited hills and toneless light. Here, I thought, was a bird of prey that would utter no cry, make no kill. And for some reason his presence brought to mind the handfuls of dark cherries which Fiona was carrying in the off-white woolen bag still slung from her firm shoulder.

But was the bird descending, drawing closer to us, a deliberate herald of the rich desolation that lay before us, fierce bird of prey somehow attracted to large lovers and the cherries in Fiona’s bag? Was he singling us out as further confirmation of Fiona’s essential soberness and lack of fear, or even as a reminder of the terror that once engulfed the barbarians and from which Hugh, for instance, was still not free? At any rate the bird was descending and the hills, like distant burial mounds, were dark. Slowly I put pressure with my upper arms first on Catherine’s shoulder and then on Fiona’s.

All eyes on the approaching eagle. Fiona began to shiver, Catherine returned the pressure of my affection. But Hugh, I thought, was growing impatient, was much too preoccupied with his own doubts and desires to realize that sometimes the faceless eagle heralds not only the breath of dead kings but the sunrise.

Yes, the sunrise. And now, quite suddenly, the sunrise was so immense, so hot and brilliant that Fiona found it necessary to respond in kind and leaped to her feet, all at once was standing upright between Hugh and me and taking swift athletic breaths of the golden air, apparently unconscious of my own hand steadying her right calf and Hugh’s her left. The black and silver sky turned orange and foamed for miles behind the stationary air-borne eagle, and the purple hills dissolved, reappeared, revealed on thick green slopes a clear pattern of thistle, clay, warped trees, a few abandoned stone huts. Mist filled the valley at our feet and then lifted. The cold air grew warm, the eagle suddenly glided downward to the east and was gone, simply gone. The day was ours.

“What’s that, baby? Listen.”

I listened, we all listened, Catherine’s ring hand was on my thigh. Across from us the large round sun had already outlived its bright circumference, its glorious round orange shape had already given up its enormous singular shape to time, had become only the light of our day, the undefined brilliance of our morning song. But that clear random tinkling sound from the valley? That metallic musical sound too unstructured for music and yet harmonizing, so to speak, with the sweet smell of our still unexplored valley?

“Sheep bells,” Catherine murmured. “That’s what it is.”

“By God, boy, do you see what I see?”

“Couldn’t be better,” I said, and drew Fiona’s upright leg more tightly to my rib cage and with my other hand signaled Catherine through the brown cloth on her hip.

Because cold dawn had given way to hot morning, the sun had yielded to light, the eagle had flown off only to return to us as a flock of long-haired semidomesticated animals.

“Goats,” I said pleasantly, “not sheep.”

“But the girl, baby. Look at the girl.”

It was the new day’s gift to Fiona, nature’s final gift to my wife. Yes, the random tinkling sound we had heard was produced by bells fastened around the necks of goats, small rusty pear-shaped iron bells hand-forged by peasants oblivious to the sad melodies that unknown cultivated strangers might hear in their noise. And goats, an entire flock of them, wearing long brown shaggy robes the color of Catherine’s slacks but more shiny, and bearing bone-colored curling horns on the tops of their nodding heads, now suddenly filled our valley with motion, color and the sound of their bells. From where Hugh and Catherine and I sat and Fiona stood, we could see that these stately animals were attended by a young girl wearing a large white hat and running, slowly running, through the tall grass.

“I want to talk with her. Right now.”

“How can you talk with her?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“Don’t you worry about Fiona. She’ll do what she wants.”

“Of course she will,” I said and laughed. “But there’s the problem of language. And the hill’s too steep for Fiona, Hugh. Believe me.”

“Cyril,” Fiona said, and the calf of her leg was hard and trembling, the skin was cold, “she’s just a child.”

“A young woman,” I heard myself saying. “About seventeen. But sit down, Fiona. You’ll fall.”

“I’m holding her, boy. Don’t worry.”

The moment passed. I made a low humming sound of affirmation in my nose and throat and said nothing. And who was to say which was the more remarkable, I asked myself, the girl or the goats? The goats were overly large, their coats long, here and there were the obvious bell-carriers, the jangling sunlit leaders, and it was quite apparent that the entire flock had come in slow hungry pursuit of the tough little black leaves of the olive trees, was following some purely aesthetic instinct to feed at dawn on the resilient branches laden with dawn’s oldest and most meager fruit. We could hear the hooves, the bells, the grass, the rubbing of long hair which was either dry and regal or still damp from the recent discharging of white milk. And the girl? This girl who carried no crook and appeared to feel no responsibility for lost kids or straggling elders? How could her slight vaulting presence down there be anything if not more remarkable than the indifference of her ancient goats?

“Baby. She sees us!”

The girl was waving. Standing still and waving. And in this instant, the very moment of correspondence between the girl’s world and ours, Catherine returned her wave, Fiona suddenly tightened her fingers in my hair. Hugh laughed because the largest goat had discovered the largest olive tree and like some tall but malformed adventurer was standing on his hind legs and nibbling in tenuous balance at the dusty leaves. It was like Hugh, I thought, to care more about the rising, unnaturally distended old goat than about the girl.

The goat chewed while the girl ran to us. Full of trust and candor she skirted a creamy boulder, she sped through the grass. On bare feet she raced toward the rocky, precipitous slope that separated the hilltop where we watched from the secluded green valley where her unsuspecting goats were feeding. But where had she gotten her clothes, the castoff garden hat and tattered dress so clearly unintended for rusticity? How could she be so unaware of girlhood, so unaware of the fact that the goatherd, in this lonely world, was usually a sullen boy or unshaven, unfriendly man?

“Here she comes,” Fiona cried. “Help her.”

How many times had we sat on this same fragment of rocky wall composed of stones that certainly were the teeth of time, sat together on this hill of ours and watched the transformation of hills and air, hemlocks and clouds, roots and rocks into a clear and sunlit but always lifeless panorama that we never ceased to admire? And now eagle, goats, unlikely girl. Perhaps Fiona had appealed to the sylvan sources in a voice more winsome and undeniable than ever before. At any rate I could not begrudge Fiona the exhilaration that was now removing her, distracting her, from Hugh and me.

“Don’t frighten her, Cyril. Please.”

I stood. We all stood. My very posture acknowledged the voices behind my back and welcomed the girl. Like one of her charges she scrambled up to us, raising dust, clutching at loose stones and tufts of grass, discovering crevices with her bare toes, laughing at the ease with which she emulated the climbing ability of her silken goats. Her face was round, her eyes were dark, the enormous flimsy hat remained somehow on the back of her head, there was a faded pink bow fastened to the bodice of the threadbare gown that fell below the knees and yet swirled and mingled with the bright air and dust she raised. She clung to the hillside, laughed again, glanced up and took her bearings and then lowered her eyes and without hesitation scrambled the last few feet into our waiting arms.

“Made it,” I said aloud, and placed the flat of my open hand on the small of her back, helped her over the wall, stepped aside for Hugh. We crowded around her shamelessly, Catherine took hold of a bare elbow, Hugh vied with Fiona for a closer look.

“She’s mine, baby, all mine!”

“Fiona saw her first,” Catherine said. “Let Fiona try to talk to her.”

“That’s right,” I murmured, “Fiona’s more bucolic than the rest of us.”

“Never mind. I’ll give each of you a little taste!”

We laughed. In unison we lapsed suddenly into silence. With unnecessary delicacy and concern for her feelings we stood around her — and stared. Not so the girl, who wanted to talk and did, and who was young but by no means a child and large though not as large as Hugh, Fiona, Catherine and me. Yes, it was the girl rather than ourselves who was outspoken in curiosity and who began and sustained our conversation, wanting to know us, wanting to tell us about her life. She spoke in a constant uninterrupted rush of sound and gesture, assuming our comprehension of the barbaric syllables and girlish pantomime. Up went the soft arm shaded with faint hair. She shrugged in the direction of the valley. She sighed, she extended both empty hands. She smiled, held up six fingers. She smiled, shook her head, touched both breasts, clapped a small hand to her unprotected loins. But all this was unimportant, she seemed to say, because she was only a goat-girl. Whereas we, she knew, were men of mystery, women of beauty. And she recognized us, she seemed to say, though she had never expected the goats to lead her to the good luck of this encounter, which she did not intend to spend on mere self-preoccupation. Hardly.

“Make her stop talking, baby. It’s time to eat.”

But she would not stop, was unquenchable, even while I raised my eyebrows and smiled and demurred and Fiona, lovely tense barelegged Fiona, opened the widemouthed sack and passed around the cherries. No, hands laden with that suggestive fruit and mouth stuffed with cherries, lips pursed to spit out the stones, on she talked — singling out each one of us for analysis, glancing to the rest of us for confirmation of her judgment, her appreciation, her right to associate herself with our mystery, our beauty. She overlooked Hugh’s missing arm, was simply not interested in his missing arm, but concentrated instead on Hugh’s little black pointed beard, reached up and stroked it with fingers juice-stained and knowing. She had tousled with the horns of the largest goat, she knew that the affinities between certain men and certain animals were to be respected. She touched her bare foot to Fiona’s bare foot, giggled when Fiona giggled, then swung about and exclaimed over Catherine’s breasts and filled her wet hands with Catherine’s hair. And then? And then she turned to me.

Or rather she glanced at Fiona, glanced at Catherine, and then once more gave me the sight of her perfectly round eyes which for the moment were certainly a match for the cherries. But no gesture of awe, no smile, no uncomfortable burst of shyness, no quickness of breath. Nothing. She did not care that by now half her flock was beginning to climb the further wall of the valley. She counted on Fiona and Catherine for tolerance.

“Kiss her, baby. She probably thinks you’re some kind of god.”

“Of course she does,” I said, and bent down and obliged Fiona as always. My face was half again as large as the girl’s, my lips were full while hers were thin and remarkably pink in color. The kiss was a mere stitch in the tapestry of my sensual experience. The distance between the goat-girl and singer of sex could not be bridged by a single kiss, prolonged or not, agreeable or not. But I who had kissed how many girls at Fiona’s bidding now kissed this one, and beneath my hand I felt a sprig of clover, a spray of green growth snagged from the field. At least there was a pleasing moisture on my cheek and mouth, at least the goat-girl considered herself loved by the unattainable man whose name she would always try to remember and say aloud to her goats.

“Hugh,” I said, turning away and glancing first at Fiona and then at Catherine: “How about it?”

“Pass, boy. For me, one woman’s plenty.”

“Oh, Hugh, kiss her just once, like Cyril. Catherine doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t care if he kisses her or not.”

“Doesn’t care, boy. You hear that?”

“I mean it, Hugh. Kiss her, if that’s what you want.”

“Cyril, baby, save us!”

“No,” I said, laughing and taking hold of Catherine’s arm, “fun’s over.”

“Oh, you’re just trying to spoil my morning. All of you.” And turning, laughing, staring at Hugh, pulling at the elastic of her tight shorts: “If you won’t kiss our little goat-girl, baby, kiss me instead!”

“Anyway,” I said softly, “she’s gone.”

Were they listening? Were they interested? I would never know because I had already waved at the tiny white figure once again watching us down there in the midst of her girlish vigil beneath the largest olive tree, had already begun to guide Catherine down the other and more gentle slope of our sunlit hill. We walked slowly and heavily, listening to the tread of my chamois boots and Catherine’s worn-out green tennis shoes, moved slowly down the hot pastoral grade with arms about each other’s waists and faces raised to the sun that was dissipated, invisible, yet uniformly present wherever we looked. Our bodies were free, our temperaments were in accord. And near the bottom of the hill we paused, and Catherine rested her head on my shoulder. Her voice, when I heard it, was low and sensible.

“What was the trouble last night?” she asked. “Meredith again?”

I nodded.

“More nosebleeds?”

I nodded.

“She’s had them for years.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “I’m fond of Meredith.”

“Are you?”

“Of course I am.”

We kissed each other. The goat-girl and I had kissed each other. Surely on the hilltop we had just abandoned, Hugh and Fiona were kissing too. So my theory of sexual extension, I thought, was taking root, already new trees were growing from the seeds we had spit so carelessly onto that barren ground.

“FIONA IS PERPLEXED, BABY. LISTEN A MINUTE.”

“I’m listening.”

“We were standing together in the dark, like this. We were nude, like this. The whole thing was a duplication of us right now, but different.”

“Well, I hope it was different.”

“Please, baby. Be serious.”

“I had an idea we might talk tonight. Tell more.”

“I was giggling. Just a little.”

“Sure you were.”

“What’s the matter with you? Stop fencing. And you could control your delicious hands. I want to talk.”

“Control your own.”

“If I can’t talk to you, I’m lost.”

“The difference, Fiona, the difference.”

“It’s not just that he’s thin and bony and was trembling. I love all that. It was something else.”

“Don’t stop now.”

“God, you’re irritating.”

“Sure I am. Why not?”

“Baby, please.”

“Start over, Fiona. My love can wait.”

“I want you, baby.”

“Keep talking.”

“We were standing here in the nude, like now. About three o’clock in the morning, and I thought you were on his mind because he seemed taller than ever, bonier, and he was cold, baby, cold. I had my arms around his neck and crossed, like this. Loosely. I didn’t care about his hand on my behind. I hardly knew it was there. I guess I tugged on his beard a little bit with my teeth. But that’s all. I was just hoping that he’d know how good he made me feel and begin to relax.”

“Sounds all right to me. What’s the problem?”

“I wish you’d stop caressing me. God!”

“Caressing stops.”

“Kiss me.”

“Let’s finish the seminar. What happened.”

“You smell good, baby.”

“You, too.”

“That’s enough, now. Please.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Just stop being Cyril a minute, can’t you?”

“You’re the one who’s puzzled, Fiona, not me.”

“It’s just that he was doing something funny with that hand of his. I began to feel it. He was making me uncomfortable, and I didn’t know why. I was conscious of something a little different and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was beginning to lose what you call my crispness, baby, I was beginning to smile the way I do when I’m not sure what’s happening. He was making me think, he was making me fish around inside for a little clue about what he was doing and how I was supposed to respond. It was such a small thing, and yet suddenly I couldn’t think about him or me but just about what he was doing back there with that hand of his. Not him, but his hand. Not me, but my behind. It wasn’t exactly a tickling, but it wasn’t sweet. I was uncertain, baby, uncertain. I whispered something to him, but he didn’t care. I tried to move, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t unhappy, just uncertain. Uncomfortable but interested. And then I got the idea, because he was pulling on me. Just pulling on me. He wasn’t rough, he wasn’t tender. Just holding half my little melon as hard as he could and pulling. He forgot me, baby. He forgot himself. And I did too. Because suddenly I got the idea that he must be working in collusion with some great big lovely satyr with hair all over his shanks and a lot of experience with little girls’ behinds. But he wasn’t. There was no satyr. Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No, baby. Nothing at all.”

“Poor Fiona.”

“Now I can’t think of anything else. Who’ll be my satyr — you?”

“Shaggy shoulders, horns, a lot of experience. OK?”

“You’re fun, baby, you really are.”

AFTER ALL, I TOLD MYSELF, IT HAD BEEN A LONG HOTdawn, and emerging now from the dragon’s mouth of the dark green cypresses, I found myself once more in this mild extremity of a familiar mood. There was no longer any point in being dressed for the night, everything about me revealed the pointlessness of a garb that had already served its purpose. The dressing gown untied and hanging open like a pair of splendid maroon-colored silken sails bereft of wind, the carefully tended hair uncombed and rumpled, the clear eyes cloudy, the fresh mouth numbed with fading taste, the cord of the pajama bottoms no longer tied in a perfect bow but sleepily knotted, the feet unaccountably bare, and brows furrowed, hands in pockets, no message on lips that were nonetheless working together in sensual emptiness, not even a cigarette to prolong the vaporous moment — all this told me that the negative account was full and that my usual and fastidious preparations of only a few hours past were now used up.

Catherine was no doubt sleeping. And Hugh? Fiona? The villa concealed on the other side of the wall of cypress trees behind me was dark, the villa lying directly ahead was also dark, concealing what contented faces or whispering mouths I could not predict. Would I hear them? Glimpse them? Join them? Or merely feel my way into a trysting place that would prove white and shadowy and empty after all? Was I, a lover, seeking the companionship of two more lovers or near lovers who might be thickly awake and just as interested as I was in a few moments of drowsy speech? I could not be sure.

I felt the dew on the soles of my feet, I saw myself sitting on the edge of Catherine’s bed and fumbling, as I had, with spectacles but not with tennis shoes. I smiled to think that the spectacles were crooked on the bridge of my nose, smiled to think that for once I had deviated from my usual habits and had walked among the pines and beside the dark sea, had returned without special purpose to Catherine’s villa. I had pushed my way through the cypress trees, had strolled in the lemon grove that fanned out soft and silent at the edge of our lives. Why, I asked myself. Why? And replied with another smile, a keener appreciation of the weight of the silk now dragging down my shoulders and brushing my calves.

Voices. One of the children demanding comfort from Catherine? But no, I told myself, walking squarely through the scented darkness that separated trees and villa, and feeling the irises growing large in eyes no longer as lackluster and heavy lidded as they had felt in the first portion of this wasted dawn — no, the voices were not high enough or querulous enough for the children’s. Thoughtfully I approached the rotten shutter locked open on the night and darkness within, avoiding stealth I approached so close to the irregular oblong of Catherine’s window that I might have peered inside, had I so desired. I stopped. I listened. I was close enough to see the morning-glories twining in the broken slats of the shutter, and yet even now the voices inside the familiar room were muffled, unclear, loud with intimacy but indistinct. I recognized the burden of the dialogue if not the words, and suddenly recognized the voices themselves because one was tired, insistent, reluctant, and belonged to Catherine, while the other was ingratiating, importuning, and obviously issued from a dry throat that could only be Hugh’s.

But Hugh? Bare-chested? Fresh from his own trampled garden and wide-awake? Was that really Hugh in there, in this late hour sprawled across a sagging bed more mine than his? Hugh propped up on his one good eager arm and filled with clumsy confidence, talking to Catherine as he had never talked to Fiona, Hugh now singing his happy but constricted version of my sweet song? No doubt of it, I told myself, our paths were crossing, and I moved closer.

I listened. I asked myself what was unusual about this pattern of sounds. I followed the rhythms of Catherine’s voice, the rhythms of Hugh’s, and then I understood. Even before I heard any actual words I understood that Catherine was employing a variety of defensive responses, whereas Hugh was saying the same words again and again as if the ease with which he had apparently shifted from Fiona’s stimulation to Catherine’s struggle justified his use of repetition. But why had Fiona let him go? Why must Catherine struggle?

I could not make out any of Catherine’s negative phrases, and decided that she was hiding her face, speaking into the pillow. But no matter, I told myself, since Catherine’s declamations came readily to mind (those words and phrases of conventional denial), and since what most concerned me now, as a matter of fact, was the precise content of what Hugh was saying, the exact nature of those particular words which had borne the freight of his sexual needs for all the years of his marriage.

For a mere instant he raised his voice. For an instant I heard him as clearly as if Hugh had popped his head out of the window and spoken not for Catherine’s benefit but mine.

“Don’t be afraid of Daddy Bear,” he was saying, “don’t be afraid of Daddy Bear …"

So this was what we had bargained for, Fiona and Catherine and I — this sad and presumptuous appeal from a man who had spent all the nights of his marriage fishing for the love of his wife with the hook of a nursery persona. The dew was a cold bath on the soles of my feet. My shoulders were heavy, my hands were more than ever resigned to the large pockets of the indifferent silk dressing gown. Instantly Hugh’s voice sank, subsided, once more rumbled along its subterranean road. The translation went hand in hand with the sounds of his voice, simple text and desperate message were one in my ear, and it took no great effort to identify the source of his words. Of course, I told myself, the honeymoon. What else if not a few words stolen in desperation from the vocabulary of the cheapest myth of childhood and spoken aloud unwittingly but successfully into Catherine’s ear in the first surge of crisis? Yes, I told myself, those words had worked, had carried Hugh with surprise and relief across that first rough spot of Catherine’s ignorance and thereafter had become the only lyrics to his monogamous song.

But why deny the humor, I asked myself, why give way to pity for Catherine and contempt for Hugh? Was there any conventional privacy that might not yield up its unique embarrassment? While the morning-glories were straining to unfurl, while Hugh lay floundering in constricted speech, while Catherine struggled to interrupt his persistency and I stood listening — why not concentrate, I asked myself, on the consolations? At least Hugh still wanted to assume his sentimental bestial shape. At least the mode of his approach was nothing new for Catherine. At least their rituals and formulas of marriage were still in force. And whatever else might happen, I told myself, my insight of the moment and Fiona’s elegance would consort together to safeguard her from all the means of self-betrayal Hugh might devise.

But Hugh was winding down at last, Catherine was beginning to give in to habit, or perhaps more than habit. I noted the first light in the sky, I moved one step closer to the window and assured myself that they would have a few minutes yet before all three children arose and came leaping into that shocked and harried bed. Yes, I thought, Hugh had slipped off one schedule but gained another. Their house was in order, so to speak, the roles had changed.

I turned away, calmly I tied the ends of my forgotten sash. And straightening shoulders and spectacles alike, I returned along the empty path that stretched endlessly from villa to villa. It amused me to discover that I was walking slowly but with a step reflecting nonetheless the rhythms of the central phrase in Hugh’s proposal, as if an old drummer were beating a brief and muffled paradiddle in my head, my inner ear, my heart. Would he find my tennis shoes? Would he begin to understand that there could be no limits on our exchange and that in the circumscribed country of Illyria a grassy wind was bound to blow away the last shreds of possessiveness? I hoped he would.

In all this darkness and silence I smelled the dead roses, saw the open door and warm rows of tiles, heard the clear but sleepy voice of Fiona calling to me from deep within our thick white walls and timeless collection of vases, earthen pots, artistic tokens of harmonious life. Her soft clear voice was coming as close at it ever did to peevishness, she might have been lying in the dew at my feet. I yawned, I approached the door, I noticed that our morning-glories were doing better than Hugh’s.

“Cyril? Is that you?”

“Expecting someone else?” I murmured, and entered the darkness, listened for another brief volley from her hard sweet sleep-ridden mind.

“Just you, baby. You.”

“WHERE’S MY MOTHER?”

“I told you, Meredith. They’re bringing the wine. You can’t have an idyl without wine.”

“I’m sick of your old idyls.”

“You’re lucky to be here. If it weren’t for me, you and your little sisters would be back at the villa where Hugh, for one, thinks you belong.”

“It’s not my father who doesn’t want us around. It’s you.”

“Look, Meredith. We need flowers, lots of flowers. You can’t have crowns without lots of flowers.”

“I don’t want any old flower crowns.”

“Your sisters do.”

“How do you know? They can’t say anything.”

“Of course they can. They speak the language of children. But take my word for it, Meredith. All little girls like flower crowns in their hair.”

“I know what you’re doing. You’re just trying to impress my parents. That’s all. You’re just trying to fool them again.”

“I’m simply going to bedeck their daughters with flowers, Meredith. It’s a nice idea.”

“It’s dumb.”

“That’s enough. I want you to gather all the flowers you can. Understand?”

“God, you’re mean.”

“To work, Meredith, to work.”

She turned, she hiked up her baggy shorts, she tried to shake some kind of curl into the chopped-off hair now wet and dark and stuck midway to her ears, she attempted to appear undaunted. But she knew I was watching her, had once more felt the weight of my interested wisdom bearing down on the brittle sticks of her suspicion, and as if my gentle insistence on obedience were not enough, had already begun to respond reluctantly to my idea of the crowns. Even Meredith was not above the idea of a little self-beautification, not exempt from the hope of one day becoming glamorized, idealized, in the eyes of preoccupied parents. Already the green shoots were popping up in that small dark brain of hers, she was trapped in my smile.

“Come on,” I said. “Dolores and Eveline and I are waiting.”

She glanced at me over her shoulder and then muttered something, stopped, and yanked up a fistful of Cyclamen persicum without regard for the pink petals scattering, bleeding, or the soft heads clutched in her hand.

“Not so hard,” I murmured. “And leave longer stems.”

“I want my mother. I don’t like your silly games.”

“Put the flowers over here. We’ll make a lot of piles and then we’ll start weaving.”

Without turning she flung her poor crushed offering toward my feet. But she had heard my voice, she was drenched in my patience, she could not deny the laughter of Dolores (or was it Eveline?), and her fingers were stained with the juice of the torn Cyclamen persicum. She could hardly help but see that our glen, our golden glen, was filled with clumps of pink flowers, and red and yellow and white flowers, and already she must have envisioned all those helpless buds entwined in little Eveline’s hair and in her own. She could not resist. She squatted. She began to pick.

But Cyril among the children? Alone, absolutely alone, with Catherine’s two identical female twins and one hostile girl? And only the old black sleeping dog to share my guardianship? It was not a typical situation for me. To serve as liaison between the adults and children, now and again to break off from the four-pointed constellation of our adulthood and sail away, as it were, in order to intercept the small three-pointed heavenly figure of the children and stall its approach, contributing to the freedom of the adults I left behind and creating unenthusiastic coherence among the children I took in hand — all this was one thing and understandable. But to propose separation at the outset and before it was necessary, to make the suggestion casually yet willingly that it might be fun for the children were I to lead them on ahead to the glen — this was quite another thing, and had prompted surprise from Fiona and Catherine, scorn from Hugh, sullenness from Meredith, and mere acquiescence from the little twins. Then why the halfhearted magnanimity, the atypical gesture? Why this minor sacrifice, this exposure to boredom? Meredith was partially right, of course, but I was a better judge of motives than Meredith, and perhaps there was something more to my plan than deception, selfishness, showmanship. Perhaps I wanted to spare Catherine a moment or two, perhaps I wanted to ensure Hugh some time alone with my wife and his, perhaps I was simply inclined to amuse the twins for once and to appease Meredith in the process, show her my other side, give her a half-hour of my attention. Perhaps I wanted to share my capacity for different games, for love on another plane. Who knows?

“I thought you were going to help.”

“I am, I am.”

“Then why are you just standing there like that?”

“You need more of the Echium diffusum.”

“Huh?”

“Those little red flowers, Meredith. Over there.”

The boredom was not exactly boredom, the distance between myself and the children was not intolerable. I was enjoying myself. The soft green dusty tumors were hanging from the branches of the fig trees just above my head and within easy reach, the infinitely soft and idle grass pillowed the sitting twins and the sleeping dog, a denser species of brushy pine ringed our glen, the fragile flowers were embedded in remarkable variety in the tissue of the ash-blond grass, the sunlight was descending through the green leaves and speckling all four of us. I heard Meredith crawling about this gentle place intent on my work, I saw the polka dots dancing, so to speak, on the ruffled jumpers of the two smaller girls seated side by side in the warm grass and holding hands, blowing chubby laughter in my direction as if they had never seen me before. And the peace, the warmth, the stasis, the smell of it — in such circumstances how could I help but enjoy my own immensity of size or the range of my interests, how help but appreciate the adaptibility of certain natural scenes which, like this one, allow for the play of children one minute and the seclusion of adults the next? I felt a coolness between my porous thin white shirt and the skin of my chest. In linen slacks and alligator belt and hard low-cut shoes the color of amber, I sensed the consciousness of someone carefully dressed for taking care of children. The children themselves were decked out for the occasion in ruffled jumpers, and in baggy but laundered shorts and sleeveless top.

“It’s hard to tell your little sisters apart, Meredith. Very hard.”

“It’s easy.”

“At least your mother could dress them differently. Blue polka dots for one, say, and red for the other.”

“She likes them the same.”

“I see.”

“Eveline has bigger teeth.”

“I don’t think they understand our game. Let’s teach them.”

No answer. No effort to show me anything except her back. Was she engaged at last? Lost in the scent of the flowers and distracted in the dream I had offered her? Or was she eluding kindness, going through motions, feigning preoccupation, reminding herself that she disliked the sound of my voice and disdained my game? Was I dealing with Meredith the spy, who was filled with duplicity and fear of what she took to be my own duplicity, or was I now in charge of Meredith the harmless child, as I had first assumed? Engaged, I decided, and only the harmless child, because now her small white haunches were frozen where she had just been crawling in the still grass, her head was turned, one hand was raised, in poignant shyness and feminine delicacy she was holding up to her small pointed nose a single bud of Tolpis barbata and sniffing in pleasure unmistakably her own. The thin hand quivered. I was sure that her eyes were closed.

“Well,” I murmured, “if you won’t help your sisters, I guess I’ll have to.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’d prefer that we work together, Meredith.”

And pausing, thinking, and then deciding to relent: “Dolores,” she said, “Eveline, pick the flowers.”

I rubbed the patina of soft dust from one green pendant fig, I watched as Meredith broke a few more stems and abruptly propelled herself toward a clump of Cistus ladaniferus worthy, I thought, of any young girl’s breathlessness. But obviously Meredith was more attentive to the situation than to the flowers, was listening for some remark from me or some sound from the twins. She waited, she shrugged, until conscience and impatience overcame the lure to beauty and elicited a brief example of the pre-emptory maternal tone she always adopted when addressing the twins. “Come on, come on,” she muttered, “just pick them. Pick a lot of them.”

“That’s fine, Meredith. But Dolores and Eveline don’t understand. Let’s help them.”

“They won’t be able to make crowns anyway.”

“Of course they will. But if we’re going to surprise Fiona and Hugh and Catherine, we’ll have to hurry. There isn’t much time.”

“Who cares?”

“Listen, Meredith. Let’s make yours out of those pink and lavender flowers and the white ones. They’re best for your eyes.”

“I’m not a child.”

“Maybe I’ll wear one too, who knows.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Just sitting down, Meredith. Do you mind?”

Cyril descending among the children. Cyril reclining on the floor of the fig tree bower. Fiona’s husband reposing within arm’s length of Catherine’s two smaller girls who appeared to have been dropped like heavy seeds into our dark-eyed glen. Amuse them, I told myself, control them, don’t frighten them, don’t awe them with effusion or excessive magnificence. And how easy it was to avoid boredom, repugnance, or exceptional condescension. Of course Meredith was watching me, ready to pounce on my first slip, and of course the twins were watching me, waiting for what chance to erupt into private persecution or unpredictable rebellion I could not be sure. If they fled, if they pummeled each other, if they began to shriek — what then? Above all I expected serenity from all three of them, was determined to see for myself that even these three were capable of charm and of conforming to my own concepts of playful sport that would entertain not only them but me. And yet it turned out that I had only to incline my back, extend one leg, seize the upraised knee of the other and smile, first at Dolores and then at Eveline, to cause both children to blink, to roll apart, to come to me.

“Look what you’re doing. You’re kicking my pile of blues to pieces.”

“Sorry. Just gather them up again.”

Supine, I was lying partially supine and wondering whether it was Dolores or Eveline who had flopped belly down on my heavy thigh, Eveline or Dolores who was attempting to perch herself on my upraised knee. But of course one name was as good as the other, I told myself, and for a moment longer tolerated the inertness of the little stomach flat on my thigh and the slow persistent movements of the short legs against my massive calf. But at least there was no tugging on Cyril’s hair, no poking at spectacles, no bouncing. Only the polka dots, the two fat bodies, the two sets of large brown eyes brooding impossibly on mine. The little stomach was sighing, the fat legs were searching for a grip. All this I tolerated for the sake of the apparent depth of feeling with which they were clambering upon the bemused figure of the man who kissed their mother and knew the way to the glen.

“Now we’re going to help Meredith pick the flowers. I’ll show you how.”

They understood, they disengaged legs and stomach from my knee and thigh, they stepped aside and waited (plump, somber, square-faced, bright of eye), and without hesitation they followed my example as I descended to all fours and moved through the speckled sunlight and between the dusty trunks of the fig trees appraising, selecting, admiring, but picking (endlessly picking) the flowers that most caught my attention or most appealed to little Eveline or little Eveline’s twin.

“You like this one. Take it to Meredith.”

“Don’t bother. We’ve got plenty of those.”

“Never mind, Meredith. Eveline likes this kind.”

“God …”

Like my small white purely artificial sheep with its stifled cry and faint accusing expression on the small face that was neither human nor animal but something of each, they drifted about in the fig tree bower together, all three of them, clumsy industrious children engrossed in gathering armfuls of goatsbeard, ghostly asphodel, and the heavy lidded Anemone coronaria. I led the way. My industry, though of a different sort, matched theirs. Eveline, I noted, remained at my side while her twin preferred more independence and was given to nibbling certain prime specimens of the Cistus salviaefolius.

“She’s eating them. Make her stop.”

“Dolores is enjoying herself, Meredith. Let’s leave her alone.”

“She’s ruining everything. You want her to.”

“Not at all, Meredith. Not at all. But look, it’s easy to make the crowns. You simply take a few flowers from each pile and a few green leaves and bind them together with these slender stems until you get a chain long enough to fit around your head. Then you fasten the ends, of course, into a beautiful circlet of all kinds of flowers. These little milky stems are like string. Think you can do it?”

“God, what a question.”

“You and I will have to help your sisters. But I’m sure that you can make a beautiful crown without any help from Cyril.”

“Why don’t you just stop talking?”

“I don’t suppose your mother ever told you that Theophrastus was the father of botany. Well, Meredith, he was.”

She scowled. I cajoled the two smaller girls until they were finally seated in a row with Meredith facing what I thought of immediately as the feast of the flowers. Bent heads, sounds of dismay, hands tangling, tears of innocence stuck between chubby fingers or falling onto their little immobile legs. Their silence made mine the more melodious as I watched all of them struggling with tissued gems, their peaceful though unsuccessful employment heightened the serenity of my own involvement in what was, for me, an easy and, as it were, poetic task. I worked swiftly and my progress kept pace with their frustrations. Meredith was not as clever or dexterous as I had at first assumed, her sisters could do no more than mangle my prized flowers in helpless palms. Yes, I thought, their ineptitude was certainly my skill, their strain my relaxation, their dubious fun my pleasure.

“Having trouble?”

“No.”

“Some of those stems are a little short for weaving. But that looks pretty nice, Meredith. Good choice of colors.”

“It’s falling apart.”

The occasion was mine, and I was determined that each child should have her luxurious and perfectly executed crown. It was up to me, and so I wove all three of them, though not before I created a great thick yellow wreath of Laurus nobilis and Genista cinerea that was heavy, majestic, sweetly scented and much too large for the head of a child.

“Like it?”

“God, you’re selfish.”

“I simply knew it would take longer, Meredith, so I made it first. Now we’ll fix up yours and your little sisters’.”

“I thought we were making them just for us.”

“Who’s being selfish now?”

“You don’t need one. Why do you have to have one too? They’re only for children.”

“If you want me to make you a flower crown as nice as mine, how about a little politeness? Shall we finish the game or stop right here?”

“It has to be as good as yours. Promise?”

“Promise.”

Yes, all three children wanted wreaths like mine, and so I wove them — tossing aside my splendid yellow concoction, adjusting the spectacles, smiling into those three little expectant faces. Meredith put an arm around Eveline’s shoulder, through their eyes I saw the familiar and freshly turned-out man become the flower god at play. Why not? Sentimentality was hardly a problem, my estimation of the circumference of each of those three small heads was more accurate, say, than Hugh’s. And if despite this good judgment of mine I erred somewhat in the size of Meredith’s little queenly crown so that it sat low on her slender brow and obscured her eyes? And if the other two were hastily made and were identically composed of nothing more than leftovers from the bed of Odontospermum maritimum? Could such trivialities detract from the eagerness of those cross-legged children or from my own composure? Not at all. The satisfaction of adjusting each delicate crown on each little bowed waiting head was mine. The satisfaction of seeing their self-consciousness was mine. The transference was actual, the flowers of the glen leapt from their hair, drooped over their ears, with a few good natural strokes I paid my debt to Iris and to all the other imaginary nudes of a more distant time.

“On your feet,” I murmured, “they’re coming.”

The three girls in a silent row, I leaning back against the bare trunk of the tallest fig tree — thus they found us, Fiona and Hugh and Catherine, when I called out, directing them to the passage through the pines. They veered our way, laughing, Hugh pursuing his dark unrhythmical shadow, our two wives carrying between them the wicker-bound demijohn of white wine, and found the passage and entered our fig tree bower.

“Hugh, look what he’s done!”

“Catherine, what do you think of what Cyril’s done to our little girls?”

“They’re sweet, baby. They really are. But what about yourself? I want to see you wearing a great big floppy crown of flowers.”

“I’ve got one.”

“Well, put it on, baby. Let’s see.”

I shrugged, reached down and slowly retrieved the wreath at my feet. The children watched, Hugh laughed. Cathernie’s eyes met mine. With both hands I settled that outspoken yellow mass into the heavy texture of my blond hair. I felt the tree at my back and slowly glanced up through the speckled light toward the clear sky that accompanied all our days of idyling.

“God, boy, what a sight.”

“Don’t ever take it off, baby. Ever.”

IHAVE MADE IT PLAIN TO CATHERINE THAT IT IS A GOOD idea for the two of us to poke around, as I put it, in the remains of my tapestry. She agrees. She now understands my reasoning. My moody psychic organization is becoming hers, together we have been touring this landscape of old deaths and fresh possibilities. The lovers have become companions. We are equally inclined, at last, to share the pleasure of turning up the occasional familiar relic or of visiting one of the crevices or hollow enclosures once known to our foursome or perhaps threesome, or even to Catherine alone or to me alone. What else is my tapestry if not the map of Love? I know well its contours, its monuments, its abandoned gardens, its narrow streets, and Catherine is beginning to know them too. In an atmosphere of peaceful investigation we are traveling together from sign to sign, from empty stage to empty stage. We turn a blind corner, we hear a distant bell, we discuss a handprint on a fragment of stone wall, suddenly we recognize the featureless head of a small child sculpted in white stone. What we both know, we share. What Catherine does not know, I tell her. The monuments, the places to visit, are inexhaustible.

For instance, not far from the squat church (within sight of its little mordant cemetery, as a matter of fact) stands a small aboveground granite cistern built by the barbarians in the same era as the construction of the squat church itself. Its mouth is open, a few crude steps lead down to pestilent green water, the vaulted ceiling reflects the greasy surface of the irregular clay tiles, the small and crumbling protrusions carved on the columns suggest a spiraling array of curling leaves, as the original artisan must have intended. Yet more important, a pear tree grows in this unlikely place, has taken root in the mud that lies beneath the polluted water and has flourished, has burst the masonry of the vaulted ceiling so that now it flowers high above the large ragged hole its green head once forced through the blanket of hard tile. It is a curious spectacle, this fusion of pear tree and ancient cistern. And sitting side by side on one of the low steps, hips touching and shoulders touching, elbows on knees and chins on clasped hands, smelling the stench and staring into the darkness of the cistern and the light let down by the heroic tree — what better spot, I told her, for concealing the wooden arm which had been stolen by Fiona and Hugh and retrieved just in time, I thought, by me. After all, the arm could not have been returned to the church, and our villa was not the place for displaying a religious theft. And so it was into this very water that late one night I flung the heavy arm, risking Fiona’s petulance but satisfying the dictates of my own good sense. At the time of our visit, Catherine and I speculated on the possibility that it must still be there, sunk in the deep fetid water toward the rear of the cistern, and waterlogged, still gaudy, still unattached to human form. Perhaps it is, though no hand rose to the surface when, that day, I tossed a few smooth stones into the echoing darkness and, in a sentence or two, evoked the past. But at least the tree stands, the cistern stands, while the shadows of love, as I told Catherine, are still flickering.

Or, to take another example, not far from the church and the cistern and cemetery stands a perfectly simple and unadorned statue of a small nude figure which, at first glance, appears to be that of a young girl. The stone is disintegrating, the lower legs and feet have long since been destroyed, the slender arms are cracked, the head is gone. The figure is little more than a small torso standing somewhat higher than my waist and covered with a leprous pink skin of dust that is the residue of its own deteriorating stone. Unprepossessing? The very antithesis of voluptuous intention? A mere weed beside the fiery bloom of the conventional greater-than-life-size female nudes sculpted out of muscular marble or cast in bronze? Yes, at first glance the breasts are small and soft, nothing more than suggestions of latent womanhood, the hips are undistinguished, the belly seems to have been molded by the hand of a sexless creator. And at first passing glance the eye resists and then dismisses the one blemish, a disproportionately large and perfectly round black hole drilled upward between those small helpless thighs.

Why then this decided sensation of erotic power? Why the implication of some secret design? What brilliant and, so to speak, ravaging guile could possibly be concealed inside that slender and merely partial form? Why did I smile immediately and Fiona cry out in happy recognition at the black hole driven so unaccountably into that small portion of the stone which, realistically, should have revealed no more than sexual silence?

Of course I knew the answers then as I know them now, knew them with as much warm pleasure as I knew them only weeks ago (or days?) when Catherine and I were standing alone in that same sun-filled abandoned place and talking together, contemplating the very same stone figure that had once so mystified my eager friend and aroused my wife. Observing Catherine’s hand on the little sloping stone shoulder and seeing Hugh’s bafflement in Catherine’s eyes and hearing Hugh’s questions in Catherine’s mouth, I could do no more than point out to Catherine that these two situations of discovery were dissimilar and yet similar, while no matter how many times the small pinkish torso gave up its little secret, the actual grace and power of this small figure remained undiminished. Because in the first situation, as I reconstructed it for Catherine, Fiona had verbalized the secret whereas I had relied on demonstration, Fiona putting her arm around Hugh’s waist and explaining in a lighthearted speech that the beautiful stone figure was really a little boy as well as a little girl, I searching about in the grass until I found the missing piece which, when inserted into that large and perfectly round black hole, demonstrated the statue’s double nature already defined in Fiona’s words. And searching in the grass again, at first with no success and then with good luck, once more finding the handy length of polished stone where I had apparently dropped it so long ago, and repeating the demonstration for Catherine, softly I filled in a few more details, recalled a few more instances of forgotten speech, forgotten sensation, describing how Fiona had enjoyed this human toy, had swiftly taken over the demonstration from methodical Cyril and had exclaimed repeatedly that the figure was a girl for Hugh and me but was always a boy, a beautiful little boy, for her. Fiona had been right, as Catherine agreed, and Catherine admitted that she too preferred the missing piece in place and yet understood my sympathy for Hugh who had repeatedly attempted to seize it from Fiona’s hand and yank it out so long ago, so far in the past.

And so it stands in that gentle half-demolished enclosure where three of us once frolicked and later, much later, two of us talked, and where Catherine and I may further contemplate it whenever we wish to view ourselves again in light of the handmaiden and youth combined.

Of course the cistern, with its resemblance to the squat church, and the little pink hermaphrodite, with its obvious resemblance to the yellow and vaguely female figure whose history is still fading high on the interior walls of the squat church, are merely two landmarks perused at random from our inexhaustible supply. There are other examples (the Byzantine grave marker on the beach beyond the pines, the table that still lies overturned in the lemon grove, the bend in a rocky path where I sponged the oil of roses onto Catherine’s soft back, a bed of crab grass) and some are more important, some less. And yet how can we choose, Catherine and I, what difference does it make which kiss we recover, or which single laugh or which faint cry we hear again in silence? The tapestry hangs down, the map is spread, one road is as good as the next.

Love beckons.

IDID NOT KNOW HOW LONG I HAD BEEN STANDING THERE with hands in pockets, legs crossed at the ankles, left shoulder slowly and heavily inclining against the flimsy and yet tightly fastened shutters, but I was quite aware of Hugh’s persistent silence and of the obvious fact that if I wished to open the shutters, as indeed I did, I had only to flip the hasp and give them an easy push with a finger or two. Still I waited, keeping my back to Hugh and preferring not to unfasten the shutters but only to lean against them with increasing pressure. I smelled the canal that lay outside at the back of the wall, I heard Hugh rattling his photographic equipment, I heard a solitary pigeon strutting above our heads on the roof. And I dismissed the sound of a liquid chemical slopping into one of his developing pans, I ignored Hugh’s silence, I asked myself what I was doing here with Hugh when I might just as well be embracing Catherine behind our favorite oleander tree. But then shoulder and shutters crossed some kind of threshold so that thanks to no apparent volition of mine they burst open, those ancient tightly secured shutters, and swung back on the light, the gray water, the stone embankment, the rusted body of the old motorbus now the color of red lead.

But I knew full well why I was here with Hugh, knew what Fiona wanted and what was coming, and perhaps should have been more ready than I was to enlist Hugh’s agony in dialogue. And yet I waited, allowing myself to wonder what had become of the woman I had once seen waving from this window where now I leaned, allowing myself to wonder again why the pitted and rusted vehicle down there in the water was more real, so to speak, than the one I remembered. But the lonely pigeon fell into view for a moment, Hugh moaned.

“What’s the matter,” I heard myself saying. “Something wrong?”

“I’m sweating, boy, can’t you see?”

“Chest again?”

“No, boy, it’s not my chest.”

“Well then,” I said, and paused. “How about Fiona?”

“Fiona?”

“Sure,” I said mildly. “Why not?”

“God, boy. Do you know what’s happening?”

“Let’s talk about it.”

But would I be able to bear down on Hugh’s problem? Could Hugh be comforted? He had not selected this room for nothing, it seemed to me, and I could not have been more aware of sagging floor, wet plaster, the crude and heavy bench covered with tin pans, blind cameras. Even the photographs scattered here and there on the white walls were stuck to the rancid plaster with thick and rusted nails that were more appropriate to beams, coffins, heavy planks, than to the glossy and curling enlargements of nude girls. And everything about Hugh himself bore out the nature of his purpose, the extent of his self-created pain, his determination to infect this hour, this day, our two lives and more with his despair. How could I miss the acid stains on the long and skimpy cotton shirt that clung to his chest? How miss the gray discolorations on his long cheeks, the beads of sweat in curling beard and knifelike mustache? How miss the black sailor pants on one side left unbuttoned from loin to waist? Or the fact that he had not even bothered to fasten the left sleeve with the usual safety pin, so that below what should have been the elbow there was merely the empty sleeve, the ghost unheeded but nonetheless in his way? How miss his eyes, his height, his agitation? And against all this I had only patience, tolerance, my systematic personality, Fiona’s silent prompting, the sun at my back. Was it enough?

“You just don’t know what’s going on. That’s all.”

“Do you?”

“I’m appealing to you, boy. Don’t let it happen.”

“Well,” I said slowly, “you’ve had your eye on Fiona since the beginning. Let’s reason from there.”

“She’s got a husband.”

“You’ve got a wife.”

“I’m talking about you, boy, not me.”

“And the torment,” I said and paused, “yours or mine?”

“You don’t know what’s going on in the shadows, boy. That’s all.”

“Tell me.”

“If we don’t work together, if we don’t stop this thing, you’ll lose her.”

“To you?”

“To me — to me. Don’t you see?”

I smiled, I shook my head, I waited. I leaned back in the frame of sunlight and glanced toward Hugh. And as I expected he began to pace, to stride from thick wall to wall, towering, lanky, disheveled, determined to keep us both captive in this little second-story dungeon of his and, in the bargain, to keep Fiona waiting. I watched him, wary and yet at the same time patient, and in that silvery monastic gloom his black bell-bottoms were flapping, his small black eyes were the eyes of a familiar saint. And he paced, he stopped, he tore down one of the photographs and stared at it with aching eyes. I took a long slow breath and tried again.

“Of course I care.”

“A dirty nest, boy. Is that what you want?”

“I suppose you’re trying to blame Fiona?”

“How about a little virtue, boy?”

“Fiona’s the most virtuous woman I’ve ever known.” “She wants me, for God’s sake.”

“Yes,” I murmured, “I think she does.”

“She laughs. She looks at me. She’s always talking about Catherine and me …”

The pigeon, I could hear, had returned to the roof and alone up there was pecking, scratching, fanning its tail. Now Hugh stood upright, and taller than ever in the right-hand empty corner of this oppressive room, reminded me in pointed ears, hard eyes, bitter mouth, that the face of Saint Peter was very like the narrow large-eyed face of Saint Paul. And were the ligaments beginning to part, the flesh to tear? Was his breathing under control at last? Was he beginning to appreciate the tone of my argument? For a moment I closed my eyes and when I opened them there he was, directly in front of me, legs spread, expressionless, with his good arm raised and all his long bony fingers rigidly extended and cupped to the little black pointed beard on his chin.

“It seems to me,” I said gently, “that what you’re really after is my permission.”

I sighed a low leonine sigh and waited, watched the black eyes turning red, listening for the next gagging sounds of his confusion. Would the stony fingers tighten on the pathetic beard? Would he extend his arm and place the full weight of his murderous stone hand against the fern-green field of my expansive breast? But he merely took a step closer and slowly, unconsciously, began to rake his long curving ribs with the spread and rigid fingers of his single hand.

“You don’t mean it,” he whispered. “You can’t.”

“Put it this way,” I murmured, “you want to play footsy with Fiona …”

“No, boy, you’re wrong …”

“And you want me to sanction the bare feet under the table.”

“For God’s sake, I don’t.”

“But why should I? Why won’t you play footsy with Fiona and leave me out of it?”

“Don’t hurt me, boy. Don’t make it worse than it is.”

“Look,” I said gently, “do we really have to have all this male camaraderie in matters of love?”

But my confidence was exactly what he was fishing for, of course, and even as I spoke I realized that my last remark could do no more than goad him on to exactly the sentimentality I had hoped to avoid. Fiona was waiting, Catherine was waiting, the wine was chilled, the thick-lipped bell was tolling in its bird’s nest of iron on top of the squat church. Yet here I stood, drinking from the sack of Hugh’s bad conscience and knowing full well that there was no stopping him and that I could not deny his confusion, his deflating misery, his annoying dependence on Fiona’s bored but sympathetic husband. At least I was ready for him and did not flinch when the long arm rose, as it did then, and the hand fell and clamped itself to my shoulder.

“I thought you’d listen, boy. I thought you’d get me out of this mess.”

“What more can I say?”

“How much has she really told you?”

“If you want to know what Fiona calls her little trade secrets — ask her.”

“I don’t believe she’s told you a damn thing. There it is.”

“Well,” I murmured, “the only problem is that Fiona’s afraid you don’t like her enough.”

“Don’t like her enough.”

“That’s right.”

“You mean she’s unsure of herself? Fiona? And worried about me?”

“Looks that way.”

“I just don’t understand, boy. I can’t believe it. She couldn’t just confide in you like that. Manhood rebels at infidelity, it’s only natural.”

“If you must know,” I said and laughed, “she calls you Malvolio. She says she loves her Malvolio best. Will you believe me now?”

“That’s crazy.”

“Ask her yourself.”

“She doesn’t love me best. She couldn’t.”

“Oh well,” I murmured, “you know what she means.”

I shrugged. Slowly and gently I dislodged his blind hand, and turned and carefully drew in the shutters, hooked them tightly closed. And above the sound of Hugh’s stony breath and the distant bell, was that of the voice of a young girl sitting somewhere in a doorway beyond the canal and pining in loud crude song for a lost love she was not yet old enough to know? I hoped that Hugh was not too preoccupied to catch a bar or two of that high song and plainly sexual refrain.

“Feeling better?”

“Do me a favor, boy. Don’t tell her about this … talk of ours.”

“Fiona? I won’t tell her a thing.” I crossed the room, dragged open the warped door and waited for Hugh to follow. “And by the way,” I said, “I won’t tell Catherine either. OK?”

It was not the last I would hear of Hugh’s medievalism, I knew, but at least for a moment the lid was once again in place on his poor troubled pot.

“ARE THEY COMING?”

“Not yet, I guess.”

“Cyril? Are they staying away from us on purpose?”

“It’s only been a few hours, more or less.”

“It’s been a day, a whole day.”

“Perhaps they just don’t want to intrude.”

“Cyril? Give me a kiss.”

“You’re not the least bit interested in kissing old Cyril. Why pretend?”

“You’re right, baby. How did you know?”

Waiting? Letting the day die? Bridging our islands, as Fiona always said, with a few friendly sex allusions and silences that suddenly drifted away in passion? But was it possible that I had spent these six hours, eight hours, whatever they were, slumped in a wicker chair and arranging a half dozen common violets in the high narrow neck of a small clay vase the color of dark earth? Was it possible that the cigarette I had begun to puff somewhere around midmorning was still burning now, still turning to hot ash in the little white saucer not inches from my ring finger hand? Apparently so. And in her own way had Fiona passed this first day, which was already gone, merely changing her clothes, appearing now and again for my silent approval in gray slacks, rosy shorts, ankle-length gown of flaming silk, virginal white frock which must have won my approval and hers and which she was now wearing? Yes, I told myself, she had.

“Nice flowers, baby.”

“Glad you like them.”

“Maybe they’re not going to come to our little party.”

“Maybe not.”

And avoiding the arbor? Avoiding the lemon grove? Doing little, saying little, going our separate ways, keeping a safe distance from the dark and scented wall of funeral cypresses? But listening? Had I too been listening for a voice, two voices, for whatever sound of life might reach us from beyond the trees? Yes, I realized that throughout the day even I had become aware of moments of passing disappointment that Fiona’s eavesdropping had not met with more success.

“How do they keep so quiet over there?”

“God knows.”

Fiona disappearing inside again, the cigarette burning, Fiona scratching her right thigh in a flurry of thoughtless exasperation, the recollection of a small half-eaten yellow crab on a large white plate near the crook of my elbow, the watery violets defying the aesthetic pattern I had in mind — yes, everything confirmed my impression of the typical first day as a slow and sluggish reflection of the first night. It was always the same, Fiona’s briefly pantomimed reassurances, my slumping revery, her thoughts, my thoughts, the curious sensation that the adventure begun in the dark was somehow obscured, discolored, drowned in the bright sun.

“Cheer up, Cyril. Please.”

Had I glanced at her book? Had she dipped her fork into the broken shell of my cold crab? Had she stared into her tall goblet while I drank from mine? Had I missed her in the midafternoon and then glanced up to see the hand on her hip, the slow consoling smile on her distant face? And had this dying sun waked the two of us and driven Fiona to an endless toilet and me to a hot cup of coffee ground from a handful of dead and blackened beans? Yes, this was how the day had passed, true to form.

Once again I found myself observing that while the first night of adventure was always sober, despite darkness and excitement and fresh uncertainties, the first day was inevitably somnolent and oddly drunken, despite the sun overhead and the return of what I thought of as private consciousness. And once again I found myself observing how different we were, Fiona and I, and yet how similar. Because if it had taken her all day to arrive at the white frock, whereas I had climbed into the old white linen jacket without thinking and as soon as I had drunk my coffee, still my slightly rumpled white jacket and beige shirt unbuttoned at the throat revealed precisely the same taste and motivation as Fiona’s frock. Unspoken traditional decorum was always the handmaiden of unconfessed anticipation. At least our new-found friends on the other side of the funeral cypresses would appreciate if not understand the significance of the way we looked. Unless this was to be another one of those rare first days that sometimes ended, as they began, in silence.

“Oh look at them. They’re all dressed up.”

“Pretty formal, don’t you think?”

“But sweet, baby, sweet.”

So time was leaping out of the shadows after all and I was standing, Fiona was hiding one hand behind her back and hitching at a fresh pair of panties beneath the frock. The diffusion of the sunlight was already jumping into the clarity of approaching night. And simply because of a powdery blue jacket, a necktie obviously tied by a woman’s hand and a gray dress with a bright red sash at the waist? That’s all it took, I thought, a few twists of clothing and a few shared memories of a night that was not dead and only lengthening, starting over.

“Found this in the luggage,” Hugh said. “I thought you’d like it.”

“Oh, Cyril. Cognac.”

“Let’s try it.”

“No, thanks, boy. Not me.”

“Hugh’s been sick.”

“But Hugh, what’s wrong?”

“Cramps. Diarrhea. Weakness.”

“Feeling better?”

“Ask Catherine, boy. She’ll tell you.”

“Hugh’s all right, baby. You can see he is.”

“Yes,” I said and laughed, “great Pan is not dead.”

Meeting. Mingling. Greeting each other. And I shook Hugh’s hand, Hugh shook Fiona’s hand, I put my arm around Catherine’s waist, Fiona took a sudden firm grip on my white linen sleeve. And the day? Gone. The night? Deep. The sunlight? Green. We admired the bottle of cognac, we glanced from face to face, Hugh assured us of his recovery. We told Hugh that the weakness would pass, Catherine admired Fiona’s frock. Fiona suggested that I open the bottle of cognac covered with black mold, but I suggested we wait.

“But, baby, what shall we do?”

“Well,” I said, “before it gets too dark, let’s look at the grapes.”

“Oh, Cyril, the grape-tasting game …”

“Want to play?”

I turned, led the way. I stepped inside the arbor and waited for Fiona to join me at a run and for Catherine to notice the empty stone bench and empty glasses, waited for some sign of Hugh’s obvious disappointment. The trellises of thick green leaves, the sandy floor, and overhead the dry and silent clusters of purple grapes — for me this was clearly the place for the bedding down of lovers. Whereas Hugh’s initial reaction, I expected, would be distaste for the grapes and impatience at what now amounted to his sudden confinement not only with Fiona but with wife and presiding host as well. But he would wait, I thought, we could all wait. Never had the grapes been this heavy on the vine, never had the fat clumps been this brown, this blue, this purple. Here even Hugh might awaken to the smaller joys of my harvest.

“All right,” I said quietly, cheerfully, “come close.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“You’ll see.”

“Cyril is a pastoral person. Aren’t you, baby?”

“Sure I am.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Catherine said in the shadows, “but I could stay right here forever.”

“But it’s a little silly, boy, isn’t it?”

“Oh,” I said from somewhere in the center of my chest, “it’s not so silly.”

I looked from face to face and noted with satisfaction that Hugh was somber and was buttoning his ill-fitting jacket while Catherine, despite her soft words, was glancing about the darkened arbor in a large vague gesture of shyness, uncertainty, apprehension. But for once Fiona was standing still, perfectly still, and was studying my collected features with bemused and yet unfeigned admiration.

“Come on, come on,” I said again. “Closer.”

I had been careful to position myself where the weight of the grapes was greatest. And to this spot I now drew my wife and Hugh’s wife and Hugh, so that in the green light and in oddly appealing discomfort we were all four of us standing shoulder to shoulder with the lowest grapes nesting in our four heads of hair. I felt myself warming to mock seriousness, I knew that each one of us was witness to the other three, I knew that individual and group self-consciousness was mounting as Hugh attempted to dislodge a flat green leaf from the side of his head and Fiona gave me her bright level stare and Catherine shifted slowly from foot to foot. For a moment I allowed myself to concentrate on the distant scent of orange blossoms and the nearby complacent song of some little member of the thrush family.

“It’s easy,” I said then in low tones of solemn confidence, “we just keep our hands behind our backs and go after the grapes — with our mouths.”

“No grapes for me, boy. No thanks.”

“Oh,” I said and laughed, “you don’t need to eat them. Just try to catch them in your lips and pull them down.”

“Why not pick a couple of bunches with our hands,” Hugh said, “and go sit under a tree?”

“Let’s do what Cyril says, Hugh. Please.”

“Baby, I want to be first. OK?”

“No, Fiona,” I said slowly, “I’m first.”

For a moment longer I took all the time I wanted — adjusting spectacles, letting arms hang loose, cushioning the backs of both clasped hands against upper thighs and lower buttocks, unlimbering the torso inside the old white linen jacket. And then I rose on the balls of my feet and simply stuck my face up among the grapes. But strain? No. Exertion? No. Yet Hugh and Catherine and Fiona could hardly help but be aware of my lifted chin, the soft open planes of my tilted face, the heavy and tightened flesh of my bent neck. And was Fiona fidgeting? Hugh grunting? Catherine sighing in disbelief? I heard them, I too was amused at their vision of my bulky athletic figure sporting with playful aesthetic hunger among the grapes. Yes, I told myself, my large head poking for no apparent reason into the symmetrical fat clumps of purple grapes was no doubt an amusing sight, as I intended it to be. But more, much more. And now the grapes were sitting on my round lenses, rolling down my nose, bobbing against my hard closely shaven cheeks, lolling and falling across the tops of my ears. I set one in motion with my tongue, I reached out for another with ready lips, it popped away. But I persevered, methodically I sucked in that single plump dangling grape and gave a tug, closed my mouth, split the skin, began to chew.

“God, boy, I see what you mean …”

“Come on, Catherine,” I said and laughed, “your turn.”

“But what about Fiona?”

“That’s all right, baby. Catherine’s next.”

Hugh grinned, Fiona clapped her lean hands silently, I nodded encouragement. So up went Catherine on tiptoe and with her eyes open, her mouth open, her jaw thrust forward. But as soon as she encountered the first grape, felt the first grape bouncing with a will of its own against her upraised chin, Catherine shuddered, stumbled, looked at me with a long soft look of unmistakable recognition. Was this what I was thinking? Was the sensation she had just experienced the same as mine?

“You missed,” Hugh said. “Try again.”

“I lost my balance.”

“They’re only grapes,” I said under my breath. “Have some.”

“Nipples, boy, that’s what you mean.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, and laughed. “But they’re just grapes.”

Again I nodded, stuffing large hands into jacket pockets, and again Catherine stood on tiptoe and to my surprise began nuzzling and nudging the very cluster which, only moments before, I myself had abandoned to the green night. And there — her throat was exposed, her hair was loose, her lips were pursed, the crushed grape was going down. Only the mother of three children being a little silly in a fairly commonplace arbor in which, nonetheless, the fruit of the field grew ripe in the air? Yes, I thought, that was all. But I enjoyed the sight.

“Baby,” Fiona whispered, “did you see?”

“But what’s this, boy — arm around my wife’s shoulders?”

Yet even as I replied in kind to their rhetorical questions and pantomimed my congenial and self-evident assent, already Hugh was stretching like a man attempting to chin himself without the use of his hands, while Fiona’s cool white brow was rising to the touch of the grapes. Eyes disappearing among the leaves, lips in shadow. Catherine and I were watching them, of course, and Catherine was so turned that somewhere below my armpit I could feel the undeniable pressure of her right breast settled against my waiting side.

And Hugh? Fiona? Their heads were together temple to temple, one of his darkly trousered legs was canted across one of her bare legs, the grapes (the entire sagging arbor of pulpy grapes) were swaying and rippling to the sound of their laughter, the movements of their open mouths.

“Oh, baby, I want to nibble each one of them!”

So much, I thought, for the viscera of the cornucopia.

BAREFOOTED BUT OTHERWISE FULLY CLOTHED, HUGH leaps about waist-deep in the rough and sunny water with the short length of rotted rope tight in his hand and the small tar-covered boat lunging and rearing in slow circles. Fiona and the children tumble from bow to stern, four wet energetic figures bailing and attempting to transform a broken oar into an imaginary mast. Catherine and I sit watching from the brief pebbly incline of the hot beach. Hugh shouts in the spray, and for answer Fiona leans over the gunwale and thrusts down her faunlike and naked face. We wave.

Or I round the point and discover Fiona squatting in a rocky crevice with her face toward the sea, the tide at her feet, her back to the vertical ledges of pink stone. And on top of the little cliff that hides Fiona and safeguards her modesty sits Hugh — rigid, one leg drawn up and the other dangling in the clear air, his silent face peering down at us in raucous and privileged enjoyment.

Remember?

“WHAT’S THE MATTER,” I CALLED, “GETTING OLD?”

Though we had started out together and with every intention of remaining together throughout a day this timeless and bright and clear, nonetheless we had once again drifted into pairs and begun to separate, to pull apart long before reaching the commencement of the breakwater. By the time Catherine and I first set foot on the breakwater and moved out from the shore, Hugh had already swept himself and Fiona far ahead, the two of them long-legged and impetuous and receding, growing smaller, flaunting their eagerness and similarity of temperament until, flanked on either side by sun and sea, they had all but disappeared. Yet midway on the breakwater between shore, village, beached fishing boats and at the other extreme, the ruined fortress, suddenly the two of them, Hugh and Fiona, had seated themselves on a couple of flat white rocks where now they waited for Catherine and me, the slow strollers, to close the long clear empty space between us.

“Not as old as you are,” Hugh shouted back through the silence, and planted his single elbow, I saw, in Fiona’s lap.

“There’s no hurry,” I said to Catherine, and squeezed her hand. “Let’s take our time.”

“Why does he want to explore that ugly place?”

“God knows.”

But now that the village lay at our backs, there was nowhere to walk except forward across the high narrow breakwater into the open sea and toward the squat and ominous pile of dark stones that revealed in the midst of its wreckage the shape of the former fortress. How strong, I asked myself, was my empathy with Hugh’s present eagerness? What could account for the rather special quality of desolation that appeared to characterize the abandoned structure now awaiting the sound of our four voices, the cautious tread of our feet? When did an ordinary stroll become a compulsive quest? And why did I now identify that unspectacular and essentially uninteresting ruin with the dark caves of the heart? Self-imprisonment, which was what we appeared to be heading for, was hardly my own idea of pleasure. And yet I was beginning to feel something of Hugh’s elation. Today of all days my empathy with Hugh, I decided, was fairly strong.

“Does Fiona really want to climb around in there?”

“I suppose she does.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“We could have stayed with the children.”

“I’d never let him take Fiona in there alone.”

“Jealous?”

“If she goes, I have to go. That’s all.”

“Fiona might fool us both. You never know.”

“How?”

“But then,” I said more to myself than to Catherine, “it’s Hugh’s expedition. We’ll just have to wait and see where it leads.”

One glance backward, and I knew what I would see: dark hills, brief and distant panorama of tiled roofs and white-washed walls, black little boats ranged on the gray beach and, far to the south, the fragile landmarks of the funeral cypresses. And yet all this was gone and for us there was only severance, isolation, the sensation of proceeding outward from the familiar shore and into the uninhibited world of blue sky, black sea, penitential fortress. We might have been walking down a country road, Catherine and I, except that the rutted track we followed across the high surface of the breakwater was white, not brown, and was composed of rock and crushed shells, rather than of dusty earth, and carried us not safely among the olive trees but precariously across deep salty water and into the light that had no source. We shaded our eyes, looked out to sea. No wonder Hugh had insisted that the four of us wear rubber-soled shoes. No wonder he had packed his enormous khaki-colored rucksack with rope, torch, knife, rolls of bandage and bottles of disinfectant. But was this clear vista of peace and treachery, space and confinement, reason enough for Hugh’s excitement? I suspected not.

“Hey there,” Hugh called, “what do you think of it?”

“Interesting,” I called back, “but let’s stay together.”

“Graffiti, you two. Come look!”

“Can you read them, boy?”

“Sure can.”

“Oh, baby, what do they say?”

No doubt the large and indecipherable signs were the work of passing fishermen who in their crafty loneliness had used pieces of soft and chalky masonry to inscribe their private sex legends on these dead walls. Appeals to big-boned virginal women said to inhabit small green islands lying somewhere beyond the horizon? Songs to a young girl of our own village? Ribald declarations of one grizzled fisherman’s love for another and much younger fisherman? Whatever the content and whoever the lovers, for us these public testimonials remained no more than secret and unreal scrawls, since no sooner had I begun to gather Fiona and Catherine close to my sides, no sooner begun to scan the massive walls for clues to the specific sense of the abandoned messages, then Hugh was already shouting from the interior of this impressively dismal place and urging us to forget the graffiti and to follow him inside.

“Are they all about the singing phallus, baby?”

“I guess they are.”

“Don’t you know, for God’s sake?”

“I’ll read them to you another time, Fiona. OK?”

“Hurry,” Catherine said then, “Hugh’s alone in there.”

“Well,” I said, gripping Fiona’s hand and Catherine’s elbow, “it’s too bad we can’t all share Hugh’s rather boyish interest in old fortresses and so forth. But on we go.”

“I love these old masculine places,” Fiona said. “You know I do.”

Still I hung back, surveying the light that shone only at sea, the incongruous mustard-colored stone walls which on three sides descended at a steep angle into the dark random tide, the entrance that was low and rounded and deep. And I noted what I suspected Hugh had failed to note in his characteristic haste and determination to see it all at a glance and to find his own lean shadow wherever he looked: the briars clotting the entrance way, the ringbolts and fallen rock, the iron bars driven into the rounded arch and now bent aside. Yes, I thought, herding Fiona and Catherine into the dark mouth of the fortress, yes, the gates were gone and the marble monsters no longer stood on their sunken pedestals. But nonetheless the mouth of the fortress remained guarded, oddly protected, within its own matter-of-fact condition of disuse, and only a man like Hugh could rush through this brief tunnel unaware of ancient armaments and present obstacles to passage. Catherine stumbled, I gripped her arm, Fiona’s uncertain voice echoed down the wet walls.

“Look,” Hugh shouted then, “burned!”

Chin high, legs far apart, rucksack lying brown and lumpy in the weeds at his feet, there stood Hugh waving us into the hot and empty courtyard and at the same time indicating with his long good arm the high walls, the blackened doorways, the cracked tower, the vacant blue sky overhead. I saw immediately that he was right, because all four walls had been deeply and viciously scorched by some devastating blaze so that they were streaked and seared with enormous swatches of unnatural color — intestinal pink, lurid orange, great blistering sheets of lifeless purple. And everywhere the weeds and fallen pediments were encrusted with the droppings of long departed gulls.

“Burned clean, boy. There’s nothing left.”

“No juice of the growing fruit, “I murmured, “that’s for sure.”

“Don’t be cryptic, baby. Please.”

“You can’t even smell it, boy. No ashes. No smoke. Nothing. It’s just a reflection — a reflection of some fiery nightmare. Don’t you see?”

“Sure,” I said and laughed, “if that’s what you want. But I prefer a little more than weeds and discoloration. How about it, Catherine?”

“Oh, Cyril, stop arguing.”

Everywhere I turned I could see that these burned walls were punctured with small charred doorless entrances leading no doubt into a labyrinth of pits and tunnels, cells and niches for birdlike archers. Never had the four of us been so starkly confined, starkly exposed. Hugh and Catherine and I were dressed appropriately for whatever ordeals might come our way (Hugh in his castoff Navy denims, Catherine wearing her gray slacks with the patches, I dressed in sweatshirt and chocolate-colored corduroys), whereas Fiona had disregarded Hugh’s instructions and was wearing only her eggshell sandals and mid-thigh tennis dress of shocking white. Stark, alone together, exposed, self-conscious. But despite my predisposition in favor of the lyrical landscape or any of those places conducive to my own warmer inclinations, and despite my conversational reluctance of only a few moments past, nonetheless I too was beginning to understand Hugh’s feeling for the condemned courtyard and gutted fortress, was already partially willing to forego my kind of pleasure for his.

“Well,” I said, and picked up Hugh’s rucksack, “what now? The tower?”

“No, boy, the dungeons.”

“Treasure,” Fiona said. “What fun.”

“OK,” I heard myself saying pleasantly, “I guess you know what you’re doing. Let’s go.”

So I slung Hugh’s clumsy burden from an easy shoulder, commiserated with Catherine in a long good-humored meeting of eyes, grinned at Fiona, trudged off across the courtyard toward the most distant and least inviting doorway in the northeast wall. Hugh leapt gaunt and spiderlike into that charred darkness, Fiona ducked after Hugh, Catherine entered head down and heavily, I whistled softly to myself and then pushed my way out of the sunlight and through the cold, tight, irregular doorless opening. There followed the typical moment of disorganization, confusion, pretended panic, while the four of us stood in single file and bumped together, enjoyed the last noisy sounds of indecision before starting down. I attempted to rummage inside the rucksack and dig out the torch, and discovered without surprise that Hugh’s torch was a nickel-plated, long-handled affair that was obviously filled with greenish and partially corroded batteries. I flicked on the weak beam and passed the torch from hand to hand to Hugh. Catherine had turned her back to me and appeared ready, now, to undergo Hugh’s childish adventure to the end.

“Cyril? Are you there?”

“Sure I am.”

“Steps, boy. They’re pretty steep. Careful now.”

The darkness was like the water in a cold well, the roof of the narrow corridor became the sounding board for Hugh’s loud voice. With slow shoulders and spread hands we felt our way along the slick invisible walls and occasional gritty patches of leprous masonry. In single file and breathing audibly, on we crept toward the diffused beam of Hugh’s torch which he was flashing in all directions now to indicate, as he said, the beginning of the steps. Above Fiona’s strong jasmine scent and the smell of the throbbing seaweed there drifted the unmistakable smell of human excrement — an undeniable fresh smell that could hardly help the tone of our quest, could not help but make Catherine uncomfortable and Fiona displeased. For a moment I allowed myself to muse on the odor of human offal, thinking that men inevitably relieved their bowels in all the ruined crypts of the world and that the smell struck some kind of chord in other men but to women was merely distasteful. What then of Fiona’s earlier asssertion of her love for the places of masculinity? Was that particular love of hers unqualified? The smell of the offal and Fiona’s sudden silences were the first indications that it was not.

“Well,” I heard myself saying, “we’re like a bunch of kids.”

“Speak for yourself, boy.”

“At least you could shine the light this way once in a while. Might help, don’t you think?”

“I’m cold, Cyril. What’ll I do?”

“There are a couple of sweaters in the rucksack, boy. Why don’t you pull one out?”

“No,” I said. “We’ll wait until we reach the bottom.”

I heard our three pairs of spongy rubber-soled shoes making soft contact with the first half dozen steps, distinguished the hard leathery sound of Fiona’s tissue-thin sandals on the stone. I saw Hugh’s haste registered in the jerky disappearance and reappearance of the light of the torch. I hoped that Hugh would find something to make this expedition of his worthwhile, I hoped that whatever he found would please Fiona and prove to be of interest, at least, to Catherine and me. I hoped that the last hours of the day would find Catherine and me alone together in one of those dense harmonious places of my choosing rather than Hugh’s, and would find Fiona once again running free and nestling with a more appreciative and agreeable Hugh.

“If there’s nothing down there,” I called, “what then?”

“It’s there, all right. I dreamed about it.”

“Stop him,” Catherine whispered in a flat voice. “Can’t you do something?”

“Too late,” I whispered back. “Besides, he’s enjoying himself.”

“Why can’t we all hold hands?”

“Wouldn’t do much good. It’ll be over soon.”

“Hugh,” Fiona said. “Tell us the dream.”

But even the timbre of Fiona’s voice was oddly diminished, and the restraint and poignancy of this second brief appeal made it only too clear that even Fiona was beginning to have reservations about the intensity of Hugh’s descent. And treading the dark air, sinking, fumbling, following each other down, once again it occurred to me that Hugh was somehow more than oblivious to Catherine’s fear and resignation, more than insensitive to Fiona’s now obvious misgivings and disappointment, more than indifferent to my quiet presence behind him at the end of the line. Perhaps our very compatibility was at last at stake. In all the thoughtlessness of his clearly secret self, perhaps his true interest was simply to bury our love in the bottom of this dismal place and in some cul-de-sac, so to speak, of his own regressive nature. Perhaps he was as indifferent to the male principle as he was to me, and was not searching for some sexual totem that would excite a little admiration in his wife and mine, but was instead determined to subject all four of us to the dead breath of denial. Who could tell?

“Oh, baby, look at the view.”

Suddenly we paused, leaning against each other, and crowded together at a high narrow aperture cut with beveled edge through the dark thick mass of what we now understood to be the outside wall, so that in the sudden funnel of clear light and with our heads close and hands on shoulders, arms about familiar waists, the rucksack pressing against Catherine’s hip as well as mine, suddenly we found ourselves sharing relief from the darkness and uncertainty of our now interrupted downward progress into this stone shaft. Silent, subdued and yet attentive, relieved and yet immobile, unemotional, touching each other and yet unmotivated by our usual feelings of mutual affection — for one brief somber moment we stared out toward the vacancy, the sheer distance, the brilliant timeless expanse of sea and air. Hugh had hiked himself as best he could into one corner of the empty aperture and was a grainy and rigid silhouette leering seaward. The scantness of Fiona’s tennis dress was pressing against the stiffness of Hugh’s denims, the breadth of my chest was partially straddling Fiona’s left shoulder blade and Catherine’s right arm, Catherine’s waist was soft and comfortable beneath the casual pressure of my left hand. There were no boats on the horizon, no birds in the air. Only the four of us, the silence, the fortress heavier than ever above our heads, the stones larger and darker and more imprisoning, only the constricted view of the inaccessible water with its all-too-real surface of white transparencies and maroon-colored undulations.

“Hugh,” Fiona said then, “why don’t we just climb back up and go swimming? I feel like a little swim. Right now.”

“I hate this place,” Catherine said. “I want to leave.”

“It’s just not much fun. I want us to have fun, that’s all.”

“Hugh knows about my claustrophobia, don’t you, Hugh? But at least you could listen to Fiona if you won’t listen to me.”

“The view’s attractive, but the rest of it just isn’t turning out as I thought it would.”

“Hugh’s selfish, that’s all.”

“Don’t you want to go swimming with me, baby?”

“Of course he does. But Hugh’s not about to change his mind. He’ll deny us the same way he denies the children.”

“But Hugh, we can’t even have a little hugging and kissing down there. Don’t you see?”

“He doesn’t care. He won’t listen to either one of us.”

“Help me, Cyril. Tell Hugh I always mean what I say.”

Laughing, leaning into both Catherine and Fiona and squinting heavily for another look at the gently shifting dark sea: “Don’t pay any attention to them,” I heard myself saying, “our wives don’t want to admit how much they like this little dangerous hunt of yours.”

“You’ll be sorry, baby.”

“No threats, Fiona.”

“I’m bored. I’m not going to say it again.”

“How about it, Hugh? Ready?”

Yes, I thought, my empathy was real enough, the tone of the position I had decided to take could not be missed. But did Hugh care? Had he been listening? Or was he more than ever oblivious, as I had at first suspected? Did it matter to Hugh that I had chosen sides — I who could always absorb the little resistances of his wife and mine, after all, with nothing to lose? Or was my support merely one more irritant that somehow enhanced Hugh’s feelings of remoteness in this our first small disagreement?

It was then that I recalled the morning’s trivial domestic incident described to me by Catherine in one long breath of privacy before we had assembled into our usual foursome — I leaving, Hugh returning, Hugh lunging into his rightful bed, Hugh appealing in hypnotic whispers for Catherine’s nakedness, Dolores entering that room of circular love, Hugh bounding up and striking his head against the rotten shutter which I myself had opened only moments before. But had Hugh sensed my intervention in both Catherine’s nakedness and the state of the shutter? Or had he simply viewed the unwitting appearance of the sleepy child along with the crack on his head as somehow deserved or as a deliberate manifestation of the dream he was still keeping to himself? Had the interruption accounted perversely for his morning’s cheer? But if all this were true, as suddenly I thought it was, and if the day’s expedition had in fact begun for Hugh with this misadventure, then of course the invisible lump on his head in some way accounted for his present leering confidence and refusal to talk. Surely the lump on his head fit in with his plans.

Still saying nothing, Hugh merely turned and once more started down. We followed, of course, and the light was gone, the vista of the bright sea was gone, a sudden vacuum in the dark air told me that Fiona was hurrying to catch up with Hugh in spite of herself. Catherine was doing her best, the walls were wet, the steps were steeper and the passage more narrow than before. From somewhere far below, the sound of Hugh’s creaking denims drifted up to us. And suddenly from those depths below us came Fiona’s faint cry along with an abrupt rush of pattering sounds that could only mean that one of them had fallen.

“What’s that?”

“Accident.”

“You better come on down here, boy. Your wife’s in trouble.”

“Keep going,” I said to Catherine, “but don’t try to hurry. Be careful.”

Fiona was sure-footed. Fiona was not one of those women who convert minor injury into an instrument of will whenever the neutral universe fails to conform in some slight particular to the subtleties of the female vision. She was strong, she was agile, she could not have fallen merely to teach Hugh a lesson or merely to hasten the swimming party which, however, I knew full well she intended to enjoy before the last light of the day. But that faint cry, that soft cry tinged with the barest coloration of accusation, I had heard it and recognized it immediately as the clear cry Fiona never uttered unless she needed my help. So as unlikely as it seemed to me, perhaps she was hurt. Perhaps there would be no swimming after all.

Beyond the suddenly visible bulk of Catherine’s shadow, I saw the white dress pulled up to the loins, the lifted knees, the slender face, the cavern floor, Hugh’s crouching shape, the circle of dim light. We were below sea level and now we were crowding together in a small wet space hollowed out from stone and thick with echoes.

“What happened?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

“I slipped, baby. Me! I went down about twenty steps.”

“Well,” I said, laughing, fumbling with the rucksack, finding the sweater, “let’s see if you can walk.”

“I hope you’re satisfied, Hugh,” Catherine said. “Fiona might have broken her ankle.”

“Climb into this sweater,” I murmured quickly and calmly, “and then we’ll check you out.”

But was she indeed hurt? Catherine was kneeling beside Fiona, Hugh was crouching, in his one hand gripped the now dying torch. Fiona herself was still prostrate on the cold stone. For a moment I had the decided impression that Hugh had bolted into these ruins and dragged us into these wet depths of vaulted darkness for the sole purpose of discovering nothing more than Fiona herself lying flat on her back in the faint eye of the torch like the remains of some lady saint stretched head to toe on her tomb. The expression on Fiona’s face seemed to bear me out, since her head was turned to the sound of my voice and since the slender construction of Fiona’s face and the willful eyes and thin half-smiling lips were raised to me in something more than mere personal concern for the immediate situation of unlikely accident. What else could that expression mean if not that she understood what I was thinking and was momentarily aware of her own body and expressly erotic temperament as the very objects of Hugh’s subterranean design? How else account for Fiona’s expression of puzzlement and appeal if not by knowing suddenly that Hugh was quite capable of attempting to transform my faunlike wife into a lifeless and sainted fixture in his mental museum?

“Give me your hand, baby. Help me up.”

But still no word from Hugh? No hint of his usually exaggerated concern for Fiona’s interests, pleasure, well-being, safety? Not even taking advantage of the darkness to thrust himself against Fiona who was now holding my hand and scrambling to her feet and was nothing if not responsive to Hugh’s slightest touch? But it was true, all too true. He must have known that today there would be no hugging and kissing, as Fiona had put it, long before Fiona had voiced that sad little conviction of hers, long before he had had his dream, long before he had banged his head on the rotted shutter.

There was nothing to do, I thought, except to hold wide the neck of the sweater and help Fiona, however clumsily, to pop her head through the opening and feel her way into the sleeves so absurdly long and tangling. And then, quite simply, I would demand the torch from Hugh and lead us calmly back up to the limitless pastel light of the burned court.

“As long as we’re here,” Fiona said then, “let’s look around.”

“OK,” I said, once more changing my mind, shifting my stance. “There’s nothing to see. But we’ll take a quick look anyway.”

I realized immediately that there was more to come, that Hugh had not yet shot his bolt of poison and that Fiona was not going to comply with my helpfulness and had already refused the possibility of wearing the sweater. But at least I managed to drape Hugh’s sweater across her shoulders and loop the long sleeves around her throat. In due time Hugh, not I, would lead us back up to the courtyard. Agreed.

“There’s no way out,” Hugh said. “We’re at the bottom.”

“Buried, you mean. Buried alive.”

To hear Catherine’s determined voice, to hear Hugh’s silence in response to it, to know that Fiona was once again looking for Hugh in the wet darkness, to be aware of this cold timeless space hollowed from the very roots of the sea — suddenly I wished again that Hugh’s poor torch would discover a real effigy with a stone cowl, stone feet, stone hands pressed together and pointed in prayer. Or would discover a real row of iron-headed pikes along one of the vaulted walls. Or a steel glove, the blade of an ax, a gold cup, anything to justify all this shadowy suspension of our lives of love. Surely this empty place should offer up some little crusty memento to justify my separation from sun and sea and grass, to justify the unspeakable content of Hugh’s dream. But then the memento, as it were, did in fact appear.

“Now, boy — how do you like it?”

“If I were you,” I said softly, slowly, “I’d leave that thing here where you found it. That’s my advice.”

“Leave it,” Catherine said quickly. “I don’t want to know what it is. I don’t want to see it.”

“Old Cyril knows what it is. Don’t you, boy?”

“Yes,” I murmured, “of course I do.”

“Tell us, baby. Tell us!”

“No, Fiona, it’s up to Hugh.”

“Damn right it is!”

And I who had never exposed Fiona to discomfort of any kind, I who had taken the exact same care of Catherine, I whose handsome and bespectacled face had always stood for sensuous rationality among the bright leaves, I the singer who spent my life quietly deciphering the crucial signs of sex, I who only moments before had decided that Hugh would discover nothing, nothing at all — now it was I, I alone, who shared with Hugh clear knowledge of the precise nature of what Hugh was dangling from the neck of the torch, as if I myself had sought it and found it and inflicted it on all four of us, silly and pathetic and yet monstrous memento of Hugh’s true attitude toward all of our well-intended loves.

“It’s a bad omen, Hugh,” I said. “Leave it behind.”

“My God, boy. Where’s your sense of humor?”

The voices echoed in the waxen blackness. Three figures squatted around Hugh’s pit, and Hugh himself stood waist-deep in this very pit which had emerged from beneath the beam of his torch only moments before. The cavern was empty, its wet walls and floor were empty, as I had thought. But the pit was not. Suddenly Hugh had found this small rectangular hole in the cavern floor and had leapt up to his knees in the refuse of coagulated fishing nets, broken clay pots and charred ribs of wood. In the midst of this pulpy refuse, he had poked with the torch itself until we heard the dull yet tinny sound of metal on metal, had thrust down the head of the torch and hooked what he was looking for and slowly, in rigid triumph, had raised the unmistakable object of his lonely search.

“I knew it was here. It had to be.”

“OK,” I murmured, “you found it. Now put it back.”

“Not a chance, boy not a chance …”

Then we were climbing, and in unchanged order (from top to bottom, from first to last), Hugh was perspiring in the lead, Fiona had obviously forgotten the effects of her fall and was pacing Hugh with renewed agility and fresh anticipation, Catherine was treading on Fiona’s heels, while I went chugging upward with my concentration divided between the gloom of the coming moment, as I envisioned it, and the pleasure of the daylight burning somewhere above our heads. Yes, I thought, Hugh’s exhibition in the courtyard was unavoidable. But after, after the silence, the disbelief, the dismay, perhaps then we would move on to long naked strokes in the bright sea or to a rendezvous of sorts with the small earthen-colored nightingale whose secret song I had recently heard not far from the villas. Or would the strains of this day dog us into the future, disrupt our embraces, diminish the peaceful intensity of all those simple idyls I still had in mind?

We stopped, we slipped, we climbed on.

“Thank God, baby. We’re safe!”

Fiona with the empty sweater clinging to her back like the cast-off skin of some long-forgotten lover, Catherine with her eyes tight shut and hair awry and broad cheeks brightly skimmed with tears, I shading my face and easing off the uncomfortable and partially opened rucksack, Hugh holding aloft his prize and leaping through the weeds to a fallen pediment, Hugh turning and facing us with the little copper rivets dancing on his penitential denims and his mouth torn open comically, painfully, as if by an invisible hand — suddenly the four of us were there, separated, disheveled, blinking, and yet reunited in this overgrown and empty quadrangle that now was filled with hard light and the sweet and salty scent of endless day. I dropped the rucksack, squinted, fished for a fat cigarette. Fiona caught hold of the sleeves of the sweater at the wrists and pulled the long empty sleeves wide and high in a gesture meant only for the far-off sun. Catherine sat on a small white chunk of stone and held her head in her hands, Hugh tipped his prize onto the altar of the fallen pediment and flung aside the torch, reared back, and waited.

“But is that all, baby? It doesn’t look like much.”

“Take a better look,” I said quietly. “You’ll change your mind.”

I filled my mouth and lungs with the acrid smoke, I squinted at Hugh, at Fiona, at Catherine. We ached with darkness, our eyes were burning with the familiar yet unfamiliar return to light, as lovers we were exhausted but not exhilarated. Hugh lifted his right leg and cocked his foot on the fallen pediment and rested his right forearm on the upraised thigh.

Catherine sighed and climbed to her feet. Fiona approached the cracked and fluted pediment, slowly Catherine and I moved into position so that all four of us were grouped around Hugh’s improvised altar upon which lay what appeared to be only a thin circlet of pitted iron— frail, ancient, oval in shape, menacing. I looked at Fiona, she looked at me, all four of us stared down at the pliant and yet indestructible thin loop of iron that was large enough to encircle a human waist and was dissected by a second and shorter loop or half circle of iron wrought into a deliberate and dimly functional design.

“No,” Fiona whispered, “no …”

On the opposite side of the pediment from Hugh, I also raised one heavy leg, placed one mountain-climbing boot on the gray stone, rested my forearm across the breadth of my heavy thigh, allowed myself to lean down for a closer look. Our four heads were together, in our different ways we were scrutinizing the single tissue-thin contraption that had already revealed its purpose to Fiona and now, I suspected, was slowly suggesting itself to Catherine as something to wear.

“It looks like a belt,” I heard her saying. “But what are all those little teeth …”

I felt Fiona’s lips against my cheek, my upraised hand was wreathed in smoke, the delicate and time-pocked iron girdle was lying on the gray stone and, I saw in this hard light, was the brown and orange color of dried blood and the blue-green color of corrosion. I concentrated, we were all concentrating. Thinking of the blue sky and mustard-colored walls and brittle weeds and this bare stone, I studied Hugh’s destructive exhibition, studied the small and rusted hinge, the thumb-sized rusted lock, the rather large tear-shaped pucker of metal and smaller and perfectly round pucker of metal that had been hammered, shaped, wrought into the second loop and that were rimmed, as Catherine had just noted, with miniature pin-sharp teeth of iron — kept my eyes on this artful relic of fear and jealousy and puffed my cigarette, listened to Catherine’s heavy breathing, wondered which strapped and naked female body Hugh now had in mind.

“Anyway,” Catherine said, “it’s too small for me …”

“No,” I murmured, “it’s adjustable.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Hugh said. “Pick it up. Show us how it works.”

“Baby. Let’s go, baby. Please.”

“The only trouble is that we’ve only got one of these things instead of two.”

“Shut up, Hugh,” Catherine said, “for God’s sake.”

“But maybe one’s enough. What do you think?”

And relenting, changing her mind, Fiona reached out one bare energetic arm and suddenly cupped Hugh’s frozen jaw in her deliberate hand.

“Do you want me to try it on for you, baby,” she said. “Is that what you want?”

Later that day, much later, I knew that Hugh was by no means appeased. The hot coal of desolation was still lodged in his eye. For the first time he stripped to the waist, discarding his denim jacket on the beach not a hundred paces from the villas where the three children shrieked, for the first time he exposed to us the pink and pointed nakedness of his partial arm. But nonetheless he refused to strip off his denim pants and accompany our nude trio into the black-and-white undulations of that deep sea. And every time I came up for air, curving thick arms like the horns of a bull and sucking in broad belly muscles and shaking spray, looking around now for Fiona, now for Catherine, inevitably I saw Hugh stretched out on the black pebbles with one knee raised and his good hand beneath his head, the little black iron trinket clearly visible on his white chest.

“You haven’t seen the last of it,” he called out once, “believe me.”

But then Catherine came rolling toward me through the waves, over my shoulder I caught a glimpse of the dark and distant fortress, I felt a splash, and suddenly Fiona’s wet face was next to mine.

“Baby, baby, baby, what can we do?”

NEED I INSIST THAT THE ONLY ENEMY OF THE MATURE marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity (body upon body, voice on voice) is naïve? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?

What is marriage if not a vast and neutral forest in which our own sexual selves and those of our first partners wander until momentarily stopped in the clear actuality of encounter? Yes, the best of marriages are simply particular stands of pale trees sensuously stitched into the yet larger tapestry, which is not to say that our entire troup of sexual partners (other than wives or husbands) need necessarily be composed of women or men who are themselves in turn already committed to their own matrimonial partners. There are exceptions. Not every finger is ringed. But why voice what simply runs in the blood and fills the mind of any considerate man who has sat with another man’s wife on his lap or of any woman who has cast off prudery and tugged at cloth and moved out among the trees? Only, I suppose, in periodic answer to nagging detractors, only for the sake of those who detest my convictions, scoff at my theories, denounce my measured presence in the world of love. And only for the sake of those other detractors, that handful of the soulless young whose lives of privileged sexuality have conditioned them merely to deride my lyricism. But none of them, none of the bitter aged and none of that arrogant handful of the contemptuous young have tasted the love lunch, for instance, or know anything at all about the sexual properties of my golden wheels of ripe cheese. Old and wheezing detractors should curb their judgment of a man who knows, after all, what he is talking about. To young detractors I will say only that if orgasm is the pit of the fruit then lyricism is its flesh. Marriage, or at least the mature marriage, is the fold that gathers in all lovers nude and alone.

WHEN CATHERINE COLLAPSED THAT DAY ON THE COLDstone floor of the squat church and in the midst of Hugh’s meager yet highly emotional funeral service, it was Fiona who first thought of the three fatherless children, Fiona who made her immediate and selfless decision to take upon herself the responsibility of the children and carry them off.

To sum it up, as only last night I finally summed it up for Catherine, Hugh died and Catherine gave way to more than grief and Fiona departed with all three of those young and partially orphaned girls. Fiona and I knew exactly what was happening and what to do. Fiona knew her part and I knew mine. She went. I stayed. Fiona assumed management of the children as if they were hers, I undertook Catherine’s recovery as if she were my wife instead of Hugh’s. Fiona went off to impart womanhood to those three little growing girls, I stayed behind to explain Hugh’s death to Catherine, to account for her missing children, to convince her that I was not, as she thought, responsible for all her losses, to renew our love.

Last night I talked and Catherine listened. My voice grew thick and confidential in the darkness, she put her hand on mine, she asked questions, every now and then she suddenly raised her wineglass and quickly drank. Exhilaration in the palm of peace? A further step in the dark?

Last night we sat beneath the grapes, Catherine and I, sat together side by side at the little rickety table in the arbor and ate the soft flakes of fish and the grapes on our plates and the bread, the wedges of cheese, sat together comfortably and tasted the dark red acidic tang of the wine and talked together, lapsed into silence. Arm over the back of my chair, glass in hand, I insisted on the accidental nature of Hugh’s death, explained to Catherine that Hugh’s death was an accident inspired, so to speak, by his cameras, his peasant nudes, his ingesting of the sex-song itself. It was not our shared love that had triggered Hugh’s catastrophe. It was simply that his private interests, private moods, had run counter to the actualities of our foursome, so that his alien myth of privacy had established a psychic atmosphere conducive to an accident of that kind. Hugh’s death hinged only on himself. And yet for that death even he was not to blame.

“Hugh was not a suicide,” I murmured, “believe me.”

Last night I covered that ground with all the simplicity and delicacy I could muster and shifted back to Fiona’s motives in going off with the girls. My final low note of reassurance was that Fiona’s departure was not, like Hugh’s death, a finality. With or without the children, I said, Fiona herself would one day be coming back to us. At any moment, or at some time in the distant future, Fiona would simply come looking for us through the funeral cypresses. It was not a certainty, of course, but that had been the tenor of our farewell. Nothing was fixed.

ROSELIA (OUR SMALL, DARK-EYED, SULLEN ROSELLA) HAS spurned them all. The brazen village lover no longer spends half the night calling to Rosella through the lacy darkness of the cypress trees, the married fishermen have abandoned hope of holding Rosella’s hand. Even the old man who was the most vigorous and insistent of the lot, a short and barrel-chested old widower full of aggressive appreciation, no longer appears each dusk to tie his little female donkey in our lemon grove and to shake my hand, to glance covertly at Catherine, to tempt Rosella with his garrulous promises of lust and tenderness. Yes, I tell myself, they are gone, the lot of them, including the old man who left us one night forever with one hand thrust into his ragged pants and his great dark lecherous old face smiling in the grief of his last denial. Any one of them might have given Rosella a honeyed tongue, a life independent of the headless god. The old man would have put her back to work in the empty field, would have given her the donkey to lead along narrow thyme-scented paths of crushed shell, each night would have given her all the chuckling and naked magnificence of his uncountable years. But they are gone, all of them, and now the nights are filled with Rosella’s would-be lovers brooding separately in their far-flung huts of stone. And reclining on the wicker settee next to Catherine, I smoke, I listen, I notice Rosella watching us. I think of the old widower rubbing his squat knees in the darkness. I miss him (simple-minded old man with an itch for love), Catherine misses him, Fiona would never have let him go. Only Rosella is indifferent to the still night and all her absent suitors spurned for me. She is here, she is a shadow, she is Hugh’s last peasant nude.

HOW LIKE FIONA TO INSIST ON HELPING HUGH, I THOUGHT. While Catherine walked with the children in the middle and I brought up the rear with the rusty shovel, my wife joined Hugh at the head of our burial party and, staggering slightly under her share of the weight of the coffin, helped lead the way. Fiona’s mood was serious, her face was white, it was she and she alone who had to help Hugh carry the coffin. So from silver handles at either end, the small black top-heavy coffin swung between slender woman and slender man and journeyed slowly through the gloom of the noonday trees toward the hole which I, of course, would dig.

“Listen,” I heard Hugh say under his breath, “am I going too fast for you?”

“No, baby. It’s all right.”

For a moment they looked at each other — two heads in significant profile, two lovers joined by their shiny burden. I saw their glance, I valued it, I noted the tightened muscles of Fiona’s bare arm, I balanced the rusted shovel on one shoulder and smelled the breeze. In my left hand I gripped the pitted iron shaft of the Byzantine cross. Widely separated, speckled in soft light, we were moving, softly moving, and underfoot the carpet of brown pine needles could not have been more appropriate to Meredith’s misery or to the solemnity that Hugh and Fiona were casting over the occasion. For once Hugh was the father, Fiona had become a beautiful dry-eyed priestess for the dead dog and little girls. Catherine was doing her part, though Meredith refused to be consoled, and for the time being the two smaller children were behaving themselves. I too was enjoying the spirit of this unlikely hour.

No more old black dog, I told myself. No more wheezing in the darkness or paws on our bed at night. And how like Hugh to come to Fiona and me with the dead dog in his arms, how like him to leave the old animal’s body for an entire day behind our villa while in one of the narrow streets of the town he managed to find an actual coffin that was small, black, thickly ornamented, and intended obviously for a child. Now only Meredith was sniffling, Meredith who would not hold Catherine’s hand and who walked alone, while in our various ways the rest of us played out Hugh’s game of burial.

“We can stop and rest if you like.”

“It’s OK, baby. It’s OK.”

Fiona believed in the grief of children. I, of course, did not. Fiona’s short yellow shift and slender naked feet meant nothing, in no way contradicted the intensity of her mood as pallbearer. But that faint ring of impatience in Fiona’s voice? Yes, that brief sound told me that Fiona herself suspected Hugh’s motives, suddenly disliked his evident concern for her well-being at a time like this, doubted that the death of a fifteen-year-old decrepit dog justified all the elaborateness of Hugh’s formal plan. No matter what I might think, Fiona was walking through this grove of death because of Meredith. Whereas Hugh was apparently moving to the rhythm of some dark death of his own.

Muted path, dark green light, rough music of Meredith’s unhappiness. And Catherine, for whom all of this could only be one more domestic incident, was carrying little Eveline high on her hip and I was strolling after them and swinging the cross, shouldering my long-handled rusted shovel. Naturally it was Catherine, I mused, who had discovered the lifeless body of the dog, Catherine who had summoned Hugh, Catherine who had undertaken the job of telling Meredith. Yes, I thought, merely one more domestic incident for Catherine. But as a matter of fact, perhaps she was just as susceptible to her oldest daughter’s grief and her husband’s game as was Fiona. Why not assume that she was moved somehow, and like me was quite satisfied with her more pedestrian role in this makeshift ceremonial affair?

“Meredith, baby, stop crying. Please.”

But crab grass? Familiar crab grass? Full circle at last? And was it really possible that Hugh had brought us full circle through the gloom of the trees and across the carpet of pine needles to this thin strip of gray sand and frieze of sharp-toothed brittle grass which had once concealed his outstretched body from Fiona’s eyes but not from mine? Did he now intend the pitted cross in my left hand to mark not only the grave of the dog but also the very location where he himself had once sprawled dreaming his naked dream? Had he deliberately selected this spot of his lonely passion as the site for the pathetic grave? But was I reading the signs correctly? Was this in fact the same gray sand, the same black and fibrous crab grass? Yes, I told myself, none other, because now my field boots were sinking ankle-deep into familiar sand and Hugh’s shadow was already stretched out and sleeping in that low and narrow plot behind the crab grass where I would drive the shovel.

“Don’t say anything to spoil it, baby,” Fiona whispered at my elbow. “I’m warning you.”

So now the sonorous gloom of the trees had given way to the clear light of the empty beach. We were standing motionless together between trees and sea with the soft blue sky above us and, at our feet, the small and heavy casket stark on the sand. Bare-chested and thinking idly of incense, white-walled cemetery, family of anonymous mourners, white chapel housing a faceless priest, slowly I struck the shovel upright in the sand and glanced at Fiona, acknowledged her unnecessary admonition, gave her to understand that, as always, she had nothing to fear from her strong and acquiescent Cyril. But Fiona did not return my smile and my imaginary peasant mourners of a moment before were gone.

“Look what they’re doing,” Meredith said then. “Make them stop!”

Catherine glanced at Hugh, Hugh scowled, Fiona began to fidget though her eyes were gentle. For the first time that day I studied Meredith’s little pinched pragmatic face and saw that she had been rubbing her eyes and nostrils with the back of her hand. Something was always wrong for Meredith, obviously something was already wrong with the funeral. Even the sight of Cyril leaning ready and sober on the handle of the upright shovel was not enough for Meredith. Not now at least.

“Dolores,” Hugh said, “Eveline. Get away from the coffin.”

“They’re just playing,” Catherine said. “Leave them alone.”

“They’re not playing,” said Meredith, “they’re trying to open it. Make them stop.”

“Listen, Catherine. I’m telling you to get those children away from that coffin. Now do it.”

More tears? Fresh cause for adolescent accusation? Or sudden shrieks of pain from the two small girls? Meredith in flight from the collapsing funeral and Hugh stalking off with Fiona? And all because the two fat little girls were flopping and climbing on the coffin at last and, in happy silence, were in fact tugging at the heavy lid which Hugh himself had feverishly screwed in place? Even while we four adults looked on (tall, quiet, silhouetted in the salty breeze, immobile, reluctant to move), now those two small children were setting upon the coffin with all the animation they had held in check from the moment our slow procession had first started off from the villas. Dolores was sitting astride the truncated high-topped brightly lacquered black coffin and riding it, beating upon its thick hollow-sounding sides with both fat hands. Little Eveline was pulling in fierce and speechless delight on the right-hand silver handle and laughing, kicking the sand, suddenly looking up at me. But now they were reversing themselves, scrambling to change places, so that Eveline was riding the fat black dolphin of the casket while Dolores was struggling on hands and knees to push the whole thing over. Eveline shouted, Dolores suddenly rested one plump cheek coquettishly against the slick hard surface of what she would never know was the old dog’s lead-lined resting place. The casket moved, Hugh glowered. The casket tilted and sank a little deeper into the gray sand. I saw the cry of anger leaping to Meredith’s thin lips.

“Don’t just stand there, baby. Do something.”

But then Catherine stooped down in matter-of-fact slow motion and pulled them off, drew them away, removed their offensive presence from the austere object of Meredith’s despair, led them safely and with a few obvious maternal words to a low hummock of spongy grass and sat down holding them close against her upraised knees and warm and comforting torso. Hugh took two strides and put his long arm around Meredith’s narrow and bony shoulders. Fiona sighed. Catherine squeezed her little culprits. I rubbed my chest. Once more funereal peace was ours.

“Meredith says she wants to dig the grave herself, boy, if it’s all right with you.”

“Sure,” I said, turning away from the shovel. “It’s hard work, but let her try.”

So Hugh relinquished Meredith, whose eyes were more pink-rimmed than ever, I saw, and positioned himself close but not too close to Fiona, while in silence I aligned myself, so to speak, with Catherine. In our semicircle around the would-be grave we allowed ourselves no talking, no more secret signals, as if at last to convince poor Meredith of our complete attention.

“Whenever you want me to take over, Meredith,” I said, “just let me know.”

But she recoiled from my offer as I knew she must, and thin, disheveled, with her outgrown childish light green frock only partially buttoned up the back (having refused Catherine’s early morning commiseration, having allowed no one to button the dress or comb her short-cropped hair), she bent herself to the task which she could not possibly accomplish. The handle of the shovel was much too long for Meredith, the flat rusted blade much too heavy. Never had she been so insistent, never had she been so cruelly indulged, while the four of us silently waited and looked on.

The shovel scraped in the sand, she held her breath, she twisted and swung her arms, a little shower of moist sand fell through the breeze. On she went, concentrating, wearing down, glancing at Hugh between each stroke. And then Meredith simply threw down the shovel. She broke her awkward rhythm and admitted defeat, not by making some kind of agreeable teary appeal to the waiting and bare-chested friend of her father, but simply by turning full in my direction, hefting high above her head the shovel, holding it aloft in both stiff and frail arms, and then flinging it down. It was a gesture far more vehement than I had expected, and yet no doubt Meredith’s sudden display of unmistakable temper was preferable to any soft-voiced appeal for my assistance. And at least this little wasted interlude was at an end.

“Listen, Meredith,” I said, passing her, deciding suddenly that fury might be a symptom of true grief after all, “whatever wakes up has to go back to sleep. Think about it, Meredith. OK?”

My fully rounded words, my wrinkled forehead, my athletic size, the faint smell of lemon juice on my sun-tanned skin and the hazy smell of white wine on my breath — none of it meant anything to Meredith, of course, who walked deliberately within striking distance of my seductive speech and refused to answer. I saw the fresh tears, the angry eyes, even the pale strawberry-like impression of the vaccination on one bare upper arm, and I was as close as I would ever come to feeling what Meredith must have been feeling at the loss of her dog. But it was hopeless, and I could only shrug and lean down, removing heavy hands from tight hip pockets, and seize the abandoned shovel and prepare to dig.

“Take your time, boy,” Hugh called gruffly. “Make it deep.”

With the first full thrust of the rusted shovel into the coarse sand, I both destroyed the original dark drifting mood of our death party and restored it. On the one hand I was breaking ground, making irreparable crunching sounds with the shovel, merely digging a hole in the wet substance of a narrow strip of gray beach. And yet on the other hand the grave was opening. Yes, I thought, poor Hugh’s funeral fantasy had given way suddenly to one large half-naked man working slowly and steadily on an empty beach. Grief had given way to industry. And yet my thoughtful exertion pointed toward the moment when the pitted cross would stand in place and the contemplation of mystery (if that’s what Hugh thought it was) could be resumed.

My physical labor, my concentration, my upper body beginning to shine mildly with sweat, the unmistakable flashing movements of my golden spectacles and large and low-slung belt buckle of dull pewter, the serenity of my dripping face, and the deepening trench, the flowering grave— all this was exactly what Hugh wanted in spite of himself, I knew, and so I prolonged the brutal practicalities and continued to dig, to shave the walls of my wet pit in the sand. I recalled Hugh’s tactless confession of a few hours before (“She asked me if you and Fiona had to come along, boy. I said you did.”) and realized that if Meredith had had her way, had in fact been able to disrupt the firm community of our two families, there would have been only Catherine to dig the grave or to share that task with her mournful and disabled husband. But better me, I thought, better old Cyril with his good wind, two good hands, steady arms, brown and hair-tinged abdomen hard as a board. Yes, this work was to my liking, I told myself, and noted that both Hugh and Fiona were staring out over my bent or rising figure as if they could see some distant apparition of the black dog yelping and floundering on the horizon. Alone as I was for once, alone with my cream-colored calfskin field boots sopping up water and my tight denims gritty and streaked with sand, still I could not help but admire Hugh’s fierce expression and Fiona’s refusal to hold Hugh’s hand or touch her hip to his.

“Done,” I called, and tossed out the shovel and climbed from the grave in one slow unobtrusive motion appropriate to the man who had dug to the center of Hugh’s fantasy and laid bare the wet and sandy pit of death. Slowly I brushed at the wet sand on my denims, took a fresh breath and surveyed the deep empty trench and the remarkably high pile of inert yet trickling sand. Deeper than necessary, higher than necessary, stark. Already my chest and arms were drying and I did not regret the magnitude of those expressive scars on the beach.

“Look,” I heard myself saying then, “a visitor …”

“But, baby,” Fiona whispered, “he’s got a dog!”

I nodded, though Fiona had already turned to stare again toward the dark trees and tall approaching man and leaping dog, as had Hugh, whose fist was clenched, and Catherine who had climbed to her feet and was holding close her small and obviously frightened girls.

“He’s a shepherd,” I murmured. “And he may not be quite right in the head. You can tell by that odd angular gait of his.”

“We’ve got to get rid of him, boy. Send him off.”

“When he sees the coffin, he’ll want to help us mourn.”

“Oh, baby, how awful.”

“Be friendly, Fiona. That’s all we can do.”

“But that damn dog, boy. It’s just like ours.”

“Yes,” I said, “too bad for Meredith.”

“Tell him the party is private, baby. Please.”

“Can’t offend him, Fiona. Bad luck.”

He raised one long black-sleeved bony arm in innocent greeting. Carelessly he swung a long white slender crook in time to his steady but unrhythmical gait. He was fast approaching, and all the incongruous details were clear enough — the shapeless and once formal black coat and trousers, the absence of shirt or socks or shoes, the short black hair suggesting the artless conscientious work of the village barber, the stately and yet ungainly size, the slender crook. Yes, I told myself, hearing his sharp whistle and noting that the whistle had no effect on the fat and mangy black dog bearing down on us, in every way our approaching stranger exemplified the typical shepherd who was bound to keep an illiterate family in the village and yet spend his days and nights roaming from thorny field to secret watering spot with his nomadic sheep.

“Hugh, baby,” Fiona whispered then, apparently forgetting Catherine, Meredith, me, the funeral itself, “he looks like you.”

But before I could comment on this latest of Fiona’s aesthetic judgments, suddenly the appealing and yet repellent figure of the shepherd was standing a shadow’s length from the casket and frowning and crossing himself, while now his dog lay groveling and whimpering in the sand at Meredith’s feet.

“It’s a different dog, Meredith,” I said. “He’s a lot younger than yours. Besides, he’s got that white star on his chest. Listen, if you pat his head a few times he’ll leave you alone.”

“Never mind, baby, it’s all right. We’ll pat him together.”

With obvious disregard for everyone but Meredith, quickly Fiona stepped to the child’s side, knelt down, put a thin strong arm around her waist and firmly began to stroke the head of the dog. It was a small but totally absorbing example of Fiona’s swift feminine purpose, another one of Fiona’s golden pebbles dropped into her bottomless well of rose water. We heard that sound, we saw her move, we watched.

“Look at the way your shepherd is staring at Fiona, boy. I don’t like it.”

Had the circumstances been other than what they were, had there been no children, no coffin, no open grave on the beach, and had we four met the tall intruder while swimming or among the pines in some dense secluded grove where we might have sat with our spread white cloth and Fiona’s array of wicker baskets, then surely Fiona would have been her usual self and would have touched the man’s arm, paired him up with Hugh, would have softened to his fixed smile, his indifference to loneliness, his broad and crooked shoulders. But not now. She had made her decision. She was concentrating on Meredith and the shepherd’s dog. And did he know all this? Had he understood this much of my kneeling wife in that single frank sweep of his dark unfocused eyes? Had he caught the pretentious tone of Hugh’s remark and decided to heed that hostile sound? Was he more concerned with our funeral than with Fiona?

Slowly he stepped forward and offered his bony right hand first to Hugh and then to me, and in the grip of those cold and calloused fingers even Hugh must have begun to comprehend what our unwanted intruder meant to say: that he had slept in dark caves, that he had buried countless dead ewes, that he also knew what it was like to bury children, that only men could work together in the service of death, that death was for men, that now his only interest was in the one-armed man and bare-chested man and the coffin. The rest of it (our wives, our children) meant nothing to him. Only death mattered. He had joined us only because of the coffin.

“Meredith,” Hugh was saying then, abruptly, gruffly, “the shepherd is going to help Cyril and me. You better watch.”

Together Hugh and I lifted the coffin, moved in unison through the crab grass, and approached the wet hole where the mute and barefooted figure already stood waiting, shovel in hand. The flatness of the sea before us reflected the gloom and silence of the wall of trees at our backs. The hole, soon to be filled, was ringed, I saw, with the deep fresh impressions of the shepherd’s feet. No birdcall, no tolling bell. Only the sound of Hugh’s breath and the rising of the salty breeze and across the open grave the white face of the shepherd.

“You better gather around,” Hugh said. “All of you.”

“Meredith, baby. This is the way it is in real life. Don’t be sad.”

“Ready, boy?”

“Ready.”

At either end of the grave we knelt and took hold of the silver grips and swung the coffin over the open grave. Together we eased the small black heavy coffin down until it rested finally in the sea-smelling dark water that lay in the bottom of the hole. I was sure that behind us Fiona was restraining Meredith. And was Fiona thinking what I was thinking? Was she too recalling the old half-drowned animal in my wet arms? No, I thought, Fiona did not share my interest in coherence and full circles. For better or worse, Fiona lived free of the shades of memory.

But it was not at all a question of restraining Meredith. She was not struggling to plunge toward the grave, as I had expected, but instead was kneeling with her hands clasped gently and her thin white face raised happily toward the black-and-white figure of the shepherd who was now filling the grave. Sitting back on her heels, Meredith appeared to be quite unconscious of Fiona’s long fingers stroking her hair or of the dog’s head resting in her lap. Only the shepherd mattered for Meredith, and despite his concentration and violent labor, the tall man was obviously aware of the admiring child.

“I’m afraid of him,” Catherine whispered.

“No need to be,” I murmured, and brushed the sand from the hair on my chest, felt little Dolores encircling my tight and heavy thigh with a stealthy arm.

Bare foot raised to the edge of the black and pitted blade, coat open, chest and belly now and again exposed in both a poverty and pride of nakedness, broad and crooked shoulders twisting suddenly to the thrust of the long arm and invulnerable bare foot — all this was observed in silence as slowly the pile of sand went down and the shadows lengthened and the light of the afternoon grew still more pale. In this physical act of covering up forever what he assumed to be the small body of an infant dressed for death, the shepherd was providing Meredith with a performance which I, had it been me, would surely not have attempted. But even now I suspected that Meredith, so seldom treated to anything she herself desired, had probably forgotten the reason we were waiting at the edge of this grave. And yet if Meredith was having a little excitement, I thought, what did it matter if momentarily she had forgotten her old dog? After all, I thought, the afternoon really belonged to Hugh.

“Oh, baby, a flute …”

From a pocket in his open coat the shepherd had produced a short wooden pipe on which he now played his reedy tune for Meredith. The light faded, the rising wind blew through the open coat, his unfocused eyes were fixed on Meredith, the bony fingers rose and fell on the holes of the crude pipe. Had he known all along that he would stand here playing his shepherd’s pipe? Was this why he had joined us and taken up the shovel? Only to pipe his endless frail tune into the approaching night? At least Meredith would never forget those sounds, I told myself. Nor, for that matter, would Hugh.

He was still playing when I retrieved the shovel, still playing when once again we straggled back into the wall of trees. And still playing when from the darkness ahead, where Hugh and Fiona were quite invisible, I heard against the wind and that faint piping the clear tones of Fiona’s voice.

“He was attractive, baby. But not as attractive as you.”

IT IS ANOTHER ONE OF OUR MURMUROUS NONSEQUENTIAL midafternoons in Illyria. Together we lounge around the small white female donkey which only this morning Hugh discovered stock-still in the lemon grove. Hugh holds the donkey’s rope. Catherine ties back her hair, Fiona smiles, all four of us have taken turns at the makeshift shower.

“Listen,” Hugh says, “we can either pack the baskets on the donkey and walk. Or Cyril can carry the baskets and Fiona can ride the donkey. What do you say, boy, shall Fiona ride?”

“Sure,” I say, admiring the little trim white body and pearl-colored hoofs, “let Fiona ride.”

“Help me up, baby. OK?”

We face each other, we kiss, we look into each other’s eyes. I put my heavy hands on Fiona’s waist and lift and seat Fiona sidesaddle (though there is no saddle) on the donkey’s rump. I step away, Hugh gives the end of the rope to Fiona and puts his quick hand against the small of her back.

“I’ll hold her on, boy. Don’t worry.”

Fiona waves. Off they go at a fast walk through the lemon trees which soon give way to orange trees white with blossoms.

“Wait,” Catherine whispers, “they’ll see.”

“Can’t wait,” I say, and pull her into another full-length embrace, mouth to mouth with Catherine’s hands in my hair and my own two weathered hands pressing the warm flesh beneath the blouse and beneath the wide waistband of Catherine’s skirt. We hold each other, we erupt into a few choppy kisses, again we hold each other — Catherine and I who are too heavy to ride on donkeys, too large in each other’s arms to move.

And yet I lift my head, Catherine lifts her head, for a moment we see that all this while Fiona has been riding back and forth between the trees, Fiona with her bare legs thrust out for balance and steadied at the same time by her smiling Hugh. They wave, the air is sweet, the small white distant donkey carries its laughing and weightless burden through the orange trees.

“Baby,” Fiona calls, “we can do whatever we want to do. We really can.”

Remember?

OR IN THE SEA AND SWIMMING, ALL FOUR OF US SIDE BY side in an undulating line of naked bathers peaceful, untiring, synchronized, stroking our slow way out from the pebbly shore behind us and forward toward the little island rising ahead. And today Hugh is as naked as the rest of us. Today he lies in the low waves beside Fiona and his body rolls, his tufts and patches of black hair shine in the foam, his thin legs are cutting imaginary paper, his stump is pink, his good arm is doing double duty.

“Think we’ll make it, boy?”

“Sure we will. Only a few hundred yards or so to go. Nothing to it.”

Porpoises. Four large human porpoises similarly disposed and holding formation, laughing, stroking the waves, and Fiona is swimming on her side, like Hugh, while Catherine and I are riding heads down and on our bellies, though now and again we swing together and bump and touch. With every breath we see each other through pink spray and across green foam.

“Baby, it’s so beautiful. I could swim forever.”

It is Fiona’s idea, of course, these naked watery idyls to the little island that slopes up from the sea and gently turns like the bare brown sinuous shoulder of a young girl. And the idea corresponds somehow to Fiona herself and to the experience — in the idea as in the sea itself we snort, kick, float, swim on as if the less familiar shore will never rise to our feet or as if the freshening depths will never give way to the warm shallows.

But it ends. We drift against the island, and Fiona is out and running, and silvery wet-ribbed Hugh is gasping for the breath of paradise but giving chase. Sea to sand, obviously it is another moment of metamorphosis which Catherine and I, still dripping, still knee-deep in the pale tide, share at a glance. Her hair is plastered to cheek, neck, upper chest, and down her left arm. Her small amber-colored eyes are fixed on mine. She is large but I am larger, and side by side we climb from the pooling sea and walk together across the few remaining feet of dry sand to the privacy of the nearest convenient rocks behind which I draw Catherine into another full-length embrace. And suddenly Catherine is all mouth, all stomach, all thighs and hands, all salt and skin and hair, Catherine sliding between my heavy legs and I between hers until later, much later, our knees can spread no wider and the brass voice resounding in the oracle of Catherine’s sex and mine can sing no more. We extricate ourselves. We kiss. We smile. I strip the wet and partially graying hair from Catherine’s cheek. Hand in hand we walk back to the clear green shallows for a rinse and then strike off across the sand for our usual cool rendezvous with thin Hugh and slender Fiona in the little abandoned seaside chapel at the eastern edge of this small timeless island.

Hugh and Fiona are already inside when we arrive, their sandy footprints already shine on the stone floor when we join them within the whitewashed wall of the little chapel. There is a cross of sorts on the roof but no windows, no altar, no iron bell, no icons, no religious furniture, as if the chapel itself had once been drowned in the depths of our green sea and then hauled to the surface and left to dry out forever. We enter, Catherine and I, knowing that Hugh and Fiona are already there. In silence we greet each other with eyes and fingers, we who are now four naked figures instead of two. There is light in the narrow doorway, the white and shadowed eruptions of this room reflect the nudity of our four tall bodies congregating, so to speak, in reunion. And if we are all comparing notes, as it were, Fiona smiling at Catherine and squeezing my arm, Hugh glancing slowly in my direction, Catherine watching the movement of Fiona’s legs and thinking of me, I catching a glimpse of Hugh in Fiona’s steady eyes — still we are all unpaired selfless lovers agreeably reunited in the island chapel.

“Baby,” Fiona whispers, “I like us all bare together, don’t you?”

I smile, Hugh tucks the tip of his injured arm against Fiona’s ribs. We linger on.

Remember?

“YOU’RE WEARING YOUR NICE OLD DRESSING GOWN,” Fiona was saying. “Have fun, baby.”

“I could stick around here tonight just as well, Fiona. What do you think?”

“You’re feeling amorous, baby, and she’s expecting you. I can tell.”

“This blue mood’s not like you, Fiona. I’ll stay.”

“No baby. Go ahead. Please.”

Yes, I was feeling amorous, as Fiona said. All day long I had sat outside our villa and watched Fiona’s mounting silence, had sat with elbows propped on heavy thighs and blown halfhearted, stillborn, unappreciated smoke rings and watched Fiona walking back and forth with her head down and her two strong hands on her buttocks. We had stared at each other over the flashing rims of our wineglasses, we had had one of our love lunches, as Fiona called them, but had made no love. She had smiled, she had looked wan, she had made no move to walk beyond the villa. And all day long there had been no sign of Hugh. So now in the darkness there was no mistaking the message of Fiona’s hand on my silken sleeve, no use arguing against Fiona’s mood. She was determined that I go, that she stay behind, that she wait alone either for my return or Hugh’s unlikely arrival. But Fiona was wearing her white and tightly belted terry-cloth robe instead of her lisle negligee, which suggested that she would spend the night with neither one of us.

“I won’t be long.”

“No hurry, baby. I’m going to read.”

“Listen,” I murmured, “if he shows up …”

But before I could allude to the innumerable incidents that might have justified Fiona’s hopes, suddenly I felt her cold hand on my mouth and her thin fingers against my lips and could say no more. Was all Hugh’s excitement to come to nothing? Was Fiona to be denied?

“I told you, baby. I’m going to read.”

My hands were in the loose pockets of my maroon-colored silken dressing gown, Fiona’s long insistent fingers were still pressed to my lips. The day that was like no other day in our lives was ended, the night that was like no other night would soon be gone. And nodding, aware of the narrow featureless white face in the darkness and the white tufted robe which I could not bring myself to touch, for the first time I contemplated the possibility that Hugh might have managed to keep himself in ignorance of Catherine and me, as a matter of fact, might simply waste all his obvious devotion to Fiona and hence hers to him. Was it over? Was it never to begin?

“It’s just not going to happen, baby. I was wrong.”

I thought of all she refused to let me say, I thought of Hugh and Fiona listening to the nightingale, I heard them laugh. I saw Hugh catching her close among the silent trees. And now only the two of us with our perplexity, our depression, our separate thoughts? We had had our disappointments in the past, our reversals, but nothing like this. Nothing quite as simple and stark and final as this.

“You better go, baby. Come back when you want to.”

So the day had already struck the toneless note of the night’s silence before darkness fell, and already the mood of the woman I was leaving had telegraphed itself, it seemed to me, to the woman I was about to meet. If Fiona was beyond my reach, I decided, Catherine was perhaps no better off. If my wife was pensive, Hugh’s wife would be pensive too. Solitude did not bode well for amorous feeling. So even before I pushed my way through the funeral cypresses, moving slowly and more ruminative than ever, already I was anticipating the pauses that would precede companionship, the reluctance that would greet my tenderness. I too was moody. The night was a black heart. I misjudged the whereabouts of the rift in the funeral cypresses and was forced to retrace my steps and feel my way through the no longer familiar passage between the trees. Perhaps Catherine was sleeping. Perhaps she was not lying awake for me at all as Fiona had thought. And still there was no sign of Hugh and I did nothing to disguise the sounds of my slow approach, thinking that we lovers in fact were bound to suffer at the hands of the lovers in fancy.

But mistaken. Totally mistaken. Because as soon as I invaded Hugh’s dark villa and entered that cold room, I knew immediately that it was worse than I thought, that it was no mere question of blue moods or vague romantic numbness, but that something was wrong, something specifically and painfully wrong.

“Catherine? What’s the matter?”

The shutters were open, the low bed was empty. I waited. I listened for the sleeping children and sleeping dog, heard nothing. But there at the foot of the empty bed stood Catherine with her dark hair loose and arms at her sides and wearing the white translucent pajama top and pants. There she stood, immobile, opalescent, poignant, and suddenly I knew that she had been standing there for hours.

“Catherine. What’s wrong?”

I saw the turned-down bed, from somewhere in the darkness of this thick-walled room I detected the scent of the three large cream-colored roses which I had picked and brought with me the night before. Nothing and yet everything had changed. But why, I asked myself, what had happened? Why was Catherine breathing with such deep regularity and watching me with such willful silence, as if Hugh himself were hidden bolt upright in one of the other darkened corners of the room? Or had he instead departed? Simply packed up his cameras and disappeared? But Catherine and I were alone, safely though uncomfortably alone, and no matter how Hugh chose to treat his wife, surely nothing could induce him to abandon the garden in which Fiona flowered.

“Catherine, what’s happened? What’s wrong?”

Mere empty bed, mere silent woman, mere smell of the night, mere fading scent of the roses, mere smell of useless cologne on my naked chest. But this could not be all, I told myself, and again I was convinced that Catherine was now more than ever in need of my patience, my tenderness.

“Listen. There’s something you want me to know but don’t want to say. What is it?”

I moved close to Catherine and placed my firm hands on her sloping shoulders.

“Fiona’s not herself tonight,” I said gently. “Neither are you.”

“I wish you hadn’t come.”

“But you’ve been expecting me.”

“Yes. But you’d better go.”

“Is it Hugh?”

“It’s not Hugh.”

“Tell me. What’s he done?”

“Nothing.”

“Catherine, put your arms on my shoulders and your hands in my hair. Kiss me.”

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Well, I’m not going to leave you like this. You know I’m not.”

“But that’s what I want.”

And if I did what she asked? If suddenly I assumed that Catherine meant what she said and that this new temperamental turn of hers was an ordinary, insignificant, familiar condition of only a single night’s duration and nothing more? If I nodded, kissed her cheek, left quietly, retraced my steps? If I simply went back and shared the smoky glow of Fiona’s lamp and spent the rest of these dark hours listening to Fiona read aloud? Was this the answer? But what then of Fiona’s unhappy hunch? If I left this room, might not the import of Fiona’s hunch prove as true for Catherine and me as for Fiona and Hugh? And what of Hugh? Where was he? Even now Hugh’s absence was a sinuous presence in this cold room.

I withdrew my hands from Catherine’s shoulders, dropped my arms, turned, tightened my silken sash, and sat down on the edge of the bed. I thought of Hugh yearning for Fiona and punishing all four of us with the fervor of his deprivation. And I thought of Fiona robed in white and consoling herself with her book of poems and sipping wine. Nothing and yet everything had changed.

“Join me, Catherine,” I said. “You might as well.”

Slumped on the edge of Catherine’s bed, skirts of the dressing gown drawn prudently across my pajamaed knees, chin in hand, low-keyed invitation still unanswered — slowly I realized that Catherine was going to settle for docility. Without speaking, without argument, without emotion, as if all our former procedures preliminary to affection had never existed, Catherine accepted my invitation not by seating herself beside me in any kind of readiness to talk, but simply by stretching herself out behind me on that low bed. In another woman docility would have said only that sex was going to get us nowhere. But not in Catherine. In Catherine docility meant something else, something more. But what?

Carefully I moved, thinking of our mimosa tree bereft in the darkness, carefully I swung up my legs and crossed my ankles, lay back carefully and quietly beside the full length of Catherine’s body. What else could I do? How else could I be except placid, undemonstrative, leisurely, totally considerate of Catherine’s docile body next to mine? But if I could have been wrong, if I myself could have been mistaken about Fiona and Catherine and even Hugh? If Fiona had decided just for once on the necessity of deception, and had actually spent this day not inuring herself to loss but anticipating a secret assignation with Hugh? If terry-cloth robe and poems were a harmless ruse? If Fiona were now lying at last with her arms around Hugh on the rough and sloping floor of his darkened studio, and if what was wrong with Catherine depended only on her so interpreting Hugh’s absence — if all this could have been true, then Fiona’s pleasure would have been my pleasure while Catherine’s jealousy would have been no match for the heat of my love. But the night was long and dark and silent. And it was not true. None of it was true. Fiona had never felt the need to deceive me in the past, so why now? Catherine had felt no jealousy since Hugh first made plain his selfthwarted attraction for Fiona. Why now?

“Confide in me, Catherine. What else can you do?”

She said nothing. She did not move. She remained flat on her back in her own way determined to acquiesce, if that’s what I demanded, but equally determined to offer me no encouragement, no help. So I shifted, rolled onto my left side, raised myself, stared down at what I could see of Catherine’s shadowed face. Slowly but firmly I placed my free hand on Catherine’s body. All this I did, not with any interest in arousing Catherine against her will but only as a matter of course, a tactile act of comfort. The movement of my hand was personal but not exploratory. I meant to convey the sensation of the palm of my large hand, not the fingers. But apparently even this, to Catherine, was more than she wanted. Apparently she was not as determined to acquiesce as I had thought.

“Stop,” she said quietly and yet not so quietly. “I wish you’d stop.”

But too late, I thought, too late. Because suddenly I felt beneath my hand the unmistakable presence of something hard, something foreign, something distinctly different from the soft malleable flesh of Catherine’s waist. It was too late to stop.

“What,” I whispered, with hand arrested, mind leaping forward, voice giving way atypically to surprise, “what …?”

No light in Catherine’s open eyes, no sounds of confession on Catherine’s lips, no effort on Catherine’s part to dissuade me, to disengage my heavy hand from where it lay on her waist. I paused, she waited. And suspended there in the darkness between my whispered exclamation and what I now knew with reasonable certainty to be its cause, slowly I felt a single cold drop of sweat trickling its telltale passage down my naked side. But was it possible? Was my hand touching what I thought it touched? One minute I was sweating for Catherine and the next I was sliding my hand beneath the edge of Catherine’s pajama top and with my bare hand touching the band of metal which now I knew beyond a doubt was girdling her waist. And just as methodically I thrust my fingers between Catherine’s unmoving thighs until beneath the mere breath of white cotton cloth I felt the little sharp pointed teeth of that elongated narrow tear of iron wedged tightly and unmistakably between her thighs.

“Catherine, it can’t be true …”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“How could he do it? How could you let him …?”

“He made me. That’s all.”

“All night long you’ve been wearing this wretched thing… ”

Bruise? Blemish? Specific source of Catherine’s pain? Her only answer was to disengage my hand at last. She did not speak, did not move, except to take hold of my hand and remove it slowly and gently from where it no longer belonged between her legs. I felt her hand, I smelled her hair, Hugh’s message could hardly have been more clear. And I understood that it was meant for me, that message, and suddenly I understood that Hugh was not at all idyling away those dark hours on the empty beach or brooding alone at the unshuttered window of his bare room above the black canal. I knew where he was. I knew exactly where to find him.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’ll be back.”

She made no objection. She asked for no explanation. And when I returned she would still be there, waiting in the darkness and making no effort to free herself from that iron web which Hugh had somehow brought himself to adjust to Catherine’s size and lock in place.

“I won’t be long. Trust me.”

Of course, I told myself, the wicker settee. Where else would he be if not stretched out even now in the darkness of the grape arbor? How like him to wait for me on the very piece of furniture from which I had watched Fiona resolving herself to so much unnecessary solitude. How like him to wait for darkness and then steal onto our side of the funeral cypresses and into my arbor, which was what he must have done, to usurp my place beneath the grapes he scorned, only to lie inactive, silent, within easy earshot of the plaintive voice of the very woman whose calm unhappiness was the result of what she took to be his absence, his unknown whereabouts. But all that time he had been there and must have listened to Fiona’s quiet declaration and heard all we said, quickened at the sound of Catherine’s name and writhed, as it were, at my own words that sealed the purpose of my departure. And to him it must have seemed too late to undo the damage he had done to Catherine, to all of us, no matter what he might have felt upon hearing the sad ring of Fiona’s voice. But perhaps our blue moods had meant nothing to Hugh. Perhaps they had only heightened his agonized elation over what he knew I was setting off to encounter in that dark villa of his. Love never had so fierce an antagonist, I thought, never had Fiona and I been so unfortunate.

“That you, boy?”

“You know it is.”

“Well, I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Yes,” I murmured, “I guess you have.”

From where I stood the glow of Fiona’s lamp was invisible. High overhead the night sky was packed and streaked with colonies and continents of stars that gave no light. And yet I knew where I was, had already heard and answered the voice that had spoken up suddenly inside the arbor. It was obviously the voice of a man reclining, a voice that had accosted me from behind a thick invisible wall of flat and matted leaves, a voice so close and soft-spoken and yet at the same time so screened and deeply buried that in the very instant of sound it transformed my gentle arbor into a cavern of black leaves. Hugh was lying inside that cavern and filling it with his distasteful eagerness and, I guessed, the pain of all the dark time he had spent rehearsing himself for my arrival.

“Come on in, boy. I want to talk to you.”

I felt the leaves in my hair, the leaves against the sides of my head, the leaves thick and black and suddenly meaningless against one silken shoulder. And now without answering Hugh’s pathetic effort to gain the upper hand I simply entered the arbor, noted in silence the darker elongated mass of shadow that was only Hugh deceptively at rest, and seated myself, as I had known I would, on our now cold and otherwise empty bench of stone. I crossed my heavy and loosely pajamaed legs, leaned forward, clasped together my two weathered hands, found myself regretting that this my trysting place had now become the scene of tribunal. We were alone. We would eat no grapes, drink no wine. Again I became aware of the smell of my cologne. Despite the darkness, I was sure that Hugh was dressed for the night chill in his old pea jacket. And was Hugh as conscious as I was of the scent of my cologne? And equally conscious that I, unlike himself, was dressed for love and sleep and was perfectly at home, so to speak, in the night temperature? No doubt he was. But while I felt only indifference for all my advantages, nonetheless I made no effort to subdue the formidable seriousness of my presence on this stone bench in my ruined arbor.

“Why don’t you smoke, boy? It’ll be easier for you.”