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stepped out into the
brightness, the rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. Two
swallows were making passes over the fountain, and a chiffchaff’s song
was piercing the air from within the sinewy gloom of the giant cedar of
Lebanon. The flowers swung in the light breeze, tickling her face as she
crossed the terrace and carefully negotiated the three crumbly steps down to
the gravel path. Robbie turned suddenly at the sound of her approach.
    “I was
away in my thoughts,” he began to explain.
    “Would
you roll me one of your Bolshevik cigarettes?”
    He threw his
own cigarette aside, took the tin which lay on his jacket on the lawn and
walked alongside her to the fountain. They were silent for a while.
    “Beautiful
day,” she then said through a sigh.
    He was
looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and
even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded
perverse.
    “How’s
Clarissa
?” He was looking down at his fingers rolling the
tobacco.
    “Boring.”
    “We
mustn’t say so.”
    “I wish
she’d get on with it.”
    “She
does. And it gets better.”
    They slowed,
then stopped so that he could put the finishing touches to her roll-up.
    She said,
“I’d rather read Fielding any day.”
    She felt she
had said something stupid. Robbie was looking away across the park and the cows
toward the oak wood that lined the river valley, the wood she had run through
that morning. He might be thinking she was talking to him in code, suggestively
conveying her taste for the full-blooded and sensual. That was a mistake, of
course, and she was discomfited and had no idea how to put him right. She liked
his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of orange and green, made even more
granular in sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall. It was an
interesting combination in a man, intelligence and sheer bulk. Cecilia had
taken the cigarette and he was lighting it for her.
    “I know
what you mean,” he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the
fountain. “There’s more life in Fielding, but he can be
psychologically crude compared to
Richardson
.”
    She set down
the vase by the uneven steps that rose to the fountain’s stone basin. The
last thing she wanted was an undergraduate debate on eighteenth-century
literature. She didn’t think Fielding was crude at all, or that
Richardson
was a fine
psychologist, but she wasn’t going to be drawn in, defending, defining,
attacking. She was tired of that, and Robbie was tenacious in argument.
    Instead she
said, “
Leon
’s coming today,
did you know?”
    “I
heard a rumor. That’s marvelous.”
    “He’s
bringing a friend, this man Paul Marshall.”
    “The
chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you’re giving him flowers!”
    She smiled.
Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer
understood him. They had fallen out of touch at
Cambridge
. It had been too
difficult to do anything else. She changed the subject.
    “The
Old Man says you’re going to be a doctor.”
    “I’m
thinking about it.”
    “You
must love the student life.”
    He looked
away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turned to her
she thought she saw a touch of irritation. Had she sounded condescending? She
saw his eyes again, green and orange flecks, like a boy’s marble. When he
spoke he was perfectly pleasant.
    “I know
you never liked that sort of thing, Cee. But how else do you become a
doctor?”
    “That’s
my point. Another six years. Why do it?”
    He
wasn’t offended. She was the one who was overinterpreting, and jittery in
his presence, and she was annoyed with herself.
    He was taking
her question seriously. “No one’s really going to give me work as a
landscape gardener. I don’t want to teach, or go in for the civil
service. And medicine interests me . . .” He broke off as a thought
occurred to him. “Look, I’ve agreed to pay your father