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then—I had never seen Constance with long hair—had been combed out and artfully arranged so that it fell in snaking tresses away from her face. Shocking in its luxuriance, as Vickers had no doubt intended, it brushed the floor. Constance lay in profile; a band of contrived light sharpened the strong planes of her face, so that her features, undeniably arresting even then, became a painterly composition, a pattern of light and dark. Black lashes made a crescent against a wide, high, almost Slavic cheekbone. Oddly, since her eyes (which were almost black) were Constance’s most famous feature, Vickers had chosen to photograph her with them shut.
    “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Vickers, who was recovering, gave a high, whinnying laugh. “That was what I called it. Well, one did things like that then. Constance on a bier, the Sitwells on biers—nothing but biers for a whole year, which went down terribly badly, of course, because it was the middle of the first war, and people said it was decadent. Useful, though, all that outrage.” He gave me a small glance. “It made me into an enfant terrible, always the best way to start. People forget I was ever that, now I’m a grand old man. So I thought I’d use this, in the exhibition, just to remind them. Oh, and her wedding photographs of course. They’re too divine.”
    He riffled through the pile of photographs. “Oh, they’re not here. They’re down at the museum, I think. But look at this—now this will interest you.”
    The photograph he held out was an informal one, the kind of picture Vickers used to call a “family snap.”
    I recognized it at once. It had been taken in Venice in 1956. Constance and a group of her friends stood by the Grand Canal; behind them you could just discern the buttress of a church—it was Santa Maria della Salute. An elegant group in pale summery clothes; it included the legendary Van Dynem twins, both now dead. A moment before the picture was taken, I remembered, there had been some horseplay between the twins with a panama hat.
    On the edge of the group, a little separated from them, were two younger figures. Caught in that golden Venetian light, with the shadows of the church just to their side: a tall, dark-haired man, his expression preoccupied, a man of striking appearance who might have been taken for an Italian but who was not, and a young woman at whom he was looking.
    She, too, was tall. Her figure was slender. She wore a greenish dress above bare legs, flat sandals. Her most striking feature was her hair, which she wore long and loose. It waved about her face; the Venetian light intensified its color to red-gold, or auburn. A strand of hair, blown across her face, obscured her features. She looked away from the camera and away from the dark-suited man. She looked, I thought, poised for flight—this young woman, who had once been myself.
    I had been twenty-five then, not quite twenty-six. I was not yet in love with the man standing next to me, but I had sensed, that day, a possibility of love. I did not want to look at this photograph, at the man, or at myself. I put it down without comment and turned back to Vickers.
    “Conrad,” I said. “Where is Constance?”
    He prevaricated. He twisted and turned. Yes, he had made some calls, just as he had promised, but—to his great surprise—had drawn a blank. No one seemed to know where Constance was—which was unusual, but surely no cause for alarm. Constance, he suggested, would pop up suddenly, just as she always did; after all, hadn’t she always been unpredictable?
    “One of Constance’s fugue states, isn’t that the term? You know how she likes to take off. There’s probably a man behind it somewhere.”
    He then showered me with suggestions. The apartment was closed up? How strange. Had I tried East Hampton? What, it was sold? He had had no idea…. He rushed away from that one very fast, leaving me quite sure he knew the house had been sold, for all the energy