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set in bitter dissatisfaction at the lost promise of her youth, when she had worn slacks and smoked cigarettes and written that thesis on Wordsworth’s politics or Shelley’s atheism that had so shocked and impressed her tutor at Girton or the bluestockings at Bryn Mawr. Surely she would be easy to deal with. First I would try charm, then threats; if all else failed I would take her to the top of the Antonelli Mole and push her off. Laughing, I began to cough, and felt my tobacco-beaten lungs wobbling in their cage like heavy, half-inflated, wet balloons, and the bath water around me swayed and almost slopped over. My cigarette case, another purloined trinket from the past, was beside me in the soap dish. I lit up, small flakes of hot ash hissing around me in the water. Nothing like a good deep chestful of cigarette smoke to quell a morning cough.
    I hauled myself up in a cascade of suds and immediately jarred my elbow on the edge of a glass shelf. This new pain struck up an echo in the knee I had bruised yesterday in the taxi on the bridge. I stood a moment clutching my arm and swearing. I am a bad fit with the world, an awkward fit; I am too high, too wide, too heavy for the common scale of things. I am not being boastful, quite the contrary; I have always found my oversized self burdensome and embarrassing. Before me in the misted glass of the bathroom’s floor-length mirror my reflection loomed, pallid and peering. I went out to the bedroom and stood by the window looking down into the shaded defile of the street, still massaging my bruised elbow. A bus went past, cars, foreshortened people. At the corner, where an angled block of buttery sunlight leaned, a woman selling flowers looked up and seemed to see me—was it possible, at such a distance? What a sight I would have been, suspended up there behind glass, a grotesque seraph, vast, naked, ancient. I lifted a hand, the palm held flatly forward, in solemn greeting, but the flower seller made no response.
    Almost before I knew what I was doing I had snatched up the telephone and asked for the Antwerp number. Waiting, I could hear myself breathing in the mouthpiece, as if I were standing behind my own shoulder. Wet still from the bath, I dripped on the marble floor, in the darkly gleaming surface of which I could see yet another, dim reflection of myself, in end-on perspective this time, like that bronzen portrait of the dead Christ by what’s-his-name, first the feet and then the shins, the knees, and dangling genitals, and belly and big chest, and topping it all the aura of wild hair and the featureless face looking down.
    She answered on the first ring. I hardly knew what to say; I had not thought I would reach her at once like this, I had expected delays, obstacles, evasions. Yes, she said, yes, this is she. I could not place her accent; she was not English, and yet an English-speaker. I knew from something in her voice that she had been doing nothing, nothing at all, only waiting for me to call. I pictured the scene, the meagre room in the cheap hotel, the light of a northern spring morning the colour of shined-on lead falling from a mansard window, and her, sitting on the side of the bed, head bowed and arthritic old hands folded in her lap, biding through the long hours, listening to the silence, willing it to be broken by the telephone’s jangling summons. She spoke with judicious care, costively, rationing the words; was there someone with her, overhearing what she said? No, she would be alone, I was certain of that. I said that she must come to me, for I would not go to her, and there was a lengthy pause. Then she said it was a question of the fare; train travel was expensive, and it was a long way. Now it was I who allowed the silence to expand. Did she think I should pay for her to come and ruin me? Still I would not speak. Very well, she said at last, she would take the overnight express and be here in the morning, and without another word, yet not