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do him good to talk about it. Come on in … God! I could do with a drink! Caliban’ll have to lump it, for once.’ She smiled a bit thinly, and led the way in through the long window.
    The
salotto
was a long, cool room, with three big windows opening on the terrace with its dazzling view. The sun was tempered by the wistaria that roofed the terrace, and the room was cool and airy, its duck-egg blue walls and white paint setting off to perfection the gilt of the Italian mirrors and the pale-gold polished wood of the floor. A calm room, with the kind of graceful simplicity that money and good taste can produce. Phyllida had always had excellent taste. It was a good thing, I sometimes reflected, that she, and not I, had married the rich man. My own taste – since I had outgrown the gingham-and-Chianti-bottle stage – had been heavily conditioned by the fact that I had lived for so long in a perpetual welter of junk-shop props picked up cheaply and licked into stage-worthiness for the current show. At best, the effect was a kind of poor man’s Cecil Beaton; at worst, a cross between sets designed by Emmett and Ronald Searle for a stage version of Samuel Becket’s
Watt
. That I enjoyed my kind of life didn’t stop me from admiring my sister’s undoubted talent for elegance.
    There was a table at the far end of the room, laden with bottles. A man stood with his back to us, splashing soda into a glass. He turned as we came in.
    My first quick impression was of a mask of rather chilly control held hard down over some strong emotion. Then the impression faded, and I saw that I was wrong; the control was not a mask; it was part of the man, and was created by the emotion itself, as a Westinghouse brake is slammed on automatically by the head of steam. Here was something very differentfrom Mr Gale. I looked at him with interest, and some compassion.
    He was tall, and toughly built, with brown hair bleached by the sun, a narrow, clever face, and grey eyes which looked tired and dragged down at the corners, as if he had had no sleep. I put his age somewhere in the middle thirties.
    Phyllida introduced us, and he acknowledged me civilly, but all his attention was on my sister. ‘You’ve told them? Was it very bad?’
    ‘Worse than bad. Get me a drink, for heaven’s sake, will you?’ She sank into a chair. ‘What? Oh, Scotch, please. What about you, Lucy?’
    ‘If that’s fruit juice in the jug, may I have that, please? Is there ice?’
    ‘Of course.’ He handed the drinks. ‘Look, Phyl, ought I to go and talk to them now? There’ll be things they’ll want to ask.’
    She drank, sighed, and seemed to relax a little. ‘I’d leave it for now, if I were you. I told them they could go home, and they didn’t say a word, just picked up their things. I suppose the police’ll be there to see them … Later on they’ll want to hear every last detail from you, but just at the moment I doubt if Maria’s fit to take anything in at all, except that he’s dead. As a matter of fact, I don’t think she even took
that
in, I don’t think she believes it, yet.’ She looked up at him. ‘Godfrey, I suppose … I suppose there couldn’t be any doubt?’
    He hesitated, swirling the whisky in his glass, frowning down at it. The lines of fatigue were deep in his face, and made me wonder if he were older than I had thought.
    ‘Well, yes. That’s rather the hell of it, don’t you see? That’s why I didn’t come over till now … I’ve been phoning around all over the place, trying to find out if he could possibly have got ashore either here or on the mainland, or if he’d been … well, found. If his body had been washed ashore, that is.’ He looked up from the drink. ‘But I’m morally certain there’s no chance. I mean, I saw him go.’
    ‘And how far out were you?’
    He grimaced. ‘About dead centre.’
    ‘From here?’
    ‘Further north, out from Kouloura, right in the strait. But that’s still a mile each