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By Root 280 0

retired but still active, benevolent and only mildly intrusive, was enjoying his favourite moment of the day. He opened the register to see who had gone and who had arrived. Business was of course very slack at this time of the year; the place was bound to be half empty in the month before the winter closure. The German family had gone, he noted; the noise of their going had indeed penetrated to his sitting room on the fifth floor. That curious elderly couple from the Channel Islands had left after tea. The conference at Geneva might yield the odd visitor, someone who decided to stay on, perhaps, and go back after the weekend. Otherwise, only the regulars were left: the Comtesse de Bonneuil, Mme Pusey and her daughter, the woman with the dog whom he refused to name, although her husband was in the English Gotha, and as to whom his son-in-law had received certain instructions. One new arrival. Hope, Edith Johanna. An unusual name for an English lady. Perhaps not entirely English. Perhaps not entirely a lady. Recommended, of course. But in this business one never knew.

2

Dressed for dinner, in her Liberty silk smock, her long narrow feet tamed into plain kid pumps, Edith sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first meal in public. She even wrote a few paragraphs of Beneath the Visiting Moon, then on re-reading them, realized that she had used the same device in The Stone and the Star, and crossed them out. And in crossing them out, understood exactly where she would have to go when she started again. Thus slightly reassured, with tomorrow’s work tentatively programmed, she closed the folder, took up her bag and her key, and walked resolutely out of the room.

From the same not too distant point along the corridor she could hear the radio again, and also bath water, and as she went towards the stairs there seemed to be a sudden emanation of a rosy scent, signalling the sort of preparation made by someone with a proper sense of her own presence. The woman with the dog, thought Edith. She will emerge, rather late, in some stunning creation, flat-stomached and disdainful, the dog under her arm. I must try and talk to her. There will, she thought painfully, be nothing else to do after dinner.

Downstairs all was deserted, and she realized that she was too early. The only sounds came from the bar, where subdued masculine conversation, unbroken by laughter or conviviality, was in progress. She would have liked a gin and tonic but could not quite make the effort. She sat down at a small table in the salon and picked up a crumpled copy of the Gazette de Lausanne which someone had left. Curious that it had not been cleared away, she thought; the house-keeping here seems so very careful. But at that moment the bulldog-faced lady, whom she must remember to address properly, if she were ever called upon to address her at all, appeared in the doorway, wearing an all-purpose black dress and having changed her blue veil with the bows for a black one with a few slightly precarious sequins, raised her stick and said, ‘Ah!’ Edith held up the Gazette de Lausanne with an enquiring smile. Mme de Bonneuil nodded and began rocking her way through the thicket of unoccupied chairs and tables. Edith rose to meet her, but Mme de Bonneuil made surprisingly rapid progress, and Edith was stalled at the next table but two. ‘Merci,’ said Mme de Bonneuil, raising her stick again. ‘Je vous en prie,’ said Edith, and returned to her chair. They were the first words she had spoken since her arrival.

Leaning back and closing her eyes briefly, she allowed her dread of the evening before her to come to the surface. In any event, meals in public were not to her taste, even when she was accompanied. She remembered with a slight shudder the last meal she had had before leaving England. Her agent, Harold Webb, had taken her out to lunch. He had clearly meant to raise her spirits, had assured her of his confidence in her, had even told her that he intended to negotiate a higher advance