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point.
    â€œâ€˜You find this amusing, do you Dacres?’ he said to me.
    â€œLavinia said ‘Don’t.’
    â€œWhy was I laughing? He thought it was me. Bosie, the family. Something in the bewitching line. They thought if I were excised she’d be fifteen again, in stockinged feet.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” asked Edelweiss, interested.
    â€œSorcery. What I mean is she hated them before she met me. We met in London, not in the country: she was living with her cousin. She painted, she danced, she knew everyone. She’d started four magazines. She’d been to Algiers. All before me. When I was in my room, working, all miseryguts. And yet they thought I was the cause: I wasn’t even a catalyst. She was the catalyst.”
    Dacres wondered why he had made himself remember.
    â€œFinally Evie spoke: ‘I don’t care about you,’ she told them. Now we could hear the musicians starting up. They had a quartet behind the leafy fronds. It’s a very aquatic place.”
    â€œI know,” Edelweiss said.
    â€œOf course. She said, ‘All you’ve ever done is try to crush me. I don’t care about your money either.’ Bosie moaned. ‘I just want to know: is it Malcolm’s doing?’ Her brother. The scion. When she was in tears she would call herself a footnote in that house.
    â€œâ€˜For God’s sake, Evelyn,’ said Bosie. By this time we were standing. Bosie couldn’t get up out of the chair. I’d see them again, once more.
    â€œShe took me home,” Dacres remembered. “We made love, on the bare floor. We decided we were going to get married. The sun shone in, surrounded by my works.”
    Dacres waited, thinking.
    â€œBut you sound happy,” Edelweiss said.
    â€œI do?”
    Dacres realized he was smiling.
    â€œWhy do you call it a bad memory?”
    Dacres said: “I still have his tie, somewhere.”
    Via Poste Restante
    Gorren,
    You should have got off the train with me. What godforsaken hole have you fetched up in? Tell me you’re not returning to England (dolente regno), it seems like suicide now. I don’t just mean personally—the whole blasted project has come to nothing and it’s time to start from scratch. Come with me, we’ll live as gods. We’ll divide the place: you take Calliope and I’ll be Polycletus. And all the guff about the snow and ice: it’s positively balmy. People say such things.
    I have landed on my feet. A man told me a joke about holidays and life: Saint Peter gives you a week in heaven and a week in hell. When you visit hell it’s splendid, all racy brunettes mixing cocktails, but when you decide to live there it’s the old story, pitchforks and brimstone and sodomy. When you complain the devil says: Well the last time you were just a tourist.
    But the point is I’m not really living here, am I, that’s his mistake. I am a visitor. Perhaps on extended leave but nonetheless. I will not even be here for the Duration. New York beckons doesn’t it (vile country though). But for the moment I have an arrangement with the curious moustachioed little chap who runs the hotel we all stayed at remember? He is Swiss, I imagine he must be an excellent dancer, he is certainly rather delicate. Wanted to be a painter so he has a soft spot for me: I’ve offered him lessons as payment in kind but he’s too shy to take me up on it. No, no chambermaids for me, I am taking good care this time.
    Gorren we might as well get to the point: send me £20 or the equivalent or whatever you can manage will you? Naturally, I’ll pay you back. Funds have temporarily dwindled and the promised commissions are still only promised. I will be introduced around (thanks to Stanley Burner, still father of his daughter) but he says people will be a little cautious initially. War air. (Though I imagine the place just as ponderous and stuck in its miasma long