566
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Naturally. When you get to the top of the stairs, then go along
the passage in front of you and it's at the end." He was almost out of
the door when he turned to say, "Angela and I are in the other direc–
tion, in case you are wondering. Separated by at least five rooms."
"Some cottage," she said, but he had gone.
She sat on alone in the quiet kitchen. She could hear Sebastian's
footsteps overhead, and was pleased to hear them. The thin English
sunlight in the courtyard outside, the way people drifted past there,
a car heard passing in the lane outside, the shadow of a bird on the
stones of the court-all this inflicted on her a mood of dispersal,
change, loss. She began to feel out of place, sitting upright, as if on
guard, her fingers around the stem of the empty wineglass . She too
should go to sleep for a while. Why not?
The bedroom at the end of the corridor was a large room, fur–
nished adequately for country visits, with rugs on the floors and an
old-fashioned down quilt on the vast double bed. From the windows
she looked at widely-spaced houses in green fields. She slid into the
great bed and thought that here, tonight, she and Henry .. . well,
better wait and see!
The two came downstairs within five minutes of each other: it
was already late afternoon. Henry had rung to say he and Angela
were delayed at the hospital. Would Sebastian and Jody start the
dinner?
Sebastian, at home in this kitchen, directed operations while
Jody obediently chopped and mixed, and then together they made a
pudding she was good at. The courtyard outside the windows now
held the last sunlight like a pool, and the plants, and the dog dozing
on a flagstone, a tree, a bench, seemed remote, the setting for a
song, or a story. Sebastian told J ody the history of this "cottage" and
its environs, a long one going back centuries, and full of incident,
but only the last part elucidated what they were looking at. This
whole area had once been a large estate, and the big archway had
been where coaches, carts, teams of horses had come under the
building that housed a dozen little workshops. But now a bakery,
ironsmiths, the farrier's, the tannery, the carpenter's shed, the stone
mason's yard, were studios for artists and students who came here all
through the year on courses. These were the people, mostly young ,
who were slowly passing the windows like lazy fish, lingering to look
up at the windy evening sky, or standing to stare at the dog, or–
briefly, before manners averted their eyes - at the window where
