She decided against closing the French windows, and sat down at one end of the Chesterfield. She was not exactly waiting, she felt. No one else she knew had her knack of keeping still, without even a book on her lap, of moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden. She had learned her patience through years of sidestepping migraine. Fretting, concentrated thought, reading, looking, wanting—all were to be avoided in favor of a slow drift of association, while the minutes accumulated like banked snow and the silence deepened around her. Sitting here now she felt the night air tickle the hem of her dress against her shin. Her childhood was as tangible as the shot silk—a taste, a sound, a smell, all of these, blended into an entity that was surely more than a mood. There was a presence in the room, her aggrieved, overlooked ten-year-old self, a girl even quieter than Briony, who used to wonder at the massive emptiness of time, and marvel that the nineteenth century was about to end. How like her, to sit in the room like this, not “joining in.” This ghost had been summoned not by Lola imitating Hermione, or the inscrutable twins disappearing into the night. It was the slow retraction, the retreat into autonomy which signaled the approaching end of Briony’s childhood. It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child. She wasn’t a fool. She knew it was self-pity, this mellow expansiveness as she contemplated what looked like her own ruin: Briony would surely go off to her sister’s college, Girton, and she, Emily, would grow stiffer in the limbs and more irrelevant by the day; age and weariness would return Jack to her, and nothing would be said, or needed to be said. And here was the ghost of her childhood, diffused throughout the room, to remind her of the limited arc of existence. How quickly the story was over. Not massive and empty at all, but headlong. Ruthless. Her spirits were not particularly lowered by these commonplace reflections. She floated above them, gazing down neutrally, absently braiding them with other preoccupations. She planned to plant a clump of ceanothus along the approach to the swimming pool. Robbie was wanting to persuade her to erect a pergola and train along it a slow-growing wisteria whose flower and scent he liked. But she and Jack would be long buried before the full effect was achieved. The story would be over. She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity? She liked him well enough, and was pleased for Grace Turner that he had turned out to be bright. But really, he was a hobby of Jack’s, living proof of some leveling principle he had pursued through the years. When he spoke about Robbie, which wasn’t often, it was with a touch of self-righteous vindication. Something had been established which Emily took to be a criticism of herself. She had opposed Jack when he proposed paying for the boy’s education, which smacked of meddling to her, and unfair on Leon and the girls. She did not consider herself proved wrong simply because Robbie had come away from Cambridge with a first. In fact, it had made things harder for Cecilia with her third, though it was preposterous of her to pretend to be disappointed. Robbie’s elevation. “Nothing good will come of it” was the phrase she often used, to which Jack would respond smugly that plenty of good had come already. For all that, Briony had been thoroughly improper at dinner to speak that way to Robbie. If she had resentments of her own, Emily sympathized. It was to be expected. But to express them was undignified. Thinking of the dinner again—how artfully Mr. Marshall had put everyone at ease. Was he suitable? It was a pity about his looks, with one half of his face looking like an overfurnished bedroom. Perhaps in time it would come to seem rugged, this chin like a wedge of cheese. Or chocolate. If he really were to supply the whole of the British Army with Amo bars he could become immensely rich. But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being. Her very words. She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home—Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? Even a chemist had his uses. And this one had found a way of making chocolate out of sugar, chemicals, brown coloring and vegetable oil. And no cocoa butter. To produce a ton of the stuff, he had explained over his astonishing cocktail, cost next to nothing. He could undercut his competitors and increase his profit margin. Vulgarly put, but what comfort, what untroubled years might flow from these cheap vats. More than thirty minutes passed unnoticed as these scraps—memories, judgments, vague resolutions, questions—uncoiled quietly before her, while she barely shifted her position and did not hear the clock strike the quarter hours. She was aware of the breeze strengthening, pushing one French window closed, before dying down once more. She was disturbed later by Betty and her helpers clearing the dining room, then those sounds also subsided and, again, Emily was far out along the branching roads of her reveries, drifting by association, and with the expertise born of a thousand headaches, avoiding all things sudden or harsh. When at last the phone rang she rose immediately, without any start of surprise, and went back out into the hallway, lifted the receiver and called out as she always did on a rising note of a question,