They would smile, and flatter her, and offer her tidbits of harmless chitchat, as if she were an exhibit in a zoo. When she spoke they listened with exaggerated attention, nodding and smiling encouragement, as they would to a child, or a half-wit. She would hear her voice trembling with the strain of trying to sound normal, the sentences tottering out of her mouth and falling ineffectually at their feet. And how they would frown, feigning polite bafflement, when she forgot herself and used an Americanism. How interesting, they would say, that you never lost your accent, adding, never, in all the years, as if she had been brought back here by the first transatlantic buccaneers, like tobacco or the turkey. She sighed. Yes, the dress was wrong, but she had not the energy, she decided, to change it.

Mal came in from the bathroom, tieless, in shirtsleeves and braces, showing a pair of cuff links. “Can you do up these blessèd things for me?” he said, in plaintive irritation.

He extended his arms and Sarah rose and took the fiddly, cold links and began to insert them in the cuffs. They avoided each other’s eye, Mal with his mouth pursed averting his face and looking vacantly into a corner of the ceiling. How delicate and pale the skin was on the undersides of his wrists. It was the thing that had struck her about him when they had first met, twenty years ago, how soft he seemed, how sweetly soft all over, this tall, tender, vulnerable man.

“Is Phoebe home?” he asked.

“She won’t be late.”

“She had better not be, on this of all nights.”

“You’re too hard on her, Mal.”

He drew his lips tighter still. “You’d better go and see if my father has arrived,” he said. “You know what a stickler he is.”

When was it, she wondered, that they had begun to speak to each other in this stilted, testy way, like two strangers trapped in a lift?

She went downstairs, the silk of her dress making a scratching sound against her knees, like a muffled cackling. Really, she should have changed into something less dramatic, less-less declamatory. She smiled wanly, liking the word. It was not her habit to declaim.