“I couldn’t see what happened,” he said. “With the gun.” Sia smiled at him in mild puzzlement. Farrell said, “She called you mother.”

Sia plucked at the front of her dress, the nervous habit of a heavy woman. “I must go up to poor Robert,” she said. “He will spend half our time now apologizing for coming in without knocking. Such a strange arrogance they have, the timid ones; how they peep at themselves.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose, having had a cold for two days.

Farrell watched her hoisting herself up the steps one at a time, pausing on the landing to sigh angrily, as she always did. Briseis came to shove her muzzle into his hand, and Farrell petted her, saying absently, “It’s all right, don’t be scared.” But Briseis smelled the gunshot and the blood, and she simply lay down flat, too overcome by human confusions even to whine. Farrell said, “Don’t think about it, that’s all. Just be a dog, that’s what I’m doing.” He took her outside to sit on the front steps, where she found her favorite ragged beach towel and killed it several times, while he played some of Henry VIII’s songs for her.

Chapter 7

Julie and Farrell’s record for mutual toleration was slightly less than five consecutive days, set almost eight years before on Nantucket. They celebrated their sixth day together by going again to the Moroccan restaurant, where they had couscous and warm, bitter champagne. Farrell spent the first half of the dinner in playing happily with Julie’s fingers and grinning at her; and the second half in telling her, headlong and in no order at all, everything he could put into words about Sia and Ben and Suzy’s visitor. Julie listened silently, attentive but expressionless, until he ran out of champagne, fingers, and phrases to describe Sia barefoot on the stair in her flowery dress.