After a minute Nick said, "Feeling a bit better?" and Catherine nodded and pressed against him as they walked. The sense of responsibility came back to him, a grey weight in his chest, and he saw them from the point of view of the picnickers or an approaching jogger: not a dear old couple at all but a pair of kids, a skinny girl with a large nervous mouth and a solemn little blond boy pretending he wasn't out of his depth. Of course he must ring France, and hope that he got Rachel, since Gerald wasn't always good with these things. He wished he knew more about what had happened and why, but he was squeamish too. "You'll be all right," he said. He thought that asking her about it might only reopen the horror, and added, "I wonder what it was all about," as if referring to a mystery of long ago. She gave him a look of painful uncertainty, but didn't answer. "Can't really say?" Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.

"No, not really."

"Well, you know you always can tell me," he said.

At the end of the path there was the gardener's cottage, huddled quaintly and servilely under the cream cliff of the terrace. Beyond it a gate gave on to the street and they stood and looked out through its iron scrolls at the sporadic evening traffic. Nick waited, and thought despairingly of Leo at large in the same summer evening. Catherine said, "It's when everything goes black and glittering."

"Mm."

"It's not like when you're down in the dumps, which is brown."

"Right…"

"Oh, you wouldn't understand."

"No, please go on."

"It's like that car," she said, nodding at a black Daimler that had stopped across the road to let out a distinguished-looking old man. The yellow of the early street lights was reflected in its roof, and as it pulled away reflections streamed and glittered in its dark curved sides and windows.