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Helene looked at her carefully. “You like words?” Then
she smiled. “Of course, you are a schoolteacher.”
Kate flushed at the slight condescension of the words. “I
teach music, not English literature,” she said, a little more
sharply than she meant.
Helene said quickly, “I am sorry, I did not mean to offend
you.”
Kate relaxed. “I shouldn’t have snapped,” she apologised
in her turn.
Marc and Marie-Louise returned just before dinner. Kate
saw them walking up towards the villa, holding hands and
talking with animation, and she had to fight down a wild
impulse to run away.
She was sitting beside Sam on the verandah, drinking an
aperitif, and wearing her white voile dress. The weather
had been rather sultry that afternoon. When the early
morning mist lifted the sun was revealed, like a brass coin,
in the sky, and as the day wore on the heat grew more and
more oppressive.
Sophia darkly prophesied a thunderstorm that night, and
Kate was inclined to agree with her. The lowering sky, the
humidity, seemed to make one inevitable. Something of the
same atmosphere lay on her own spirits. She felt tense,
restless, nervous.
Marie-Louise gave Sam and Kate a brief, indifferent
glance as she walked past, but Marc nodded to them, his
eyes sliding over Kate without meeting hers. He was
looking rather serious, she noticed. She felt relief flood into
her when the other two vanished inside. The first encounter
had passed somehow, and now she need not dread having to
