f they applied themselves to it, the Drogheda people could imagine that Rome and London were no farther away than Sydney, and that the grown-up Dane and Justine were still children going to boarding school. Admittedly they couldn’t come home for all the shorter vacations of other days, but once a year they turned up for a month at least. Usually in August or September, and looking much as always. Very young. Did it matter whether they were fifteen and sixteen or twenty-two and twenty-three? And if the Drogheda people lived for that month in early spring, they most definitely never went round saying things like, Well, only a few weeks to go! or, Dear heaven, it’s not a month since they left! But around July everyone’s step became brisker, and permanent smiles settled on every face. From the cookhouse to the paddocks to the drawing room, treats and gifts were planned.

In the meantime there were letters. Mostly these reflected the personalities of their authors, but sometimes they contradicted. One would have thought, for instance, that Dane would be a meticulously regular correspondent and Justine a scrappy one. That Fee would never write at all. That the Cleary men would write twice a year. That Meggie would enrich the postal service with letters every day, at least to Dane. That Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat would send birthday and Christmas cards. That Anne Mueller would write often to Justine, never to Dane.

Dane’s intentions were good, and he did indeed write regularly. The only trouble was he forgot to post his efforts, with the result that two or three months would go by without a word, and then Drogheda would receive dozens on the same mail run. The loquacious Justine wrote lengthy missives which were pure stream-of-consciousness, rude enough to evoke blushes and clucks of alarm, and entirely fascinating. Meggie wrote once every two weeks only, to both her children. Though Justine never received letters from her grandmother, Dane did quite often. He also got word regularly from all his uncles, about the land and the sheep and the health of the Drogheda women, for they seemed to think it was their duty to assure him all was truly well at home. However, they didn’t extend this to Justine, who would have been flabbergasted by it anyway. For the rest, Mrs. Smith, Minnie, Cat and Anne Mueller, correspondence went as might be expected.

It was lovely reading letters, and a burden writing them. That is, for all save Justine, who experienced twinges of exasperation because no one ever sent her the kind she desired—fat, wordy and frank. It was from Justine the Drogheda people got most of their information about Dane, for his letters never plunged his readers right into the middle of a scene. Whereas Justine’s did.

Rain flew into London today [she wrote once], and he was telling me he saw Dane in Rome last week. Well, he sees a lot more of Dane than of me, since Rome is at the top of his travel agenda and London is rock bottom. So I must confess Rain is one of the prime reasons why I meet Dane in Rome every year before we come home. Dane likes coming to London, only I won’t let him if Rain is in Rome. Selfish. But you’ve no idea how I enjoy Rain. He’s one of the few people I know who gives me a run for my money, and I wish we met more often.

In one respect Rain’s luckier than I am. He gets to meet Dane’s fellow students where I don’t. I think Dane thinks I’m going to rape them on the spot. Or maybe he thinks they’ll rape me. Hah. Only happen if they saw me in my Charmian costume. It’s a stunner, people, it really is. Sort of up-to-date Theda Bara. Two little round bronze shields for the old tits, lots and lots of chains and what I reckon is a chastity belt—you’d need a pair of tin-cutters to get inside it, anyway. In a long black wig, tan body paint and my few scraps of metal I look a smasher.

…Where was I??? Oh, yes, Rain in Rome last week meeting Dane and his pals. They all went out on the tiles. Rain insists on paying, saves Dane embarrassment. It was some night. No women, natch, but everything else. Can you imagine Dane down on his knees in some seedy Roman bar saying “Fair daffodils, we haste to see thee weep so soon away” to a vase of daffodils? He tried for ten minutes to get the words of the quotation in their right order and couldn’t, then he gave up, put one of the daffodils between his teeth instead and did a dance. Can you ever imagine Dane doing that? Rain says it’s harmless and necessary, all work and no play, etc. Women being out, the next best thing is a skinful of grog. Or so Rain insists. Don’t get the idea it happens often, it doesn’t, and I gather when it does Rain is the ringleader, so he’s along to watch out for them, the naive lot of raw prawns. But I did laugh to think of Dane’s halo slipping during the course of a flamenco dance with a daffodil.

It took Dane eight years in Rome to attain his priesthood, and at their beginning no one thought they could ever end. Yet those eight years used themselves up faster than any of the Drogheda people had imagined. Just what they thought he was going to do after he was ordained they didn’t know, except that they did assume he would return to Australia. Only Meggie and Justine suspected he would want to remain in Italy, and Meggie at any rate could lull her doubts with memories of his content when he came back each year to his home. He was an Australian, he would want to come home. With Justine it was different. No one dreamed she would come home for good. She was an actress; her career would founder in Australia. Where Dane’s career could be pursued with equal zeal anywhere at all.

Thus in the eighth year there were no plans as to what the children would do when they came for their annual holiday; instead the Drogheda people were planning their trip to Rome, to see Dane ordained a priest.

“We fizzled out,” said Meggie.

“I beg your pardon, dear?” asked Anne.

They were sitting in a warm corner of the veranda reading, but Meggie’s book had fallen neglected into her lap, and she was absently watching the antics of two willy-wagtails on the lawn. It had been a wet year; there were worms everywhere and the fattest, happiest birds anyone ever remembered. Bird songs filled the air from dawn to the last of dusk.

“I said we fizzled out,” repeated Meggie, crowlike. “A damp squib. All that promise! Whoever would have guessed it in 1921, when we arrived on Drogheda?”

“How do you mean?”

“A total of six sons, plus me. And a year later, two more sons. What would you think? Dozens of children, half a hundred grandchildren? So look at us now. Hal and Stu are dead, none of the ones left alive seem to have any intention of ever getting married, and I, the only one not entitled to pass on the name, have been the only one to give Drogheda its heirs. And even then the gods weren’t happy, were they? A son and a daughter. Several grandchildren at least, you might think. But what happens? My son embraces the priesthood and my daughter’s an old maid career woman. Another dead end for Drogheda.”

“I don’t see what’s so strange about it,” said Anne. “After all, what could you expect from the men? Stuck out here as shy as kangas, never meeting the girls they might have married. And with Jims and Patsy, the war to boot. Could you see Jims marrying when he knows Patsy can’t? They’re far too fond of each other for that. And besides, the land’s demanding in a neutered way. It takes just about all they’ve got to give, because I don’t think they have a great deal. In a physical sense, I mean. Hasn’t it ever struck you, Meggie? Yours isn’t a very highly sexed family, to put it bluntly. And that goes for Dane and Justine, too. I mean, there are some people who compulsively hunt it like tomcats, but not your lot. Though perhaps Justine will marry. There’s this German chap Rainer; she seems terribly fond of him.”

“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” said Meggie, in no mood to be comforted. “She seems terribly fond of him. Just that. After all, she’s known him for seven years. If she wanted to marry him, it would have happened ages ago.”

“Would it? I know Justine pretty well,” answered Anne truthfully, for she did; better than anyone else on Drogheda, including Meggie and Fee. “I think she’s terrified of committing herself to the kind of love marriage would entail, and I must say I admire Rainer. He seems to understand her very well. Oh, I don’t say he’s in love with her for sure, but if he is, at least he’s got the sense to wait until she’s ready to take the plunge.” She leaned forward, her book falling forgotten to the tiles. “Oh, will you listen to that bird? I’m sure even a nightingale couldn’t match it.” Then she said what she had been wanting to say for weeks. “Meggie, why won’t you go to Rome to see Dane ordained? Isn’t that peculiar? Dane—ordain.”

“I’m not going to Rome!” said Meggie between clenched teeth. “I shall never leave Drogheda again.”

“Meggie, don’t! You can’t disappoint him so! Go, please! If you don’t, Drogheda won’t have a single woman there, because you’re the only woman young enough to take the flight. But I tell you, if I thought for one minute my body would survive I’d be right on that plane.”

“Go to Rome and see Ralph de Bricassart smirking? I’d rather be dead!”

“Oh, Meggie, Meggie! Why must you take out your frustrations on him, and on your son? You said it once yourself—it’s your own fault. So beggar your pride, and go to Rome. Please!”

“It isn’t a question of pride.” She shivered. “Oh, Anne, I’m frightened to go! Because I don’t believe it, I just don’t! My flesh creeps when I think about it.”

“And what about the fact he mightn’t come home after he’s a priest? Did that ever occur to you? He won’t be given huge chunks of leave the way he was in the seminary, so if he decides to remain in Rome you may well have to take yourself there if you ever want to see him at all. Go to Rome, Meggie!”

“I can’t. If you knew how frightened I am! It’s not pride, or Ralph scoring one over on me, or any of the things I say it is to stop people asking me questions. Lord knows, I miss both my men so much I’d crawl on my knees to see them if I thought for a minute they wanted me. Oh, Dane would be glad to see me, but Ralph? He’s forgotten I ever existed. I’m frightened, I tell you. I know in my bones that if I go to Rome something will happen. So I’m not going.”

“What could happen, for pity’s sake?”

“I don’t know…. If I did, I’d have something to battle. A feeling, how can I battle a feeling? Because that’s all it is. A premonition. As if the gods are gathering.”

Anne laughed. “You’re becoming a real old woman, Meggie. Stop!”

“I can’t, I can’t! And I am an old woman.”

“Nonsense, you’re just in brisk middle age. Well and truly young enough to hop on that plane.”

“Oh, leave me alone!” said Meggie savagely, and picked up her book.

Occasionally a crowd with a purpose converges upon Rome. Not tourism, the voyeuristic sampling of past glories in present relics; not the filling in of a little slice of time between A and B, with Rome a point on the line between those two places. This is a crowd with a single uniting emotion; it bursts with pride, for it is coming to see its son, nephew, cousin, friend ordained a priest in the great basilica which is the most venerated church in the world. Its members put up in humble pensiones, luxury hotels, the homes of friends or relatives. But they are totally united, at peace with each other and with the world. They do the rounds dutifully; the Vatican Museum with the Sistine Chapel at its end like a prize for endurance; the Forum, the Colosseum, the Appian Way, the Spanish Steps, the greedy Trevi Fountain, the son et lumière. Waiting for the day, filling in time. They will be accorded the special privilege of a private audience with the Holy Father, and for them Rome will find nothing too good.

This time it wasn’t Dane waiting on the platform to meet Justine, as it had been every other time; he was in retreat. Instead, Rainer Moerling Hartheim prowled the dirty paving like some great animal. He didn’t greet her with a kiss, he never did; he just put an arm about her shoulders and squeezed.

“Rather like a bear,” said Justine.

“A bear?”

“I used to think when I first met you that you were some sort of missing link, but I’ve finally decided you’re more of a bear than a gorilla. It was an unkind comparison, the gorilla.”

“And bears are kind?”

“Well, perhaps they do one to death just as quickly, but they’re more cuddly.” She linked her arm through his and matched his stride, for she was almost as tall as he. “How’s Dane? Did you see him before he went into retreat? I could kill Clyde, not letting me go sooner.”

“Dane is as always.”

“You haven’t been leading him astray?”

“Me? Certainly not. You look very nice, Herzchen.”

“I’m on my very best behavior, and I bought out every couturier in London. Do you like my new short skirt? They call it the mini.”

“Walk ahead of me, and I’ll tell you.”

The hem of the full silk skirt was about midthigh; it swirled as she turned and came back to him. “What do you think, Rain? Is it scandalous? I noticed no one in Paris is wearing this length yet.”

“It proves a point, Herzchen—that with legs as good as yours, to wear a skirt one millimeter longer is scandalous. I’m sure the Romans will agree with me.”

“Which means my arse will be black and blue in an hour instead of a day. Damn them! Though do you know something, Rain?”

“What?”

“I’ve never been pinched by a priest. All these years I’ve been flipping in and out of the Vatican with nary a pinch to my credit. So I thought maybe if I wore a miniskirt, I might be the undoing of some poor prelate yet.”

“You might be my undoing.” He smiled.

“No, really? In orange? I thought you hated me in orange, when I’ve got orange hair.”

“It inflames the senses, such a busy color.”

“You’re teasing me,” she said, disgusted, climbing into his Mercedes limousine, which had a German pennant fluttering from its bonnet talisman. “When did you get the little flag?”

“When I got my new post in the government.”

“No wonder I rated a mention in the News of the World! Did you see it?”

“You know I never read rags, Justine.”

“Well, nor do I; someone showed it to me,” she said, then pitched her voice higher and endowed it with a shabby-genteel, fraightfully naice accent. “What up-and-coming carrot-topped Australian actress is cementing very cordial relations with what member of the West German cabinet?”

“They can’t be aware how long we’ve known each other,” he said tranquilly, stretching out his legs and making himself comfortable.

Justine ran her eyes over his clothes with approval; very casual, very Italian. He was rather in the European fashion swim himself, daring to wear one of the fishing-net shirts which enabled Italian males to demonstrate the hairiness of their chests.

“You should never wear a suit and collar and tie,” she said suddenly.

“No? Why not?”

“Machismo is definitely your style—you know, what you’ve got on now, the gold medallion and chain on the hairy chest. A suit makes you look as if your waistline is bulging, when it really isn’t at all.”

For a moment he gazed at her in surprise, then the expression in his eyes became alert, in what she called his “concentrated thinking look.” “A first,” he said.

“What’s a first?”

“In the seven years I’ve known you, you’ve never before commented upon my appearance except perhaps to disparage it.”

“Oh, dear, haven’t I?” she asked, looking a little ashamed. “Heavens, I’ve thought of it often enough, and never disparagingly.” For some reason she added hastily, “I mean, about things like the way you look in a suit.”

He didn’t answer, but he was smiling, as at a very pleasant thought.

That ride with Rainer seemed to be the last quiet thing to happen for days. Shortly after they returned from visiting Cardinal de Bricassart and Cardinal di Contini-Verchese, the limousine Rainer had hired deposited the Drogheda contingent at their hotel. Out of the corner of her eye Justine watched Rain’s reaction to her family, entirely uncles. Right until the moment her eyes didn’t find her mother’s face, Justine had been convinced she would change her mind, come to Rome. That she hadn’t was a cruel blow; Justine didn’t know whether she ached more on Dane’s behalf or on her own. But in the meantime here were the Unks, and she was undoubtedly their hostess.

Oh, they were so shy! Which one of them was which? The older they got, the more alike they looked. And in Rome they stuck out like—well, like Australian graziers on holiday in Rome. Each one was clad in the city-going uniform of affluent squatters: tan elastic-sided riding boots, neutral trousers, tan sports jackets of very heavy, fuzzy wool with side vents and plenty of leather patches, white shirts, knitted wool ties, flat-crowned grey hats with broad brims. No novelty on the streets of Sydney during Royal Easter Show time, but in a late Roman summer, extraordinary.

And I can say with double sincerity, thank God for Rain! How good he is with them. I wouldn’t have believed anyone could stimulate Patsy into speech, but he’s doing it, bless him. They’re talking away like old hens, and where did he get Australian beer for them? He likes them, and he’s interested, I suppose. Everything is grist to the mill of a German industrialist-politician, isn’t it? How can he stick to his faith, being what he is? An enigma, that’s what you are, Rainer Moerling Hartheim. Friend of popes and cardinals, friend of Justine O’Neill. Oh, if you weren’t so ugly I’d kiss you, I’m so terribly grateful. Lord, fancy being stuck in Rome with the Unks and no Rain! You are well named.

He was sitting back in his chair, listening while Bob told him about shearing, and having nothing better to do because he had so completely taken charge, Justine watched him curiously. Mostly she noticed everything physical about people immediately, but just occasionally that vigilance slipped and people stole up on her, carved a niche in her life without her having made that vital initial assessment. For if it wasn’t made, sometimes years would go by before they intruded into her thoughts again as strangers. Like now, watching Rain. That first meeting had been responsible, of course; surrounded by churchmen, awed, frightened, brazening it out. She had noticed only the obvious things: his powerful build, his hair, how dark he was. Then when he had taken her off to dinner the chance to rectify things had been lost, for he had forced an awareness of himself on her far beyond his physical attributes; she had been too interested in what the mouth was saying to look at the mouth.

He wasn’t really ugly at all, she decided now. He looked what he was, perhaps, a mixture of the best and the worst. Like a Roman emperor. No wonder he loved the city. It was his spiritual home. A broad face with high, wide cheekbones and a small yet aquiline nose. Thick black brows, straight instead of following the curve of the orbits. Very long, feminine black lashes and quite lovely dark eyes, mostly hooded to hide his thoughts. By far his most beautiful possession was his mouth, neither full nor thin-lipped, neither small nor large, but very well shaped, with a distinct cut to the boundaries of its lips and a peculiar firmness in the way he held it; as if perhaps were he to relax his hold upon it, it might give away secrets about what he was really like. Interesting, to take a face apart which was already so well known, yet not known at all.

She came out of her reverie to find him watching her watch him, which was like being stripped naked in front of a crowd armed with stones. For a moment his eyes held hers, wide open and alert, not exactly startled, rather arrested. Then he transferred his gaze calmly to Bob, and asked a pertinent question about boggis. Justine gave herself a mental shake, told herself not to go imagining things. But it was fascinating, suddenly to see a man who had been a friend for years as a possible lover. And not finding the thought at all repulsive.

There had been a number of successors to Arthur Lestrange, and she hadn’t wanted to laugh. Oh, I’ve come a long way since that memorable night. But I wonder have I actually progressed at all? It’s very nice to have a man, and the hell with what Dane said about it being the one man. I’m not going to make it one man, so I’m not going to sleep with Rain; oh, no. It would change too many things, and I’d lose my friend. I need my friend, I can’t afford to be without my friend. I shall keep him as I keep Dane, a male human being without any physical significance for me.

The church could hold twenty thousand people, so it wasn’t crowded. Nowhere in the world had so much time and thought and genius been put into the creation of a temple of God; it paled the pagan works of antiquity to insignificance. It did. So much love, so much sweat. Bramante’s basilica, Michelangelo’s dome, Bernini’s colonnade. A monument not only to God, but to Man. Deep under the confessio in a little stone room Saint Peter himself was buried; here the Emperor Charlemagne had been crowned. The echoes of old voices seemed to whisper among the pouring slivers of light, dead fingers polished the bronze rays behind the high altar and caressed the twisted bronze columns of the baldacchino.

He was lying on the steps, face down, as though dead. What was he thinking? Was there a pain in him that had no right to be there, because his mother had not come? Cardinal Ralph looked through his tears, and knew there was no pain. Beforehand, yes; afterward, certainly. But now, no pain. Everything in him was projected into the moment, the miracle. No room in him for anything which was not God. It was his day of days, and nothing mattered save the task at hand, the vowing of his life and soul to God. He could probably do it, but how many others actually had? Not Cardinal Ralph, though he still remembered his own ordination as filled with holy wonder. With every part of him he had tried, yet something he had withheld.

Not so august as this, my ordination, but I live it again through him. And wonder what he truly is, that in spite of our fears for him he could have passed among us so many years and not made an unfriend, let alone a real enemy. He is loved by all, and he loves all. It never crosses his mind for an instant that this state of affairs is extraordinary. And yet, when he came to us first he was not so sure of himself; we have given him that, for which perhaps our existences are vindicated. There have been many priests made here, thousands upon thousands, yet for him there is something special. Oh, Meggie! Why wouldn’t you come to see the gift you’ve given Our Lord—the gift I could not, having given Him myself? And I suppose that’s it, how he can be here today free of pain. Because for today I’ve been empowered to take his pain to myself, free him from it. I weep his tears, I mourn in his place. And that is how it should be.

Later he turned his head, looked at the row of Drogheda people in alien dark suits. Bob, Jack, Hughie, Jims, Patsy. A vacant chair for Meggie, then Frank. Justine’s fiery hair dimmed under a black lace veil, the only female Cleary present. Rainer next to her. And then a lot of people he didn’t know, but who shared in today as fully as the Drogheda people did. Only today it was different, today it was special for him. Today he felt almost as if he, too, had had a son to give. He smiled, and sighed. How must Vittorio feel, bestowing Dane’s priesthood upon him?

Perhaps because he missed his mother’s presence so acutely, Justine was the first person Dane managed to take aside at the reception Cardinal Vittorio and Cardinal Ralph gave for him. In his black soutane with the high white collar he looked magnificent, she thought; only not like a priest at all. Like an actor playing a priest, until one looked into the eyes. And there it was, the inner light, that something which transformed him from a very good-looking man into one unique.

“Father O’Neill,” she said.

“I haven’t assimilated it yet, Jus.”

“That isn’t hard to understand. I’ve never felt quite the way I did in Saint Peter’s, so what it must have been like for you I can’t imagine.”

“Oh, I think you can, somewhere inside. If you truly couldn’t, you wouldn’t be such a fine actress. But with you, Jus, it comes from the unconscious; it doesn’t erupt into thought until you need to use it.”

They were sitting on a small couch in a far corner of the room, and no one came to disturb them.

After a while he said, “I’m so pleased Frank came,” looking to where Frank was talking with Rainer, more animation in his face than his niece and nephew had ever seen. “There’s an old Rumanian refugee priest I know,” Dane went on, “who has a way of saying, ‘Oh, the poor one!’ with such compassion in his voice…. I don’t know, somehow that’s what I always find myself saying about our Frank. And yet, Jus, why?”

But Justine ignored the gambit, went straight to the crux. “I could kill Mum!” she said through her teeth. “She had no right to do this to you!”

“Oh, Jus! I understand. You’ve got to try, too. If it had been done in malice or to get back at me I might be hurt, but you know her as well as I do, you know it’s neither of those. I’m going down to Drogheda soon. I’ll talk to her then, find out what’s the matter.”

“I suppose daughters are never as patient with their mothers as sons are.” She drew down the corners of her mouth ruefully, shrugged. “Maybe it’s just as well I’m too much of a loner ever to inflict myself on anyone in the mother role.”

The blue eyes were very kind, tender; Justine felt her hackles rising, thinking Dane pitied her.

“Why don’t you marry Rainer?” he asked suddenly.

Her jaw dropped, she gasped. “He’s never asked me,” she said feebly.

“Only because he thinks you’d say no. But it might be arranged.”

Without thinking, she grabbed him by the ear, as she used to do when they were children. “Don’t you dare, you dog-collared prawn! Not one word, do you hear? I don’t love Rain! He’s just a friend, and I want to keep it that way. If you so much as light a candle for it, I swear I’ll sit down, cross my eyes and put a curse on you, and you remember how that used to scare the living daylights out of you, don’t you?”

He threw back his head and laughed. “It wouldn’t work, Justine! My magic is stronger than yours these days. But there’s no need to get so worked up about it, you twit. I was wrong, that’s all. I assumed there was a case between you and Rain.”

“No, there isn’t. After seven years? Break it down, pigs might fly.” Pausing, she seemed to seek for words, then looked at him almost shyly. “Dane, I’m so happy for you. I think if Mum was here she’d feel the same. That’s all it needs, for her to see you now, like this. You wait, she’ll come around.”

Very gently he took her pointed face between his hands, smiling down at her with so much love that her own hands came up to clutch at his wrists, soak it in through every pore. As if all those childhood years were remembered, treasured.

Yet behind what she saw in his eyes on her behalf she sensed a shadowy doubt, only perhaps doubt was too strong a word; more like anxiety. Mostly he was sure Mum would understand eventually, but he was human, though all save he tended to forget the fact.

“Jus, will you do something for me?” he asked as he let her go.

“Anything,” she said, meaning it.

“I’ve got a sort of respite, to think about what I’m going to do. Two months. And I’m going to do the heavy thinking on a Drogheda horse after I’ve talked to Mum—somehow I feel I can’t sort anything out until after I’ve talked to her. But first, well…I’ve got to get up my courage to go home. So if you could manage it, come down to the Peloponnese with me for a couple of weeks, tick me off good and proper about being a coward until I get so sick of your voice I put myself on a plane to get away from it.” He smiled at her. “Besides, Jussy, I don’t want you to think I’m going to exclude you from my life absolutely, any more than I will Mum. You need your old conscience around occasionally.”

“Oh, Dane, of course I’ll go!”

“Good,” he said, then grinned, eyed her mischievously. “I really do need you, Jus. Having you bitching in my ear will be just like old times.”

“Uh-uh-uh! No obscenities, Father O’Neill!”

His arms went behind his head, he leaned back on the couch contentedly. “I am! Isn’t it marvelous? And maybe after I’ve seen Mum, I can concentrate on Our Lord. I think that’s where my inclinations lie, you know. Simply thinking about Our Lord.”

“You ought to have espoused an order, Dane.”

“I still can, and I probably will. I have a whole lifetime; there’s no hurry.”

Justine left the party with Rainer, and after she talked of going to Greece with Dane, he talked of going to his office in Bonn.

“About bloody time,” she said. “For a cabinet minister you don’t seem to do much work, do you? All the papers call you a playboy, fooling around with carrot-topped Australian actresses, you old dog, you.”

He shook his big fist at her. “I pay for my few pleasures in more ways than you’ll ever know.”

“Do you mind if we walk, Rain?”

“Not if you keep your shoes on.”

“I have to these days. Miniskirts have their disadvantages; the days of stockings one could peel off easily are over. They’ve invented a sheer version of theatrical tights, and one can’t shed those in public without causing the biggest furor since Lady Godiva. So unless I want to ruin a five-guinea pair of tights, I’m imprisoned in my shoes.”

“At least you improve my education in feminine garb, under as well as over,” he said mildly.

“Go on! I’ll bet you’ve got a dozen mistresses, and undress them all.”

“Only one, and like all good mistresses she waits for me in her negligee.”

“Do you know, I believe we’ve never discussed your sex life before? Fascinating! What’s she like?”

“Fair, fat, forty and flatulent.”

She stopped dead. “Oh, you’re kidding me,” she said slowly. “I can’t see you with a woman like that.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve got too much taste.”

“Chacun à son goût, my dear. I’m nothing much to look at, myself—why should you assume I could charm a young and beautiful woman into being my mistress?”

“Because you could!” she said indignantly. “Oh, of course you could!”

“My money, you mean?”

“Not, not your money! You’re teasing me, you always do! Rainer Moerling Hartheim, you’re very well aware how attractive you are, otherwise you wouldn’t wear gold medallions and netting shirts. Looks aren’t everything—if they were, I’d still be wondering.”

“Your concern for me is touching, Herzchen.”

“Why is it that when I’m with you I feel as if I’m forever running to catch up with you, and I never do?” Her spurt of temper died; she stood looking at him uncertainly. “You’re not serious, are you?”

“Do you think I am?”

“No! You’re not conceited, but you do know how very attractive you are.”

“Whether I do or not isn’t important. The important thing is that you think I’m attractive.”

She was going to say: Of course I do; I was mentally trying you on as a lover not long ago, but then I decided it wouldn’t work, I’d rather keep on having you for my friend. Had he let her say it, he might have concluded his time hadn’t come, and acted differently. As it was, before she could shape the words he had her in his arms, and was kissing her. For at least sixty seconds she stood, dying, split open, smashed, the power in her screaming in wild elation to find a matching power. His mouth—it was beautiful! And his hair, incredibly thick, vital, something to seize in her fingers fiercely. Then he took her face between his hands and looked at her, smiling.

“I love you,” he said.

Her hands had gone up to his wrists, but not to enclose them gently, as with Dane; the nails bit in, scored down to meat savagely. She stepped back two paces and stood rubbing her arm across her mouth, eyes huge with fright, breasts heaving.

“It couldn’t work,” she panted. “It could never work, Rain!”

Off came the shoes; she bent to pick them up, then turned and ran, and within three seconds the soft quick pad of her feet had vanished.

Not that he had any intention of following her, though apparently she had thought he might. Both his wrists were bleeding, and they hurt. He pressed his handkerchief first to one and then to the other, shrugged, put the stained cloth away, and stood concentrating on the pain. After a while he unearthed his cigarette case, took out a cigarette, lit it, and began to walk slowly. No one passing by could have told from his face what he felt. Everything he wanted within his grasp, reached for, lost. Idiot girl. When would she grow up? To feel it, respond to it, and deny it.

But he was a gambler, of the win-a-few, lose-a-few kind. He had waited seven long years before trying his luck, feeling the change in her at this ordination time. Yet apparently he had moved too soon. Ah, well. There was always tomorrow—or knowing Justine, next year, the year after that. Certainly he wasn’t about to give up. If he watched her carefully, one day he’d get lucky.

The soundless laugh quivered in him; fair, fat, forty and flatulent. What had brought it to his lips he didn’t know, except that a long time ago his ex-wife had said it to him. The four F’s, describing the typical victim of gallstones. She had been a martyr to them, poor Annelise, even though she was dark, skinny, fifty and as well corked as a genie in a bottle. What am I thinking of Annelise for, now? My patient campaign of years turned into a rout, and I can do no better than poor Annelise. So, Fräulein Justine O’Neill! We shall see.

There were lights in the palace windows; he would go up for a few minutes, talk to Cardinal Ralph, who was looking old. Not well. Perhaps he ought to be persuaded into a medical examination. Rainer ached, but not for Justine; she was young, there was time. For Cardinal Ralph, who had seen his own son ordained, and not known it.

It was still early, so the hotel foyer was crowded. Shoes on, Justine crossed quickly to the stairs and ran up them, head bent. Then for some time her trembling hands couldn’t find the room key in her bag and she thought she would have to go down again, brave the throng about the desk. But it was there; she must have passed her fingers over it a dozen times.

Inside at last, she groped her way to the bed, sat down on its edge and let coherent thought gradually return. Telling herself she was revolted, horrified, disillusioned; all the while staring drearily at the wide rectangle of pale light which was the night sky through the window, wanting to curse, wanting to weep. It could never be the same again, and that was a tragedy. The loss of the dearest friend. Betrayal.

Empty words, untrue; suddenly she knew very well what had frightened her so, made her flee from Rain as if he had attempted murder, not a kiss. The rightness of it! The feeling of coming home, when she didn’t want to come home any more than she wanted the liability of love. Home was frustration, so was love. Not only that, even if the admission was humiliating; she wasn’t sure she could love. If she was capable of it, surely once or twice her guard would have slipped; surely once or twice she would have experienced a pang of something more than tolerant affection for her infrequent lovers. It didn’t occur to her that she deliberately chose lovers who would never threaten her self-imposed detachment, so much a part of herself by now that she regarded it as completely natural. For the first time in her life she had no reference point to assist her. There was no time in the past she could take comfort from, no once-deep involvement, either for herself or for those shadowy lovers. Nor could the Drogheda people help, because she had always withheld herself from them, too.

She had had to run from Rain. To say yes, commit herself to him, and then have to watch him recoil when he found out the extent of her inadequacy? Unbearable! He would learn what she was really like, and the knowledge would kill his love for her. Unbearable to say yes, and end in being rebuffed for all time. Far better to do any rebuffing herself. That way at least pride would be satisfied, and Justine owned all her mother’s pride. Rain must never discover what she was like beneath all that brick flippancy.

He had fallen in love with the Justine he saw; she had not allowed him any opportunity to suspect the sea of doubts beneath. Those only Dane suspected—no, knew.

She bent forward to put her forehead against the cool bedside table, tears running down her face. That was why she loved Dane so, of course. Knowing what the real Justine was like, and still loving her. Blood helped, so did a lifetime of shared memories, problems, pains, joys. Whereas Rain was a stranger, not committed to her the way Dane was, or even the other members of her family. Nothing obliged him to love her.

She sniffled, wiped her palm around her face, shrugged her shoulders and began the difficult business of pushing her trouble back into some corner of her mind where it could lie peacefully, unremembered. She knew she could do it; she had spent all her life perfecting the technique. Only it meant ceaseless activity, continuous absorption in things outside herself. She reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.

One of the Unks must have delivered the letter to her room, for it was lying on the bedside table, a pale-blue air letter with Queen Elizabeth in its upper corner.

“Darling Justine,” wrote Clyde Daltinham-Roberts, “Come back to the fold, you’re needed! At once! There’s a part going begging in the new season’s repertoire, and a tiny little dicky-bird told me you just might want it. Desdemona, darling? With Marc Simpson as your Othello? Rehearsals for the principals start next week, if you’re interested.”

If she was interested! Desdemona! Desdemona in London! And with Marc Simpson as Othello! The opportunity of a lifetime. Her mood skyrocketed to a point where the scene with Rain lost significance, or rather assumed a different significance. Perhaps if she was very, very careful she might be able to keep Rain’s love; a highly acclaimed, successful actress was too busy to share much of her life with her lovers. It was worth a try. If he looked as if he were getting too close to the truth, she could always back off again. To keep Rain in her life, but especially this new Rain, she would be prepared to do anything save strip off the mask.

In the meantime, news like this deserved some sort of celebration. She didn’t feel up to facing Rain yet, but there were other people on hand to share her triumph. So she put on her shoes, walked down the corridor to the Unks’ communal sitting room, and when Patsy let her in she stood with arms spread wide, beaming.

“Break out the beer, I’m going to be Desdemona!” she announced in ringing tones.

For a moment no one answered, then Bob said warmly, “That’s nice, Justine.”

Her pleasure didn’t evaporate; instead it built up to an uncontrollable elation. Laughing, she flopped into a chair and stared at her uncles. What truly lovely men they were! Of course her news meant nothing to them! They didn’t have a clue who Desdemona was. If she had come to tell them she was getting married, Bob’s answer would have been much the same.

Since the beginning of memory they had been a part of her life, and sadly she had dismissed them as contemptuously as she did everything about Drogheda. The Unks, a plurality having nothing to do with Justine O’Neill. Simply members of a conglomerate who drifted in and out of the homestead, smiled at her shyly, avoided her if it meant conversation. Not that they didn’t like her, she realized now; only that they sensed how foreign she was, and it made them uncomfortable. But in this Roman world which was alien to them and familiar to her, she was beginning to understand them better.

Feeling a glow of something for them which might have been called love, Justine stared from one creased, smiling face to the next. Bob, who was the life force of the unit, the Boss of Drogheda, but in such an unobtrusive way; Jack, who merely seemed to follow Bob around, or maybe it was just that they got along so well together; Hughie, who had a streak of mischief the other two did not, and yet so very like them; Jims and Patsy, the positive and negative sides of a self-sufficient whole; and poor quenched Frank, the only one who seemed plagued by fear and insecurity. All of them save Jims and Patsy were grizzled now, indeed Bob and Frank were white-haired, but they didn’t really look very different from the way she remembered them as a little girl.

“I don’t know whether I ought to give you a beer,” Bob said doubtfully, standing with a cold bottle of Swan in his hand.

The remark would have annoyed her intensely even half a day ago, but at the moment she was too happy to take offense.

“Look, love, I know it’s never occurred to you to offer me one through the course of our sessions with Rain, but honestly I’m a big girl now, and I can handle a beer. I promise it isn’t a sin.” She smiled.

“Where’s Rainer?” Jims asked, taking a full glass from Bob and handing it to her.

“I had a fight with him.”

“With Rainer?”

“Well, yes. But it was all my fault. I’m going to see him later and tell him I’m sorry.”

None of the Unks smoked. Though she had never asked for a beer before, on earlier occasions she had sat smoking defiantly while they talked with Rain; now it took more courage than she could command to produce her cigarettes, so she contented herself with the minor victory of the beer, dying to gulp it down thirstily but mindful of their dubious regard. Ladylike sips, Justine, even if you are dryer than a secondhand sermon.

“Rain’s a bonzer bloke,” said Hughie, eyes twinkling.

Startled, Justine suddenly realized why she had grown so much in importance in their thoughts: she had caught herself a man they’d like to have in the family. “Yes, he is rather,” she said shortly, and changed the subject. “It was a lovely day, wasn’t it?”

All the heads bobbed in unison, even Frank’s, but they didn’t seem to want to discuss it She could see how tired they were, yet she didn’t regret her impulse to visit them. It took a little while for near-atrophied senses and feelings to learn what their proper functions were, and the Unks were a good practice target. That was the trouble with being an island; one forgot there was anything going on beyond its shores.

“What’s Desdemona?” Frank asked from the shadows where he hid.

Justine launched into a vivid description, charmed by their horror when they learned she would be strangled once a night, and only remembered how tired they must be half an hour later when Patsy yawned.

“I must go,” she said, putting down her empty glass. She had not been offered a second beer; one was apparently the limit for ladies. “Thanks for listening to me blather.”

Much to Bob’s surprise and confusion, she kissed him good night; Jack edged away but was easily caught, while Hughie accepted the farewell with alacrity. Jims turned bright red, endured it dumbly. For Patsy, a hug as well as a kiss, because he was a little bit of an island himself. And for Frank no kiss at all, he averted his head; yet when she put her arms around him she could sense a faint echo of some intensity quite missing in the others. Poor Frank. Why was he like that?

Outside their door, she leaned for a moment against the wall. Rain loved her. But when she tried to phone his room the operator informed her he had checked out, returned to Bonn.

No matter. It might be better to wait until London to see him, anyway. A contrite apology via the mail, and an invitation to dinner next time he was in England. There were many things she didn’t know about Rain, but of one characteristic she had no doubt at all; he would come, because he hadn’t a grudging bone in his body. Since foreign affairs had become his forte, England was one of his most regular ports of call.

“You wait and see, my lad,” she said, staring into her mirror and seeing his face instead of her own. “I’m going to make England your most important foreign affair, or my name isn’t Justine O’Neill.”

It had not occurred to her that perhaps as far as Rain was concerned, her name was indeed the crux of the matter. Her patterns of behavior were set, and marriage was no part of them. That Rain might want to make her over into Justine Hartheim never even crossed her mind. She was too busy remembering the quality of his kiss, and dreaming of more.

There remained only the task of telling Dane she couldn’t go to Greece with him, but about this she was untroubled. Dane would understand, he always did. Only somehow she didn’t think she’d tell him all the reasons why she wasn’t able to go. Much as she loved her brother, she didn’t feel like listening to what would be one of his sternest homilies ever. He wanted her to marry Rain, so if she told him what her plans for Rain were, he’d cart her off to Greece with him if it meant forcible abduction. What Dane’s ears didn’t hear, his heart couldn’t grieve about.

“Dear Rain,” the note said. “Sorry I ran like a hairy goat the other night, can’t think what got into me. The hectic day and everything, I suppose. Please forgive me for behaving like an utter prawn. I’m ashamed of myself for making so much fuss about a trifle. And I daresay the day had got to you, too, words of love and all, I mean. So I tell you what—you forgive me, and I’ll forgive you. Let’s be friends, please. I can’t bear to be at outs with you. Next time you’re in London, come to dinner at my place and we’ll formally draft out a peace treaty.”

As usual it was signed plain “Justine.” No words even of affection; she never used them. Frowning, he studied the artlessly casual phrases as if he could see through them to what was really in her mind as she wrote. It was certainly an overture of friendship, but what else? Sighing, he was forced to admit probably very little. He had frightened her badly; that she wanted to retain his friendship spoke of how much he meant to her, but he very much doubted whether she understood exactly what she felt for him. After all, now she knew he loved her; if she had sorted herself out sufficiently to realize she loved him too, she would have come straight out with it in her letter. Yet why had she returned to London instead of going to Greece with Dane? He knew he shouldn’t hope it was because of him, but despite his misgivings, hope began to color his thoughts so cheerfully he buzzed his secretary. It was 10 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time, the best hour to find her at home.

“Get me Miss O’Neill’s London flat,” he instructed, and waited the intervening seconds with a frown pulling at the inner corners of his brows.

“Rain!” Justine said, apparently delighted. “Did you get my letter?”

“This minute.”

After a delicate pause she said. “And will you come to dinner soon?”

“I’m going to be in England this coming Friday and Saturday. Is the notice too short?”

“Not if Saturday evening is all right with you. I’m in rehearsal for Desdemona, so Friday’s out.”

“Desdemona?”

“That’s right, you don’t know! Clyde wrote to me in Rome and offered me the part. Marc Simpson as Othello, Clyde directing personally. Isn’t it wonderful? I came back to London on the first plane.”

He shielded his eyes with his hand, thankful his secretary was safely in her outer office, not sitting where she could see his face. “Justine, Herzchen, that’s marvelous news!” he managed to say enthusiastically. “I was wondering what brought you back to London.”

“Oh, Dane understood,” she said lightly, “and in a way I think he was quite glad to be alone. He had concocted a story about needing me to bitch at him to go home, but I think it was all more for his second reason, that he doesn’t want me to feel excluded from his life now he’s a priest.”

“Probably,” he agreed politely.

“Saturday evening, then,” she said. “Around six, then we can have a leisurely peace treaty session with the aid of a bottle or two, and I’ll feed you after we’ve reached a satisfactory compromise. All right?”

“Yes, of course. Goodbye, Herzchen.”

Contact was cut off abruptly by the sound of her receiver going down; he sat for a moment with his still in his hand, then shrugged and replaced it on its cradle. Damn Justine! She was beginning to come between him and his work.

She continued to come between him and his work during the succeeding days, though it was doubtful if anyone suspected. And on Saturday evening a little after six he presented himself at her apartment, empty-handed as usual because she was a difficult person to bring gifts. She was indifferent to flowers, never ate candy and would have thrown a more expensive offering carelessly in some corner, then forgotten it. The only gifts Justine seemed to prize were those Dane had given her.

“Champagne before dinner?” he asked, looking at her in surprise.

“Well, I think the occasion calls for it, don’t you? It was our first-ever breaking of relations, and this is our first-ever reconciliation,” she answered plausibly, indicating a comfortable chair for him and settling herself on the tawny kangaroo-fur rug, lips parted as if she had already rehearsed replies to anything he might say next.

But conversation was beyond him, at least until he was better able to assess her mood, so he watched her in silence. Until he had kissed her it had been easy to keep himself partially aloof, but now, seeing her again for the first time since, he admitted that it was going to be a great deal harder in the future.

Probably even when she was a very old woman she would still retain something not quite fully mature about face and bearing; as though essential womanliness would always pass her by. That cool, self-centered, logical brain seemed to dominate her completely, yet for him she owned a fascination so potent he doubted if he would ever be able to replace her with any other woman. Never once had he questioned whether she was worth the long struggle. Possibly from a philosophical standpoint she wasn’t. Did it matter? She was a goal, an aspiration.

“You’re looking very nice tonight, Herzchen,” he said at last, tipping his champagne glass to her in a gesture half toast, half acknowledgment of an adversary.

A coal fire simmered unshielded in the small Victorian grate, but Justine didn’t seem to mind the heat, huddled close to it with her eyes fixed on him. Then she put her glass on the hearth with a ringing snap and sat forward, her arms linked about her knees, bare feet hidden by folds of densely black gown.

“I can’t stand beating around the bush,” she said. “Did you mean it, Rain?”

Suddenly relaxing deeply, he lay back in his chair. “Mean what?”

“What you said in Rome…That you loved me.”

“Is that what this is all about, Herzchen?”

She looked away, shrugged, looked back at him and nodded. “Well, of course.”

“But why bring it up again? You told me what you thought, and I had gathered tonight’s invitation wasn’t extended to bring up the past, only plan a future.”

“Oh, Rain! You’re acting as if I’m making a fuss! Even if I was, surely you can see why.”

“No, I can’t.” He put his glass down and bent forward to watch her more closely. “You gave me to understand most emphatically that you wanted no part of my love, and I had hoped you’d at least have the decency to refrain from discussing it.”

It had not occurred to her that this meeting, no matter what its outcome, would be so uncomfortable; after all, he had put himself in the position of a suppliant, and ought to be waiting humbly for her to reverse her decision. Instead he seemed to have turned the tables neatly. Here she was feeling like a naughty schoolgirl called upon to answer for some idiotic prank.

“Look, sport, you’re the one who changed the status quo, not me! I didn’t ask you to come tonight so I could beg forgiveness for having wounded the great Hartheim ego!”

“On the defensive, Justine?”

She wriggled impatiently. “Yes, dammit! How do you manage to do that to me, Rain? Oh, I wish just once you’d let me enjoy having the upper hand!”

“If I did, you’d throw me out like a smelly old rag,” he said, smiling.

“I can do that yet, mate!”

“Nonsense! If you haven’t done it by now you never will. You’ll go on seeing me because I keep you on the hop—you never know what to expect from me.”

“Is that why you said you loved me?” she asked painfully. “Was it only a ploy to keep me on the hop?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re a prize bastard!” she said through her teeth, and marched across the rug on her knees until she was close enough to give him the full benefit of her anger. “Say you love me again, you big Kraut prawn, and watch me spit in your eye!”

He was angry, too. “No, I’m not going to say it again! That isn’t why you asked me to come, is it? My feelings don’t concern you one bit, Justine. You asked me to come so you could experiment with your own feelings, and it didn’t enter your mind to consider whether that was being fair to me.”

Before she could move away he leaned forward, gripped her arms near the shoulders and clamped her body between his legs, holding her firmly. Her rage vanished at once; she flattened her palms on his thighs and lifted her face. But he didn’t kiss her. He let go of her arms and twisted to switch off the lamp behind him, then relaxed his hold on her and laid his head back against the chair, so that she wasn’t sure if he had dimmed the room down to glowing coals as the first move in his love-making, or simply to conceal his expression. Uncertain, afraid of outright rejection, she waited to be told what to do. She should have realized earlier that one didn’t tamper with people like Rain. They were as invincible as death. Why couldn’t she put her head on his lap and say: Rain, love me, I need you so much and I’m so sorry? Oh, surely if she could get him to make love to her some emotional key would turn and it would all come tumbling out, released….

Still withdrawn, remote, he let her take off his jacket and tie, but by the time she began to unbutton his shirt she knew it wasn’t going to work. The kind of instinctive erotic skills which could make the most mundane operation exciting were not in her repertoire. This was so important, and she was making an absolute mess of it. Her fingers faltered, her mouth puckered. She burst into tears.

“Oh, no! Herzchen, liebchen, don’t cry!” He pulled her onto his lap and turned her head into his shoulder, his arms around her. “I’m sorry, Herzchen, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“Now you know,” she said between sobs. “I’m a miserable failure; I told you it wouldn’t work! Rain, I wanted so badly to keep you, but I knew it wouldn’t work if I let you see how awful I am!”

“No, of course it wouldn’t work. How could it? I wasn’t helping you, Herzchen.” He tugged at her hair to bring her face up to his, kissed her eyelids, her wet cheeks, the corners of her mouth. “It’s my fault, Herzchen, not yours. I was paying you back; I wanted to see how far you could go without encouragement. But I think I have mistaken your motives, nicht wahr?” His voice had grown thicker, more German. “And I say, if this is what you want you shall have it, but it shall be together.”

“Please, Rain, let’s call it off! I haven’t got what it takes. I’ll only disappoint you!”

“Oh, you’ve got it, Herzchen, I’ve seen it on the stage. How can you doubt yourself when you’re with me?”

Which was so right her tears dried.

“Kiss me the way you did in Rome,” she whispered. Only it wasn’t like the kiss in Rome at all. That had been something raw, startled, explosive; this was very languorous and deep, an opportunity to taste and smell and feel, settle by layers into voluptuous ease. Her fingers returned to the buttons, his went to the zipper of her dress, then he covered her hand with his and thrust it inside his shirt, across skin matted with fine soft hair. The sudden hardening of his mouth against her throat brought a helpless response so acute she felt faint, thought she was falling and found she had, flat on the silky rug with Rain looming above her. His shirt had come off, perhaps more, she couldn’t see, only the fire glancing off his shoulders spread over her, and the beautiful stern mouth. Determined to destroy its discipline for all time, she locked her fingers in his hair and made him kiss her again, harder, harder!

And the feel of him! Like coming home, recognizing every part of him with her lips and hands and body, yet fabulous and strange. While the world sank down to the minute width of the firelight lapping against darkness, she opened herself to what he wanted, and learned something he had kept entirely concealed for as long as she had known him; that he must have made love to her in imagination a thousand times. Her own experience and newborn intuition told her so. She was completely disarmed. With any other man the intimacy and astonishing sensuality would have appalled her, but he forced her to see that these were things only she had the right to command. And command them she did. Until finally she cried for him to finish it, her arms about him so strongly she could feel the contours of his very bones.

The minutes wore away, wrapped in a sated peace. They had fallen into an identical rhythm of breathing, slow and easy, his head against her shoulder, her leg thrown across him. Gradually her rigid clasp on his back relaxed, became a dreamy, circular caress. He sighed, turned over and reversed the way they were lying, quite unconsciously inviting her to slide still deeper into the pleasure of being with him. She put her palm on his flank to feel the texture of his skin, slid her hand across warm muscle and cupped it around the soft, heavy mass in his groin. To feel the curiously alive, independent movements within it was a sensation quite new to her; her past lovers had never interested her sufficiently to want to prolong her sexual curiosity to this languid and undemanding aftermath. Yet suddenly it wasn’t languid and undemanding at all, but so enormously exciting she wanted him all over again.

Still she was taken unaware, knew a suffocated surprise when he slipped his arms across her back, took her head in his hands and held her close enough to see there was nothing controlled about his mouth, shaped now solely because of her, and for her. Tenderness and humility were literally born in her in that moment. It must have shown in her face, for he was gazing at her with eyes grown so bright she couldn’t bear them, and bent over to take his upper lip between her own. Thoughts and senses merged at last, but her cry was smothered soundless, an unuttered wail of gladness which shook her so deeply she lost awareness of everything beyond impulse, the mindless guidance of each urgent minute. The world achieved its ultimate contraction, turned in upon itself, and totally disappeared.

Rainer must have kept the fire going, for when gentle London daylight soaked through the folds of the curtains the room was still warm. This time when he moved Justine became conscious of it, and clutched his arm fearfully.

“Don’t go!”

“I’m not, Herzchen.” He twitched another pillow from the sofa, pushed it behind his head and shifted her closer in to his side, sighing softly. “All right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you cold?”

“No, but if you are we could go to bed.”

“After making love to you for hours on a fur rug? What a comedown! Even if your sheets are black silk.”

“They’re ordinary old white ones, cotton. This bit of Drogheda is all right, isn’t it?”

“Bit of Drogheda?”

“The rug! It’s made of Drogheda kangaroos,” she explained.

“Not nearly exotic or erotic enough. I’ll order you a tiger skin from India.”

“Reminds me of a poem I heard once:

Would you like to sin

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger skin?

Or would you prefer

To err with her

On some other fur?

“Well, Herzchen, I must say it’s high time you bounced back! Between the demands of Eros and Morpheus, you haven’t been flippant in half a day.” He smiled.

“I don’t feel the need at the moment,” she said with an answering smile, settling his hand comfortably between her legs. “The tiger skin doggerel just popped out because it was too good to resist, but I haven’t got a single skeleton left to hide from you, so there’s not much point in flippancy, is there?” She sniffed, suddenly aware of a faint odor of stale fish drifting on the air. “Heavens, you didn’t get any dinner and now it’s time for breakfast! I can’t expect you to live on love!”

“Not if you expect such strenuous demonstrations of it, anyway.”

“Go on, you enjoyed every moment of it.”

“Indeed I did.” He sighed, stretched, yawned. “I wonder if you have any idea how happy I am.”

“Oh, I think so,” she said quietly.

He raised himself on one elbow to look at her. “Tell me, was Desdemona the only reason you came back to London?”

Grabbing his ear, she tweaked it painfully. “Now it’s my turn to pay you back for all those headmasterish questions! What do you think?”

He prized her fingers away easily, grinning. “If you don’t answer me, Herzchen, I’ll strangle you far more permanently than Marc does.”

“I came back to London to do Desdemona, but because of you. I haven’t been able to call my life my own since you kissed me in Rome, and well you know it. You’re a very intelligent man, Rainer Moerling Hartheim.”

“Intelligent enough to have known I wanted you for my wife almost the first moment I saw you,” he said.

She sat up quickly. “Wife?”

“Wife. If I’d wanted you for my mistress I’d have taken you years ago, and I could have. I know how your mind works; it would have been relatively easy. The only reason I didn’t was because I wanted you for my wife and I knew you weren’t ready to accept the idea of a husband.”

“I don’t know that I am now,” she said, digesting it.

He got to his feet, pulling her up to stand against him. “Well, you can put in a little practice by getting me some breakfast. If this was my house I’d do the honors, but in your kitchen you’re the cook.”

“I don’t mind getting your breakfast this morning, but theoretically to commit myself until the day I die?” She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s my cup of tea, Rain.”

It was the same Roman emperor’s face, and imperially unperturbed by threats of insurrection. “Justine, this is not something to play with, nor am I someone to play with. There’s plenty of time. You have every reason to know I can be patient. But get it out of your head entirely that this can be settled in any way but marriage. I have no wish to be known as anyone less important to you than a husband.”

“I’m not giving up acting!” she said aggressively.

“Verfluchte Kiste, did I ask you to? Grow up, Justine! Anyone would think I was condemning you to a life sentence over a sink and stove! We’re not exactly on the breadline, you know. You can have as many servants as you want, nannies for the children, whatever else is necessary.”

“Erk!” said Justine, who hadn’t thought of children.

He threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Herzchen, this is what’s known as the morning after with a vengeance! I’m a fool to bring up realities so soon, I know, but all you have to do at this stage is think about them. Though I give you fair warning—while you’re making your decision, remember that if I can’t have you for my wife, I don’t want you at all.”

She threw her arms around him, clinging fiercely. “Oh, Rain, don’t make it so hard!” she cried.

Alone, Dane drove his Lagonda up the Italian boot, past Perugia, Firenze, Bologna, Ferrara, Padova, better by-pass Venezia, spend the night in Trieste. It was one of his favorite cities, so he stayed on the Adriatic coast a further two days before heading up the mountain road to Ljubljana, another night in Zagreb. Down the great Sava River valley amid fields blue with chicory flowers to Beograd, thence to Nis, another night. Macedonia and Skopje, still in crumbling ruins from the earthquake two years before; and Tito-Veles the vacation city, quaintly Turkish with its mosques and minarets. All the way down Yugoslavia he had eaten frugally, too ashamed to sit with a great plate of meat in front of him when the people of the country contented themselves with bread.

The Greek border at Evzone, beyond it Thessalonika. The Italian papers had been full of the revolution brewing in Greece; standing in his hotel bedroom window watching the bobbing thousands of flaming torches moving restlessly in the darkness of a Thessalonika night, he was glad Justine had not come.

“Pap-an-dre-ou! Pap-an-dre-ou! Pap-an-dre-ou!” the crowds roared, chanting, milling among the torches until after midnight.

But revolution was a phenomenon of cities, of dense concentrations of people and poverty; the scarred countryside of Thessaly must still look as it had looked to Caesar’s legions, marching across the stubble-burned fields to Pompey at Pharsala. Shepherds slept in the shade of skin tents, storks stood one-legged in nests atop little old white buildings, and everywhere was a terrifying aridity. It reminded him, with its high clear sky, its brown treeless wastes, of Australia. And he breathed of it deeply, began to smile at the thought of going home. Mum would understand, when he talked to her.

Above Larisa he came onto the sea, stopped the car and got out. Homer’s wine-dark sea, a delicate clear aquamarine near the beaches, purple-stained like grapes as it stretched to the curving horizon. On a greensward far below him stood a tiny round pillared temple, very white in the sun, and on the rise of the hill behind him a frowning Crusader fortress endured. Greece, you are very beautiful, more beautiful than Italy, for all that I love Italy. But here is the cradle, forever.

Panting to be in Athens, he pushed on, gunned the red sports car up the switchbacks of the Domokos Pass and descended its other side into Boeotia, a stunning panorama of olive groves, rusty hillsides, mountains. Yet in spite of his haste he stopped to look at the oddly Hollywoodish monument to Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae. The stone said: “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie, in obedience to their command.” It struck a chord in him, almost seemed to be words he might have heard in a different context; he shivered and went on quickly.

In melted sun he paused for a while above Kamena Voura, swam in the clear water looking across the narrow strait to Euboea; there must the thousand ships have sailed from Aulis, on their way to Troy. It was a strong current, swirling seaward; they must not have had to ply their oars very hard. The ecstatic cooings and strokings of the ancient black-garbed crone in the bathhouse embarrassed him; he couldn’t get away from her fast enough. People never referred to his beauty to his face anymore, so most of the time he was able to forget it. Delaying only to buy a couple of huge, custard-filled cakes in the shop, he went on down the Attic coast and finally came to Athens as the sun was setting, gilding the great rock and its precious crown of pillars.

But Athens was tense and vicious, and the open admiration of the women mortified him; Roman women were more sophisticated, subtle. There was a feeling in the crowds, pockets of rioting, grim determination on the part of the people to have Papandreou. No, Athens wasn’t herself; better to be elsewhere. He put the Lagonda in a garage and took the ferry to Crete.

And there at last, amid the olive groves, the wild thyme and the mountains, he found his peace. After a long bus ride with trussed chickens screeching and the all-pervasive reek of garlic in his nostrils, he found a tiny white-painted inn with an arched colonnade and three umbrellaed tables outside on the flagstones, gay Greek bags hanging festooned like lanterns. Pepper trees and Australian gum trees, planted from the new South Land in soil too arid for European trees. The gut roar of cicadas. Dust, swirling in red clouds.

At night he slept in a tiny cell-like room with shutters wide open, in the hush of dawn he celebrated a solitary Mass, during the day he walked. No one bothered him, he bothered no one. But as he passed the dark eyes of the peasants would follow him in slow amazement, and every face would crease deeper in a smile. It was hot, and so quiet, and very sleepy. Perfect peace. Day followed day, like beads slipping through a leathery Cretan hand.

Voicelessly he prayed, a feeling, an extension of what lay all through him, thoughts like beads, days like beads. Lord, I am truly Thine. For Thy many blessings I thank Thee. For the great Cardinal, his help, his deep friendship, his unfailing love. For Rome and the chance to be at Thy heart, to have lain prostrate before Thee in Thine own basilica, to have felt the rock of Thy Church within me. Thou hast blessed me above my worth; what can I do for Thee, to show my appreciation? I have not suffered enough. My life has been one long, absolute joy since I began in Thy service. I must suffer, and Thou Who suffered will know that. It is only through suffering that I may rise above myself, understand Thee better. For that is what this life is: the passage toward understanding Thy mystery. Plunge Thy spear into my breast, bury it there so deeply I am never able to withdraw it! Make me suffer…. For Thee I forsake all others, even my mother and my sister and the Cardinal. Thou alone art my pain, my joy. Abase me and I shall sing Thy beloved Name. Destroy me, and I shall rejoice. I love Thee. Only Thee…

He had come to the little beach where he liked to swim, a yellow crescent between beetling cliffs, and stood for a moment looking across the Mediterranean to what must be Libya, far below the dark horizon. Then he leaped lightly down the steps to the sand, kicked off his sneakers, picked them up, and trod through the softly yielding contours to the spot where he usually dropped shoes, shirt, outer shorts. Two young Englishmen talking in drawling Oxford accents lay like broiling lobsters not far away, and beyond them two women drowsily speaking in German. Dane glanced at the women and self-consciously hitched his swimsuit, aware they had stopped conversing and had sat up to pat their hair, smile at him.

“How goes it?” he asked the Englishmen, though in his mind he called them what all Australians call the English, Pommies. They seemed to be fixtures, since they were on the beach every day.

“Splendidly, old boy. Watch the current—it’s too strong for us. Storm out there somewhere.”

“Thanks.” Dane grinned, ran down to the innocently curling wavelets and dived cleanly into shallow water like the expert surfer he was.

Amazing, how deceptive calm water could be. The current was vicious, he could feel it tugging at his legs to draw him under, but he was too strong a swimmer to be worried by it. Head down, he slid smoothly through the water, reveling in the coolness, the freedom. When he paused and scanned the beach he saw the two German women pulling on their caps, running down laughing to the waves.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called to them in German to stay in shallow water because of the current. Laughing, they waved acknowledgment. He put his head down then, swam again, and thought he heard a cry. But he swam a little farther, then stopped to tread water in a spot where the undertow wasn’t so bad. There were cries; as he turned he saw the women struggling, their twisted faces screaming, one with her hands up, sinking. On the beach the two Englishmen had risen to their feet and were reluctantly approaching the water.

He flipped over onto his belly and flashed through the water, closer and closer. Panicked arms reached for him, clung to him, dragged him under; he managed to grip one woman around the waist long enough to stun her with a swift clip on the chin, then grabbed the other by the strap of her swimsuit, shoved his knee hard into her spine and winded her. Coughing, for he had swallowed water when he went under, he turned on his back and began towing his helpless burdens in.

The two Pommies were standing shoulder-deep, too frightened to venture any farther, for which Dane didn’t blame them in the least. His toes just touched the sand; he sighed in relief. Exhausted, he exerted a last superhuman effort and thrust the women to safety. Fast regaining their senses, they began screaming again, thrashing about wildly. Gasping, Dane managed a grin. He had done his bit; the Poms could take over now. While he rested, chest heaving, the current had sucked him out again, his feet no longer brushed the bottom even when he stretched them downward. It had been a close call. If he hadn’t been present they would certainly have drowned; the Poms hadn’t the strength or skill to save them. But, said a voice, they only wanted to swim so they could be near you; until they saw you they hadn’t any intention of going in. It was your fault they were in danger, your fault.

And as he floated easily a terrible pain blossomed in his chest, surely as a spear would feel, one long and red-hot shaft of screaming agony. He cried out, threw his arms up above his head, stiffening, muscles convulsed; but the pain grew worse, forced his arms down again, thrust his fists into his armpits, brought up his knees. My heart! I’m having a heart attack, I’m dying! My heart! I don’t want to die! Not yet, not before I’ve begun my work, not before I’ve had a chance to prove myself! Dear Lord, help me! I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die!

The spasmed body stilled, relaxed; Dane turned onto his back, let his arms float wide and limp in spite of the pain. Wet-lashed, he stared up at the soaring vault of the sky. This is it; this is Thy spear, that I in my pride begged for not an hour ago. Give me the chance to suffer, I said, make me suffer. Now when it comes I resist, not capable of perfect love. Dearest Lord, Thy pain! I must accept it, I must not fight it, I must not fight Thy will. Thy hand is mighty and this is Thy pain, as Thou must have felt it on the Cross. My God, my God, I am Thine! If this is Thy will, so be it. Like a child I put myself into Thy infinite hand. Thou art too good to me. What have I done to deserve so much from Thee, and from the people who love me better than they love anyone else? Why hast Thou given me so much, when I am not worthy? The pain, the pain! Thou art so good to me. Let it not be long, I asked, and it has not been long. My suffering will be short, quickly over. Soon I shall see Thy face, but now, still in this life, I thank Thee. The pain! My dearest Lord, Thou art too good to me. I love Thee!

A huge tremor passed through the still, waiting body. His lips moved, murmured a Name, tried to smile. Then the pupils dilated, drove all the blue from his eyes forever. Safe on the beach at last, the two Englishmen dumped their weeping charges on the sand and stood looking for him. But the placid deep blue sea was empty, vast; the wavelets ran up rushing and retreated. Dane was gone.

Someone thought of the United States Air Force station nearby, and ran for help. Not thirty minutes after Dane had disappeared a helicopter took off, beat the air frantically and swooped in ever-increasing circles outward from the beach, searching. No one expected to see anything. Drowned men sank to the bottom and didn’t come up for days. An hour passed; then fifteen miles out to sea they sighted Dane floating peacefully on the bosom of the deep, arms outstretched, face turned up to the sky. For a moment they thought he was alive and cheered, but as the craft came low enough to throw the water into hissing foam, it was plain he was dead. The coordinates were given over the helicopter’s radio, a launch sped out, and three hours later returned.

Word had spread. The Cretans had loved to see him pass, loved to exchange a few shy words. Loved him, though they didn’t know him. They flocked down to the sea, women all in black like dowdy birds, men in old-fashioned baggy trousers, white shirts open at the collar and sleeves rolled up. And stood in silent groups, waiting.

When the launch came in a burly master sergeant sprang out onto the sand, turned back to receive a blanket-draped form into his arms. He marched a few feet up the beach beyond the water line, and with the help of another man laid his burden down. The blanket fell apart; there was a high, rustling whisper from the Cretans. They came crowding around, pressing crucifixes to weather-beaten lips, the women softly keening, a wordless ohhhhhhhh! that had almost a melody in it, mournful, patient, earthbound, female.

It was about five in the afternoon; the barred sun was sliding westward behind the frowning cliff, but was still high enough to light up the little dark cluster on the beach, the long, still form on the sand with its golden skin, its closed eyes whose lashes were spiky from drying salt, the faint smile on the blued lips. A stretcher was brought forward, then all together Cretans and American servicemen bore Dane away.

Athens was in turmoil, rioting crowds overturning all order, but the USAF colonel got through to his superiors on a special frequency band, Dane’s blue Australian passport in his hand. It said, as such documents do, nothing about him. His profession was simply marked “Student,” and in the back under next of kin Justine’s name was listed, with her London address. Unconcerned by the legal meaning of the term, he had put her name because London was far closer to Rome than Drogheda. In his little room at the inn, the square black case which housed his priestly implements had not been opened; it waited with his suitcase for directions as to where it should be sent.

When the phone rang at nine in the morning Justine rolled over, opened a bleary eye and lay cursing it, vowing she would have the bloody thing disconnected. Because the rest of the world thought it only right and proper to commence whatever they did at nine in the morning, why did they assume the same of her?

But it rang, and rang, and rang. Maybe it was Rain; that thought tipped the balance toward consciousness, and Justine got up, slopped reeling out to the living room. The German parliament was in urgent session; she hadn’t seen Rain in a week and hadn’t been optimistic about her chances of seeing him for at least another week. But perhaps the crisis had resolved, and he was calling to tell her he was on his way over.

“Hello?”

“Miss Justine O’Neill?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“This is Australia House, in the Aldwych, you know?” The voice had an English inflection, gave a name she was too tired to hear because she was still assimilating the fact that the voice was not Rain’s.

“Okay, Australia House.” Yawning, she stood on one foot and scratched its top with the sole of the other.

“Do you have a brother, a Mr. Dane O’Neill?”

Justine’s eyes opened. “Yes, I do.”

“Is he at present in Greece, Miss O’Neill?”

Both feet settled into the rug, stood braced. “Yes, that’s right,” It did not occur to her to correct the voice, explain it was Father, not Mister.

“Miss O’Neill, I very much regret to say that it is my unfortunate duty to give you some bad news.”

“Bad news? Bad news? What is it? What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

“I regret to have to inform you that your brother, Mr. Dane O’Neill, was drowned yesterday in Crete, I understand in heroic circumstances, performing a sea rescue. However, you realize there is a revolution in Greece, and what information we have is sketchy and possibly not accurate.”

The phone stood on a table near the wall and Justine leaned against the solid support the wall offered. Her knees buckled, she began to slide very slowly downward, wound up in a curled heap on the floor. Not laughing and not crying, she made noises somewhere in between, audible gasps. Dane drowned. Gasp. Dane dead. Gasp. Crete, Dane, drowned. Gasp. Dead, dead.

“Miss O’Neill? Are you there, Miss O’Neill?” asked the voice insistently.

Dead. Drowned. My brother!

“Miss O’Neill, answer me!”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Oh, God, I’m here!”

“I understand you are his next of kin, therefore we must have your instructions as to what to do with the body. Miss O’Neill, are you there?”

“Yes, yes!”

“What do you want done with the body, Miss O’Neill?”

Body! He was a body, and they couldn’t even say his body, they had to say the body. Dane, my Dane. He is a body. “Next of kin?” she heard her voice asking, thin and faint, torn by those great gasps. “I’m not Dane’s next of kin. My mother is, I suppose.”

There was a pause. “This is very difficult, Miss O’Neill. If you’re not the next of kin, we’ve wasted valuable time.” The polite sympathy gave way to impatience. “You don’t seem to understand there’s a revolution going on in Greece and the accident happened in Crete, even more remote and hard to contact. Really! Communication with Athens is virtually impossible and we have been instructed to forward the next of kin’s personal wishes and instructions regarding the body immediately. Is your mother there? May I speak to her, please?”

“My mother’s not here. She’s in Australia.”

“Australia? Lord, this gets worse and worse! Now we’ll have to send a cable to Australia; more delays. If you are not the next of kin, Miss O’Neill, why did your brother’s passport say you were?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and found she had laughed.

“Give me your mother’s address in Australia; we’ll cable her at once. We have to know what to do with the body! By the time cables get back and forth, this will mean a twelve-hour delay, I hope you realize that. It’s going to be difficult enough without this mix-up.”

“Phone her, then. Don’t waste time with cables.”

“Our budget does not extend to international phone calls, Miss O’Neill,” said that stiff voice. “Now, will you please give me your mother’s name and address?”

“Mrs. Meggie O’Neill,” Justine recited, “Drogheda, Gillanbone, New South Wales, Australia.” She spelled out the unfamiliar names for him.

“Once again, Miss O’Neill, my deepest regrets.”

The receiver clicked, began the interminable burr of the dial tone. Justine sat on the floor and let it slip into her lap. There was a mistake, it would all sort itself out. Dane drowned, when he swam like a champion? No, it wasn’t true. But it is, Justine, you know it is, you didn’t go with him to protect him and he drowned. You were his protector from the time he was a baby and you should have been there. If you couldn’t save him, you should have been there to drown with him. And the only reason you didn’t go with him was because you wanted to be in London so you could get Rain to make love to you.

Thinking was so hard. Everything was so hard. Nothing seemed to work, not even her legs. She couldn’t get up, she would never get up again. There was no room in her mind for anyone but Dane, and her thoughts went in ever-diminishing circles around Dane. Until she thought of her mother, the Drogheda people. Oh, God. The news would come there, come to her, come to them. Mum didn’t even have the lovely last sight of his face in Rome. They’ll send the cable to the Gilly police, I suppose, and old Sergeant Ern will climb into his car and drive out all the miles to Drogheda, to tell my mother that her only son is dead. Not the right man for the job, and an almost-stranger. Mrs. O’Neill, my deepest, most heartfelt regrets, your son is dead. Perfunctory, courteous, empty words…. No! I can’t let them do that to her, not to her, she is my mother, too! Not that way, not the way I had to hear it.

She pulled the other part of the phone off the table onto her lap, put the receiver to her ear and dialed the operator.

“Switch? Trunks, please, international. Hello? I want to place an urgent call to Australia, Gillanbone one-two-one-two. And please, please hurry.”

Meggie answered the phone herself. It was late, Fee had gone to bed. These days she never felt like seeking her own bed early, she preferred to sit listening to the crickets and frogs, doze over a book, remember.

“Hello?”

“London calling, Mrs. O’Neill,” said Hazel in Gilly.

“Hello, Justine,” Meggie said, not perturbed. Jussy called, infrequently, to see how everything was.

“Mum? Is that you, Mum?”

“Yes, it’s Mum here,” said Meggie gently, sensing Justine’s distress.

“Oh, Mum! Oh, Mum!” There was what sounded like a gasp, or a sob. “Mum, Dane’s dead. Dane’s dead!”

A pit opened at her feet. Down and down and down it went, and had no bottom. Meggie slid into it, felt its lips close over her head, and understood that she would never come out again as long as she lived. What more could the gods do? She hadn’t known when she asked it. How could she have asked it, how could she not have known? Don’t tempt the gods, they love it. In not going to see him in this most beautiful moment of his life, share it with him, she had finally thought to make the payment. Dane would be free of it, and free of her. In not seeing the face which was dearer to her than all other faces, she would repay. The pit closed in, suffocating. Meggie stood there, and realized it was too late.

“Justine, my dearest, be calm,” said Meggie strongly, not a falter in her voice. “Calm yourself and tell me. Are you sure?”

“Australia House called me—they thought I was his next of kin. Some dreadful man who only wanted to know what I wanted done with the body. ‘The body,’ he kept calling Dane. As if he wasn’t entitled to it anymore, as if it was anyone’s.” Meggie heard her sob. “God! I suppose the poor man hated what he was doing. Oh, Mum, Dane’s dead!”

“How, Justine? Where? In Rome? Why hasn’t Ralph called me?”

“No, not in Rome. The Cardinal probably doesn’t know anything about it. In Crete. The man said he was drowned, a sea rescue. He was on holiday, Mum, he asked me to go with him and I didn’t, I wanted to play Desdemona, I wanted to be with Rain. If I’d only been with him! If I had, it mightn’t have happened. Oh, God, what can I do?”

“Stop it, Justine,” said Meggie sternly. “No thinking like that, do you hear me? Dane would hate it, you know he would. Things happen, why we don’t know. The important thing now is that you’re all right, I haven’t lost both of you. You’re all I’ve got left now. Oh, Jussy, Jussy, it’s so far away! The world’s big, too big. Come home to Drogheda! I hate to think of you all alone.”

“No, I’ve got to work. Work is the only answer for me. If I don’t work, I’ll go mad. I don’t want people, I don’t want comfort. Oh, Mum!” She began to sob bitterly. “How are we going to live without him?”

How indeed? Was that living? God’s thou wert, unto God return. Dust to dust. Living’s for those of us who failed. Greedy God, gathering in the good ones, leaving the world to the rest of us, to rot.

“It isn’t for any of us to say how long we’ll live,” said Meggie. “Jussy, thank you so much for telling me yourself, for phoning.”

“I couldn’t bear to think of a stranger breaking the news, Mum. Not like that, from a stranger. What will you do? What can you do?”

With all her will Meggie tried to pour warmth and comfort across the miles to her devastated girl in London. Her son was dead, her daughter still lived. She must be made whole. If it was possible. In all her life Justine seemed only to have loved Dane. No one else, even herself.

“Dear Justine, don’t cry. Try not to grieve. He wouldn’t have wanted that, now would he? Come home, and forget. We’ll bring Dane home to Drogheda, too. At law he’s mine again, he doesn’t belong to the Church and they can’t stop me. I’ll phone Australia House right away, and the embassy in Athens if I can get through. He must come home! I’d hate to think of him lying somewhere far from Drogheda. Here is where he belongs, he’ll have to come home. Come with him, Justine.”

But Justine sat in a heap, shaking her head as if her mother could see. Come home? She could never come home again. If she had gone with Dane he wouldn’t be dead. Come home, and have to look at her mother’s face every day for the rest of her life? No, it didn’t bear thinking of.

“No, Mum,” she said, the tears rolling down her skin, hot like molten metal. Who on earth ever said people most moved don’t weep? They don’t know anything about it. “I shall stay here and work. I’ll come home with Dane, but then I’m going back. I can’t live on Drogheda.”

For three days they waited in a purposeless vacuum, Justine in London, Meggie and the family on Drogheda, stretching the official silence into tenuous hope. Oh, surely after so long it would turn out to be a mistake, surely if it was true they would have heard by now! Dane would come in Justine’s front door smiling, and say it was all a silly mistake. Greece was in revolt, all sorts of silly mistakes must have been made. Dane would come in the door and laugh the idea of his death to scorn, he’d stand there tall and strong and alive, and he’d laugh. Hope began to grow, and grew with every minute they waited. Treacherous, horrible hope. He wasn’t dead, no! Not drowned, not Dane who was a good enough swimmer to brave any kind of sea and live. So they waited, not acknowledging what had happened in the hope it would prove to be a mistake. Time later to notify people, let Rome know.

On the fourth morning Justine got the message. Like an old woman she picked up the receiver once more, and asked for Australia.

“Mum?”

“Justine?”

“Oh, Mum, they’ve buried him already; we can’t bring him home! What are we going to do? All they can say is that Crete is a big place, the name of the village isn’t known, by the time the cable arrived he’d already been spirited away somewhere and disposed of. He’s lying in an unmarked grave somewhere! I can’t get a visa for Greece, no one wants to help, it’s chaos. What are we going to do, Mum?”

“Meet me in Rome, Justine,” said Meggie.

Everyone save Anne Mueller was there around the phone, still in shock. The men seemed to have aged twenty years in three days, and Fee, shrunken birdlike, white and crabbed, drifted about the house saying over and over, “Why couldn’t it have been me? Why did they have to take him? I’m so old, so old! I wouldn’t have minded going, why did it have to be him? Why couldn’t it have been me? I’m so old!” Anne had collapsed, and Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat walked, slept tears.

Meggie stared at them silently as she put the phone down. This was Drogheda, all that was left. A little cluster of old men and old women, sterile and broken.

“Dane’s lost,” she said. “No one can find him; he’s been buried somewhere on Crete. It’s so far away! How could he rest so far from Drogheda? I’m going to Rome, to Ralph de Bricassart. If anyone can help us, he can.”

Cardinal de Bricassart’s secretary entered his room.

“Your Eminence, I’m sorry to disturb you, but a lady wishes to see you. I explained that there is a congress, that you are very busy and cannot see anyone, but she says she will sit in the vestibule until you have time for her.”

“Is she in trouble, Father?”

“Great trouble, Your Eminence, that much is easy to see. She said I was to tell you her name is Meggie O’Neill.” He gave it a lilting foreign pronunciation, so that it came out sounding like Meghee Onill.

Cardinal Ralph came to his feet, the color draining from his face to leave it as white as his hair.

“Your Eminence! Are you ill?”

“No, Father, I’m perfectly all right, thank you. Cancel my appointments until I notify you otherwise, and bring Mrs. O’Neill to me at once. We are not to be disturbed unless it is the Holy Father.”

The priest bowed, departed. O’Neill. Of coursel It was young Dane’s name, he should have remembered. Save that in the Cardinal’s palace everyone just said Dane. Ah, he had made a grave mistake, keeping her waiting. If Dane was His Eminence’s dearly loved nephew then Mrs. O’Neill was his dearly loved sister.

When Meggie came into the room Cardinal Ralph hardly knew her. It was thirteen years since he had last seen her; she was fifty-three and he was seventy-one. Both of them aged now, instead of only him. Her face hadn’t changed so much as settled, and into a mold unlike the one he had given her in his imagination. Substitute a trenchant incisiveness for sweetness, a touch of iron for softness; she resembled a vigorous, aging, willful martyr rather than the resigned, contemplative saint of his dreams. Her beauty was as striking as ever, her eyes still that clear silvery grey, but both had hardened, and the once vivid hair had faded to a drab beige, like Dane’s without the life. Most disconcerting of all, she wouldn’t look at him for long enough to satisfy his eager and loving curiosity.

Unable to greet this Meggie naturally, he stiffly indicated a chair. “Please sit down.”

“Thank you,” she said, equally stilted.

It was only when she was seated and he could gaze down upon her whole person that he noticed how visibly swollen her feet and ankles were.

“Meggie! Have you flown all the way through from Australia without breaking your journey? What’s the matter?”

“Yes, I did fly straight through,” she said. “For the past twenty-nine hours I’ve been sitting in planes between Gilly and Rome, with nothing to do except stare out the window at the clouds, and think.” Her voice was harsh, cold.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated impatiently, anxious and fearful.

She lifted her gaze from her feet and looked at him steadily.

There was something awful in her eyes; something so dark and chilling that the skin on the back of his neck crawled and automatically he put his hand up to stroke it.

“Dane is dead,” said Meggie.

His hand slipped, flopped like a rag doll’s into his scarlet lap as he sank into a chair. “Dead?” he asked slowly. “Dane dead?”

“Yes. He was drowned six days ago in Crete, rescuing some women from the sea.”

He leaned forward, put his hands over his face. “Dead?” she heard him say indistinctly. “Dane dead? My beautiful boy! He can’t be dead! Dane—he was the perfect priest—all that I couldn’t be. What I lacked he had.” His voice broke. “He always had it—that was what we all recognized—all of us who aren’t perfect priests. Dead? Oh, dear Lord!”

“Don’t bother about your dear Lord, Ralph,” said the stranger sitting opposite him. “You have more important things to do. I came to ask for your help—not to witness your grief. I’ve had all those hours in the air to go over the way I’d tell you this, all those hours just staring out the window at the clouds knowing Dane is dead. After that, your grief has no power to move me.”

Yet when he lifted his face from his hands her dead cold heart bounded, twisted, leaped. It was Dane’s face, with a suffering written upon it that Dane would never live to feel. Oh, thank God! Thank God he’s dead, can never now go through what this man has, what I have. Better he’s dead than to suffer something like this.

“How can I help, Meggie?” he asked quietly, suppressing his own emotions to don the soul-deep guise of her spiritual counselor.

“Greece is in chaos. They’ve buried Dane somewhere on Crete, and I can’t find out where, when, why. Except I suppose that my instructions directing that he be flown home were endlessly delayed by the civil war, and Crete is hot like Australia. When no one claimed him, I suppose they thought he had no one, and buried him.” She leaned forward in her chair tensely. “I want my boy back, Ralph, I want him found and brought home to sleep where he belongs, on Drogheda. I promised Jims I’d keep him on Drogheda and I will, if I have to crawl on my hands and knees through every graveyard on Crete. No fancy Roman priest’s tomb for him, Ralph, not as long as I’m alive to put up a legal battle. He’s to come home.”

“No one is going to deny you that, Meggie,” he said gently. “It’s consecrated Catholic ground, which is all the Church asks. I too have requested that I be buried on Drogheda.”

“I can’t get through all the red tape,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I can’t speak Greek, and I have no power or influence. So I came to you, to use yours. Get me back my son, Ralph!”

“Don’t worry, Meggie, we’ll get him back, though it may not be very quickly. The Left are in charge now, and they’re very anti-Catholic. However, I’m not without friends in Greece, so it will be done. Let me start the wheels in motion immediately, and don’t worry. He is a priest of the Holy Catholic Church, we’ll get him back.”

His hand had gone to the bell cord, but Meggie’s coldly fierce gaze stilled it.

“You don’t understand, Ralph. I don’t want wheels set in motion. I want my son back—not next week or next month, but now! You speak Greek, you can get visas for yourself and me, you’ll get results. I want you to come to Greece with me now, and help me get my son back.”

There was much in his eyes: tenderness, compassion, shock, grief. But they had become the priest’s eyes too, sane, logical, reasonable. “Meggie, I love your son as if he were my own, but I can’t leave Rome at the moment. I’m not a free agent—you above all others should know that. No matter how much I may feel for you, how much I may feel on my own account, I can’t leave Rome in the midst of a vital congress. I am the Holy Father’s aide.”

She reared back, stunned and outraged, then shook her head, half-smiling as if at the antics of some inanimate object beyond her power to influence; then she trembled, licked her lips, seemed to come to a decision and sat up straight and stiff. “Do you really love my son as if he were your own, Ralph?” she asked. “What would you do for a son of yours? Could you sit back then and say to his mother, No, I’m very sorry, I can’t possibly take the time off? Could you say that to the mother of your son?”

Dane’s eyes, yet not Dane’s eyes. Looking at her; bewildered, full of pain, helpless.

“I have no son,” he said, “but among the many, many things I learned from yours was that no matter how hard it is, my first and only allegiance is to Almighty God.”

“Dane was your son too,” said Meggie.

He stared at her blankly. “What?”

“I said, Dane was your son too. When I left Matlock Island I was pregnant. Dane was yours, not Luke O’Neill’s.”

“It—isn’t—true!”

“I never intended you to know, even now,” she said. “Would I lie to you?”

“To get Dane back? Yes,” he said faintly.

She got up, came to stand over him in the red brocade chair, took his thin, parchmentlike hand in hers, bent and kissed the ring, the breath of her voice misting its ruby to milky dullness. “By all that you hold holy, Ralph, I swear that Dane was your son. He was not and could not have been Luke’s By his death I swear it.”

There was a wail, the sound of a soul passing between the portals of Hell. Ralph de Bricassart fell forward out of the chair and wept, huddled on the crimson carpet in a scarlet pool like new blood, his face hidden in his folded arms, his hands clutching at his hair.

“Yes, cry!” said Meggie. “Cry, now that you know! It’s right that one of his parents be able to shed tears for him. Cry, Ralph! For twenty-six years I had your son and you didn’t even know it, you couldn’t even see it. Couldn’t see that he was you all over again! When my mother took him from me at birth she knew, but you never did. Your hands, your feet, your face, your eyes, your body. Only the color of his hair was his own; all the rest was you. Do you understand now? When I sent him here to you, I said it in my letter. ‘What I stole, I give back.’ Remember? Only we both stole, Ralph. We stole what you had vowed to God, and we’ve both had to pay.”

She sat in her chair, implacable and unpitying, and watched the scarlet form in its agony on the floor. “I loved you, Ralph, but you were never mine. What I had of you, I was driven to steal. Dane was my part, all I could get from you. I vowed you’d never know, I vowed you’d never have the chance to take him away from me. And then he gave himself to you, of his own free will. The image of the perfect priest, he called you. What a laugh I had over that one! But not for anything would I have given you a weapon like knowing he was yours. Except for this. Except for this! For nothing less would I have told you. Though I don’t suppose it matters now. He doesn’t belong to either of us anymore. He belongs to God.”

Cardinal de Bricassart chartered a private plane in Athens; he, Meggie and Justine brought Dane home to Drogheda, the living sitting silently, the dead lying silently on a bier, requiring nothing of this earth any-more.

I have to say this Mass, this Requiem for my son. Bone of my bone, my son. Yes, Meggie, I believe you. Once I had my breath back I would even have believed you without that terrible oath you swore. Vittorio knew the minute he set eyes on the boy, and in my heart I, too, must have known. Your laugh behind the roses from the boy—but my eyes looking up at me, as they used to be in my innocence. Fee knew. Anne Mueller knew. But not we men. We weren’t fit to be told. For so you women think, and hug your mysteries, getting your backs on us for the slight God did you in not creating you in His Image. Vittorio knew, but it was the woman in him stilled his tongue. A masterly revenge.

Say it, Ralph de Bricassart, open your mouth, move your hands in the blessing, begin to chant the Latin for the soul of the departed. Who was your son. Whom you loved more than you loved his mother. Yes, more! For he was yourself all over again, in a more perfect mold.

“In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…”

The chapel was packed; they were all there who could be there. The Kings, the O’Rourkes, the Davieses, the Pughs, the MacQueens, the Gordons, the Carmichaels, the Hopetons. And the Clearys, the Drogheda people. Hope blighted, light gone. At the front in a great lead-lined casket, Father Dane O’Neill, covered in roses. Why were the roses always out when he came back to Drogheda? It was October, high spring. Or course they were out. The time was right.

“Sanctus…sanctus…sanctus…”

Be warned that the Holy of Holies is upon you. My Dane, my beautiful son. It is better so. I wouldn’t have wanted you to come to this, what I already am. Why I say this for you, I don’t know. You don’t need it, you never needed it. What I grope for, you knew by instinct. It isn’t you who is unhappy, it’s those of us here, left behind. Pity us, and when our times come, help us.

“Ite, Missa est…Requiescat in pace….”

Out across the lawn, down past the ghost gums, the roses, the pepper trees, to the cemetery. Sleep on, Dane, because only the good die young. Why do we mourn? You’re lucky, to have escaped this weary life so soon. Perhaps that’s what Hell is, a long term in earth-bound bondage. Perhaps we suffer our hells in living….

The day passed, the mourners departed, the Drogheda people crept about the house and avoided each other; Cardinal Ralph looked early at Meggie, and could not bear to look again. Justine left with Jean and Boy King to catch the afternoon plane for Sydney, the night plane for London. He never remembered hearing her husky bewitching voice, or seeing those odd pale eyes. From the time when she had met him and Meggie in Athens to the time when she went with Jean and Boy King she had been like a ghost, her camouflage pulled closely around her. Why hadn’t she called Rainer Hartheim, asked him to be with her? Surely she knew how much he loved her, how much he would want to be with her now? But the thought never stayed long enough in Cardinal Ralph’s tired mind to call Rainer himself, though he had wondered about it off and on since before leaving Rome. They were strange, the Drogheda people. They didn’t like company in grief; they preferred to be alone with their pain.

Only Fee and Meggie sat with Cardinal Ralph in the drawing room after a dinner left uneaten. No one said a word; the ormolu clock on the marble mantel ticked thunderously, and Mary Carson’s painted eyes stared a mute challenge across the room to Fee’s grandmother. Fee and Meggie sat together on a cream sofa, shoulders lightly touching; Cardinal Ralph never remembered their being so close in the old days. But they said nothing, did not look at each other or at him.

He tried to see what it was he had done wrong. Too much wrong, that was the trouble. Pride, ambition, a certain unscrupulousness. And love for Meggie flowering among them. But the crowning glory of that love he had never known. What difference would it have made to know his son was his son? Was it possible to love the boy more than he had? Would he have pursued a different path if he had known about his son? Yes! cried his heart. No, sneered his brain.

He turned on himself bitterly. Fool! You ought to have known Meggie was incapable of going back to Luke. You ought to have known at once whose child Dane was. She was so proud of him! All she could get from you, that was what she said to you in Rome. Well, Meggie…. In him you got the best of it. Dear God, Ralph, how could you not have known he was yours? You ought to have realized it when he came to you a man grown, if not before. She was waiting for you to see it, dying for you to see it; if only you had, she would have gone on her knees to you. But you were blind. You didn’t want to see. Ralph Raoul, Cardinal de Bricassart, that was what you wanted; more than her, more than your son. More than your son!

The room had become filled with tiny cries, rustles, whispers; the clock was ticking in time with his heart. And then it wasn’t in time anymore. He had got out of step with it. Meggie and Fee were swimming to their feet, drifting with frightened faces in a watery insubstancial mist, saying things to him he couldn’t seem to hear.

“Aaaaaaah!” he cried, understanding.

He was hardly conscious of the pain, intent only on Meggie’s arms around him, the way his head sank against her. But he managed to turn until he could see her eyes, and looked at her. He tried to say, Forgive me, and saw she had forgiven him long ago. She knew she had got the best of it. Then he wanted to say something so perfect she would be eternally consoled, and realized that wasn’t necessary, either. Whatever she was, she could bear anything. Anything! So he closed his eyes and let himself feel, that last time, forgetfulness in Meggie.