His voice came with a stiff jerk, as if it choked him. He remembered,
too.


ii

The grey and yellow flagstones of the terrace were hot under your feet.

Jerrold's mother lay out there on a pile of cushions, in the sun. She
was very large and very beautiful. She lay on her side, heaved up on one
elbow. Under her thin white gown you could see the big lines of her
shoulder and hip, and of her long full thigh, tapering to the knee.

Anne crouched beside her, uncomfortably, holding her little body away
from the great warm mass among the cushions.

Mrs. Fielding was aware of this shrinking. She put out her arm and drew
Anne to her side again.

"Lean back," she said. "Close. Closer."

And Anne would lean close, politely, for a minute, and then stiffen and
shrink away again when the soft arm slackened.

Eliot Fielding (the clever one) lay on his stomach, stretched out across
the terrace. He leaned over a book: _Animal Biology_. He was absorbed in
a diagram of a rabbit's heart and took no notice of his mother or of
Anne.