Did You Invite Me?

Rachel first met Gilbert at David and Sarah's, or it may have been at Richard and Phoebe's--she could not remember--but what she did remember was that he stood like a touchy exclamation mark and talked in his shotgun manner about his dog. His talk jumped so that she got confused: The dog was his wife's dog, but was he talking about his dog or his wife? He blinked very fast when he talked of either. Then she remembered what David (or maybe Richard) had told her. His wife was dead. Rachel had a dog, too, but he was not interested.

The bond among them all was that they owned small, white stuccoed houses, not quite alike--hers alone, for example, had Gothic-revival windows, which, she felt, gave her a point--on opposite sides of the park. Another bond was that they had reached middle life and said nothing about it, except that Gilbert sharply pretended to be younger than the rest of them in order to remind them they had arrived at that time when one year passes into the next unnoticed, leaving certain dregs, an insinuation that they had not done what they intended. When this thought struck them, they would all--if they had the time--look out of their sedate windows at the park, that tame and once princely oasis where the trees looked womanish on the island in the lake or marched in grave married processions along the avenues in the late summer or in the winter were starkly widowed. They could watch the weekend crowds or the solitary walkers on the public grass, see the ducks flying over in the evenings, hear the keeper's whistle and his shout "All out" when the gates of the park closed an hour after sunset; and at night, hearing the animals at the zoo, they could send out silent cries of their own upon the place and evoke their ghosts.

But not Gilbert. His cry would be a howl and audible, a joint howl of himself and this dog he talked about. Rachel had never seen a man so naked. Something must be done about him, she thought every time she met him. Two years ago, Sonia, his famous and chancy wife, had died--"on the stage," the headlines in the London newspapers said, which was nearly true--and his eyes were red-rimmed as if she had died yesterday, his angry face was raw with drink or the unjust marks of guilt and grief. He was a tall man, all bones, and even his wrists coming out of a jacket that was too short in the sleeve seemed to be crying. He had also the look of a man who had decided not to buy another suit in his life, to let cloth go on gleaming with its private malice. It was well known--for he boasted of it himself--that his wife had been much older than he, that they quarreled half the time and that he still adored her.

Rachel had been naked, too, in her time, when, (continued on page 242)Did You Invite Me?(continued from page 145) six or seven years before, she had divorced her husband. Gilbert is "in the middle of it," she thought. She had been "through it" and had "come out of it" and was not hurt or lonely anymore and had crowded her life with public troubles. She was married to a newspaper column.

"Something really must be done about him," she said at last out loud to David and Sarah, as she tried to follow Gilbert's conversation that was full of traps and false exit lines. For his part, he sniffed when he spoke to them of Rachel.

"Very attractive woman. Very boring. All women are boring. Sonia was a terrible bore sometimes, carrying on, silly cow. What of it? You may have remarked it: I'm a bore. I must go. Thank you. Sarah and David, for inviting me and offering me your friendship. You did invite me, didn't you? You did? I'm glad. I have no friends. The friends Sonia and I invited to the house were hers, not mine. Old codgers. I must go home and feed her dog."

They watched him go off stiffly, a 40-year-old.

An outsider he was, of course, because of loss. One feels the east wind--she knew that. But it was clear--as she decided to add him to her worries--that he must always have been that. He behaved mechanically, click, click, click, like a puppet or an orphan, homelessness being his vanity. This came out when David had asked him about his father and mother in Rachel's presence. From their glances at each other, she knew they had heard what he said many times before. Out came his shot, the long lashes of his childish eyes blinking fast:

"Never met the people."

He was showing her a nasty wound. He was born in Singapore, he said. One gathered the birth had no connection with either father or mother. She tried to be intelligent about the city.

"Never saw the place."

The father became a prisoner of the Japanese: The mother took him to India. Rachel tried to be intelligent about India.

"Don't remember it."

"The old girl"--his mother--sent him home to schools. He spent his boyhood in camps and dormitories, his army life in Nissen huts. He was 20 when he really "met" his parents. At the sight of him, they separated for good.

No further answers. Life had been doled out to him in accidental soupspoons, one at a time; he returned the compliment by doing the same and then erected silence like houses of cards, watching people wait for them to fall down.

How did the raw young man come to be married to Sonia, an actress at the top of the tree, 15 years older than he? "The old girl knew her," he said. She was his mother's friend. Rachel worried away at it. She saw, correctly, a dramatic woman with a clever mouth, a surrogate mother--but a mother astute in acting the part among her scores of grand and famous friends. Rachel had one or two famous friends, too, but he snubbed her with his automatic phrase:

"Never met him."

Or: "Never met her."

And then Rachel, again correctly, saw him standing in the doorway of Sonia's drawing room or bringing drinks perhaps to the crowd like an uncouth son; those wrists were the wrists of a growing boy who silently jeered at the guests. She heard Sonia dressing him down for his Nissen-hut language and his bad manners--which, however, she encouraged. This was her third marriage and it had to be original. That was the heart of the Gilbert problem: Sonia had invented him; he had no innate right to what he appeared to be, although he was 40.

So Rachel, who happened to be writing an article on broken homes, asked him to come round and have a drink. He walked across the park from his house to hers. At the door, he spoke his usual phrase:

"Thank you for inviting me. You did invite me, didn't you? Well, I thank you. We live on opposite sides of the park." He said this like a marksman. "Very convenient. Not too near."

He went in.

"Your house is white and your dog is white," he said.

Rachel owned a dog. A very white fox terrier came barking at him on a high, glassy note, showing sharp teeth. Rachel was wearing a pale-blue dress from her throat to the tips of her shoes and led him into the sitting room. He sank into a soft, silky sofa with his knees together and politely inspected her as an interesting collection of bones.

"Shall I ever get up from this?" he said, patting the sofa. "Silly question. Yes, I shall, of course. I have come, shortly I shall go." He was mocking someone's manners, perhaps hers. The fox terrier, which had followed him into the small and sunny room, sniffed long at Gilbert's shoes and his trouser legs and stiffened when he stroked its head. The dog growled.

"Pretty head," he said. "I like dogs' heads." He was staring at Rachel's head. Her hair was smooth, neat and fair.

"I remarked his feet on the hall floor, tick, tick, tick. Your hall must be tiled. Mine is carpeted."

"Don't be so aggressive, Sam," said Rachel gravely to the dog.

"Leave him alone," said Gilbert. "He can smell Tom, Sonia's Boston bull. That's who you can smell, isn't it? He can smell an enemy."

"Sam is a problem," she said. "Everyone in the street hates you, Sam, don't they? When you get out in the garden you bark and bark, people open their windows and shout at you. You chase cats, you killed the Gregory boy's rabbit and bit the Jackson child. You drive the doctor mad. He throws flowerpots at you."

"Stop nagging the poor animal," said Gilbert. And to the dog he said:

"Good for you. Be a nuisance. Be yourself. Everyone needs an enemy. Absolutely."

And he said to himself: She hasn't forgiven her husband. In her long dress she had the composure of the completely smoothed-over person who might well have nothing on underneath. Gilbert appreciated this, but she became prudish and argumentative.

"Why do you say 'absolutely'?" she said, seeing a distracting point for discussion here. "Isn't that relative?"

"No," said Gilbert with enjoyment. He loved a row. "I've got an enemy at my office. Nasty little creepy fellow. He wants my job. He watches me. There's a new job going--promotion--and he thinks I want it. So he watches. He sits on the other side of the room and is peeing himself with anxiety every time I move. Peeing himself, yes. If I leave the room, he goes to the door to see if I'm going to the director's office. If I do, he sweats. He makes an excuse to go to the director to see if he can find out what we've been talking about. When I am working on a scheme, he comes over to look at it. If I'm working out costs, he stares with agony at the layout or the figures. 'Is that Jameson's?' He can't contain himself. 'No, I'm doing my income tax,' I tell him. He's very shocked at my doing that in office hours and goes away relieved. He'll report that to the director. Then a suspicion strikes him when he is halfway back to his desk and he turns round and comes over again, panting. He doesn't believe me. 'I'm turning inches into centimeters,' I say. He still doesn't believe me. Poor silly bugger."

He laughed.

"Wasn't that rather cruel?" she said. "Why centimeters?"

"Why not? He wants the French job. Boring little man. Boring office. Yes."

Gilbert constructed one of his long silences.

After a while, he went on:

"He was the only one who came from the office to Sonia's funeral. He brought his wife--never met her before--and she cried. The only person who did. Yes. He'd never missed a show she was in."

"So he isn't an enemy. Doesn't that prove my point?" she asked solemnly.

Gilbert ignored this.

"They'd never met poor Sonia," he said. And he blinked very fast.

"I never met your wife, either, you know," said Rachel earnestly. She hoped he would describe her; but he described her doctors, the lawyers who assemble after death.

"What a farce," he said.

He said, "She had a stroke in the theater. Her words came out backward. I wrote to her first two husbands. Only one replied. The theater sent her to the hospital--damn fools. If you go to the hospital, you die of pneumonia, bloody hospital won't give you enough pillows, you lie flat and you can't get your breath. What a farce. Her brother came and talked, one of those fat men. Never liked the man."

She said how terrible it must have been.

"Did she recover her speech? They sometimes do."

"Asked," he said, "for the dog, called it God."

He got up suddenly from the sofa.

"There! I have got up. I am standing on my feet. I am a bore," he said. "I shall go."

As he left the room, the terrier came snilfing at his heels.

"Country dogs. Good ratters. Ought to be on a farm."

She plunged into a confidence to make him stay longer.

"He used to be a country dog. My husband bought him for me when we lived in the country. I know," she reverted to a worry, "how important environment is to animals and I was going to let him stay--but when you are living alone in the city--well, there are a lot of burglaries here."

"Why did you divorce your husband?" he asked as he opened the front door. "I shouldn't have asked. Bad manners. I apologize. I was rude. Sonia was always on to me about that."

"He went off with a girl at his office," she said staunchly.

"Silly man," said Gilbert, looking at the dog. "Thank you. Goodbye. Do we shake hands? You invited me, now it is my turn to invite you. That is the right thing, of course it is. We must do the right thing. I shall."

Weeks passed before Gilbert invited Rachel. There were difficulties. Whatever he decided by day was destroyed at night. At night Sonia would seem to come flying out of the park, saying the house had belonged to her. She had paid for it. She enumerated the furniture item by item. She had the slow, languid walk of her stage appearances as she went suspiciously from room to room, asking what he had done with her fur coats and where were her shoes? "You've given them to some woman." She said he had a woman in the house. He said he asked only David and Sarah: She said she didn't trust Sarah. He pleaded he had kept the dog. When he said that, her ghost vanished, saying he starved the poor thing.

One night he said to her, "I'm going to ask Rachel, but you'll be here."

"I damn well will," she said. And this became such a dogma that when, at last, he asked Rachel to come, he disliked her.

His house was not as sedate as hers, which had been repainted that year--his not. His windows seemed to him--and to her--to sob. There was grit on the frames. When he opened the door to her, she noted that the brass knocker had not been polished and inside there was the immediate cold odor of old food. The hall and walls echoed their voices and the air was very still. In the sitting room, the seats of the chairs, one could see, had not been sat on for a long time, there was dust on the theatrical wallpaper. Hearing her, Sonia's dog, Tom, came scrabbling the stair carpet and rushed into the room hysterically at both of them, skidding on rugs, snorting, whimpering, and made at once for her skirts, got under her legs and was driven off onto a sofa of green silk, rather like hers, but now frayed where the dog's claws had caught.

"Off the sofa, Tom," said Gilbert. The dog ignored this and snuffled from its squat nose and gazed from wet eyes that were like enormous marbles. Gilbert picked up a rubber bone and threw it to the dog. Down it came and the racing round the room began again. Rachel held her glass in the air for safety's sake and the dog jumped at it and made her spill whiskey on her dress. In this confusion they tried to talk.

"Sonia liked being photographed with Tom," he said.

"I saw her on the stage only once. She was very beautiful," she said. "It must have been twelve years ago. Gielgud and another actor called Slade were in it. Or perhaps it wasn't Slade. Oh, dear! My memory!"

"Her second husband," he said.

He picked up the dog's rubber bone. The dog rushed to him and seized it. Man and dog pulled at the bone.

"You won't get it. You want it," said Gilbert while she seemed to hear her husband say, "Why can't you keep your mouth shut if you can't remember things?" And Gilbert, grinning in his struggle with the dog, said:

"She always had Tom sleep on our bed. He still does. Won't leave it. He's on it even when I come back from the office."

"He sleeps with you?" she said with a shudder.

"I come home. I want someone to talk to."

"What d'you do with him when you go to your office?" The dog pulled and snorted. The woman who came in and cleaned looked after the dog, he said. And went on:

"Your house has three stories, mine has two, otherwise the same. I've got a basement full of rubbish. I was going to turn it into a flat, but Sonia got worse. Futile. Yes, life is futile. Why not sell the damn place? No point. No point in anything. I go to the office, come back, feed the dog and get drunk. Why not? Why go on? Why do you go on? Just habit. No sense in it."

"You do go on," she said.

"The dog," he said.

I must find some people for him to meet. He can't go on like this, she thought. It is ghastly.

When she left, he stood on the doorstep and said:

"My house. Your house. They're worth four times what we gave for them. There it is."

She decided to invite him to dinner to meet some people--but whom could she ask? He was prickly. She knew dozens of people, but, as she thought of them, there seemed, for the first time, to be something wrong with all of them. In the end, she invited no one to meet him.

On a diet, silly cow, he thought when she came to the door, but he fell back on his usual phrase as he looked about the empty room.

"Did you invite me? Or shall I go away? You did invite me. Thank you. Thank you."

"I've been in Vienna with the Fladgates. She is a singer. Friends of David and Sarah."

"Fladgates? Never heard of the people," he said. "Sonia insulted someone in Vienna. I was drunk. Sonia never drank anything--that made her insults worse. Did your husband drink?"

"Indeed not."

He sat down on the sofa. The evening--Sonia's time. He expected Sonia to fly in and sit there watching this woman with all her "problems" hidden chastely except for one foot, which tipped up and down in her shoe under her long dress. But--to his surprise--Sonia did not come. The terrier sat at Rachel's feet.

"How is your enemy?" she said as they drank. "The man in the office."

"He and his wife asked me to dinner," he said.

"That's kind," she said.

"People are kind," he said. "I've remarked that."

"Does he still watch you?"

"Yes. You know what it was? He thinks I drink too much. He thinks I've got a bottle in my desk. It wasn't the job that was worrying him. We are wrong about people. I am. You are. Everyone is."

When they went in to dinner, candles were on the table.

Bloody silly having candles, he said to himself. And when she came in with the soup, he said:

"We had candles. Poor Sonia threw them out the window once. She had to do it in a play."

The soup was iced and white and there was something in it that he could not make out. But no salt. That's it, he thought, no salt in this woman. Writes about politics and things all day and forgets the salt. The next course was white, too, something chopped or minced with something peculiar, goodness knew what. It got into his teeth. Minced newsprint, he thought.

"Poor Sonia couldn't cook at all," he said, pushing his food about, proud of Sonia. "She put dishes on the floor near the stove, terrible muddle, and rushed back to hear what people were saying, and then an awful bloody stink came from the kitchen. I used to go down and the potatoes had burned dry and Tom had cleared the plates. Bloody starvation. No dinner."

"Oh, no!" she said.

"I live on chops now. Yes," he said. "One, sometimes two, every day, say ten a week. Am I being a bore? Shall I go?"

Rachel had a face that had been set for years in the same concerned expression. That expression now fell to pieces from her forehead to her throat. Against her will, she laughed. The laugh shook her and was loud; she felt herself being whirled into a helpless state from the toes upward. Her blood whirled, too.

"You laughed!" he shouted. "You did not protest. You did not write an article. You laughed. I could see your teeth. Very good. I've never seen you laugh before."

And the dog barked at them.

"She laughed!" he shouted at the dog.

She went out to make coffee, very annoyed at being trapped into laughing. While he waited, the dog sat, undecided, ears pricked, listening for her and watching him like a sentry.

"Rats," whispered Gilbert to the dog. It stood up sharply.

"Poor bastard. What a life," he said.

The dog barked angrily at him and when she came in, he said, "I told your dog he ought to be on a farm."

"You said that before. Let us have coffee next door," she said. They moved into the next room and now she sat on the sofa while she poured the coffee.

"Now you are sitting on the sofa. I'm in this armchair," he said, thinking of life tactically. "Sonia moved about, too. I used to watch her going into a room. Where will she sit next? Damned if I ever got it right. The same in restaurants. 'Let us sit here,' she'd say, and then when the waiter came to her chair, she'd say, 'No, not here. Over there.' Never knew where she was going to settle. Like a fly. She wanted attention. Of course. That was it. Quite right."

"Well," she said coldly, "she was an actress."

"Nothing to do with it," he said. "Woman."

"Nonsense," she said, hating to be called a woman, and thought, It's my turn now.

"My husband," she said, "traveled the whole time. Moscow, Germany, Copenhagen, South Africa; but when he got home, he was never still, posing to the animals on the farm, showing off to barns, fences, talking French and German to birds, pretending to be a country gentleman."

"Let the poor man alone," he said. "Is he still alive?"

"I told you," she said. "I won't bore you with it all."

She was astonished to find herself using his word and that the full story of her husband and herself she had planned to tell, and which she had told so many people, suddenly lost interest. And yet, anyway, she thought, why shouldn't I tell this man about it? So she started, but she made a muddle of it. She got lost in the details. The evening, she saw, was a failure. He yawned.

If there was one thing Rachel could honestly say, it was that she had not thought of her husband for years. She had not forgotten, but he had become a generality in the busyness of her life. But now, after the evening when Gilbert came to dinner, her husband came to life and plagued her. If an airplane came down whining across the wide London sky, she saw him sitting in it--back from Beirut, Gape Town, Copenhagen--descending not upon her but upon another woman. If she took the dog for a run in the park, the cuddling couples on the grass became him and that young girl; if babies screamed in their prams, they were his children; if a man threw a ball, it was he; if men in white flannels were playing cricket, she wondered if he were among them. She imagined sudden, cold meetings and ran through tirades of hot dialog. One day she saw a procession of dogs, panting and tails up, following a bitch, with a foolish grin of wet teeth in their jaws, and Sam rushed after them: She went red in the face shouting at him. And yet she had gone to the park in order to calm herself and to be alone. The worst thing that could happen would be to meet Gilbert, the cause of this; but, like all malevolent causes, he never showed his face. She had wished to do her duty and be sorry for him, but not for him to become a man. She feared she might be on the point of talking about this to a woman, not a woman she knew well--that would be disastrous--but, say, to some woman or girl sitting alone on a park seat or some woman in a shop: a confidence she would regret all her life. She was touchy in these days and had a row with the doctor who threw flowerpots at her dog. She petted the animal. "Your head is handsome," she said, stroking its head, "but why did you go after that silly bitch?" The dog adored her when she said this. "You're vain," she said to it.

Gilbert did go to the park, but only on Saturdays, when the crowds came. He liked seeing the picnics, the litter on the grass; he stood still with pleasure when babies screamed or ice cream dripped. He grinned at boys throwing water from drinking fountains and families trudging, drunks lying asleep and fat girls lying half on top of their men and tickling their faces with grass. "The place is a damn bedroom. Why not? Where else can they go? Lucky, boring people. I've got a bedroom and no one in it."

One Saturday, after three days of rain, he took his dog there and--would you believe it?--there the whole crowd was again, still at it, on the wet grass. The trouble with Sonia was that she thought the park was vulgar and would never go there--went once and never again, hadn't brought the right shoes.

He remarked this to his dog as he let it off its leash. The animal scampered round him in wide circles, came back to him and then raced off again in circles getting wider and wider, until it saw a man with string in his hand trying to fly a kite. The kite was flopping on the ground, rose 20 or 30 feet in the air and then dived again. The dog rushed at the kite, but the man got it up again, higher this time. Gilbert walked toward the man. "Poor devil, can't get it up," he said as he walked. He got near the man and watched his struggles.

Then the kite shot up high and Gilbert watched it raving there until suddenly it swept away higher still. Gilbert said: "Good for him." The boredom of the gray afternoon was sweet. He lit a cigarette and threw the empty packet onto the grass and then he lost sight of the dog. When he saw it again, it was racing in a straight line toward a group of trees by the lake. It was racing toward another dog. A few yards away from the dog, it stopped and pranced. The dog was a terrier and stopped dead, then came forward. They stood sniffing each other's tails and then jumped round muzzle to muzzle. They were growling, the terrier barked and then the two dogs flew at each other's necks. Their play had turned to a war, their jaws were at each other's necks and ears.

Gilbert saw at once it was Rachel's dog; indeed, Rachel was running up, shouting, "Sam! Sam!" The fight was savage and Tom had his teeth in.

"Stop them," Rachel was shouting. "Stop them. They'll kill each other. He's got him by the throat."

And then she saw him: "You!"

Gilbert was enjoying the fight. He looked around and picked up a stick that had fallen from a tree.

"Stop them," she shouted.

"Get yours by the collar, I'll get mine," he shouted to her.

"I can't. Sam! Sam! They're bleeding."

She was dancing about in terror, trying to catch Sam by the legs.

"Not by the legs. By the collar, like this, woman," he shouted. "Don't put your arms round him, you idiot. Like this. Stop dancing about."

He caught Tom by the collar and lifted him as both dogs hung on to each other.

"You're strangling him. I can't, I can't," she said. Gilbert brought his stick down hard on the muzzles of the dogs, just as she was trying to grasp Sam again.

"You'll kill them."

He brought the stick down hard again. The dogs yelped with pain and separated.

"Get the leash on," he said, "you fool."

Somehow she managed it and the two dogs now strained to get at each other. The terrier's white neck and body were spotted with blood and smears of it were on Rachel's hands.

Gilbert wiped their spit off his sleeve.

They pulled their dogs yards apart and she stared at him. It infuriated her that he was laughing at her with pure pleasure. In their stares, they saw each other clearly and as they had never seen each other before. To him, in her short skirt and her shoes muddied by the wet grass, her hair disordered and the blood risen to her pale face, she was a woman. The grass had changed her. To her, he was not a pitiable arrangement of widower's tricks but a man on his own. And the park itself changed him in her eyes: In the park he, like everyone else there, seemed to be human. The dogs gave one more heave to get at each other.

"Lie down, Sam," Gilbert shouted.

She lifted her chin and was free to hate him for shouting at her animal.

"Look after yours. He's dangerous," she called back, angered by the friendliness of his face.

"Damn silly dogs enjoyed it. Good for them. Are you all right? Go up to the kiosk and get a drink--if I may, I'll follow you up...see you're all right."

"No, no," she put out a loud moan--far too loud. "He's bleeding. I'll take him home," and she turned to look at the park. "What a mess people make." And now, walking away, made a final accusation:

"I didn't know you brought your dog here."

He watched her go. She turned away and dragged the struggling terrier over the grass uphill from the lake. He watched her walking unsteadily.

Very attractive figure, he thought. Silly cow. Better go home and ring her up.

He turned and on the way back to his house, he could still see her dancing about on the grass and shouting. He went over the scene again and repeated his conclusion: She's got legs. A woman. Must be. Full of life. She was still dancing about as he put a bowl of water down for the dog. It drank noisily and he gave it another bowl and then he washed the dog's neck and looked at its ear. "Nothing much wrong with you," he said. He fed the animal and soon it jumped onto the sofa and was instantly snorting, and whimpering and shaking into sleep.

I must ring her up, yes, that is what I must do.

But a neighbor answered and said Rachel had gone to the vet and she had come back in a terrible state and had gone to bed with one of her migraines.

"Don't bother her," he said. "I just rang to ask how the dog was."

Rachel was not in bed. She was standing beside the neighbor and when the call was over, she said:

"What did he say?"

"He asked about the dog."

"Is that all?"

"Yes."

This flabbergasted her.

In the middle of the night she woke up and when her stupefaction passed, she damn well wished he were there so that she could say, "It didn't occur to you to apologize. I don't like being called a fool. You assume too much. Don't think I care a damn about your dog." She was annoyed to feel a shudder pass through her. She got out of bed and, looking out of her window at the black trees, saw herself racing across the park to his house and pulling that dog of his off his bed. The things she said! The language she used! She kicked the dog out of the room and it went howling downstairs. She went back to bed weak and surprised at herself, because, before she realized it, Sam became Tom in her mind. She lay there stiff, awake, alone. Which dog had she kicked? Sam or Tom?

In his house, Gilbert locked up, poured himself a strong whiskey, then a second, then a third. Uncertain of whom he was addressing, Rachel or Sonia, he said, "Silly cow," and blundered drunkish to bed. He woke up at five very cold. No dog. The bed was empty. He got out of bed and went downstairs. For the first time since Sonia had died, the dog was asleep on the sofa. He had forgotten to leave his door open.

In the morning, he was startled to hear Sonia's voice saying to him in her stage voice: "Send her some flowers, ask her to dinner and stop pitying yourself."

So he sent the flowers and when Rachel rang to thank him, he asked her to dinner--at a restaurant.

"Your house. My house," he said. "Two dogs."

There was a long silence and he could hear her breath bristling.

"Yes. I think it has to be somewhere else," she said. And added: "As you say, we have a problem."

And after this dinner and the next, she said:

"There are so many problems. I don't really know you."

They talked all summer and people who came regularly to the restaurant made up stories about them and were quite put out when in October they stopped coming. All the proprietor had heard was that they had sold their houses--in fact, he knew what they'd got for them. The proprietor had bought Sonia's dog. There was a terrier, too, he said, but he didn't know what had happened to that.