Dick awoke at five after a long dream of war, walked to the window and stared out it at the Zugersee. His dream had begun in sombre majesty¹; navy blue uniforms crossed a dark plaza² behind bands playing the second movement of Prokofieff’s “Love of Three Oranges.” Presently there were fire engines, symbols of disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing³ station. He turned on his bed-lamp light and made a thorough note of it ending with the half-ironic phrase: “Non-combatant’s shell-shock.”

As he sat on the side of his bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something desolate⁴ and he felt sorry for whatever loneliness she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance⁵ of her perishable⁶ beauty.

Even this past year and a half on the Zugersee seemed wasted time for her, the seasons marked only by the workmen on the road turning pink in May, brown in July, black in September, white again in Spring. She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans⁷. The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her — she sought in them the vitality⁸ that had made them independent or creative or rugged⁹, sought in vain — for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole’s

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