She was a sharp-featured, pretty girl named Carol, married at an age she often said had been much too young, and it didn’t take her long to discover that she hated London. It was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling sulphurous fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms and afflict your wincing, weeping eyes.

Besides, she and Warren hadn’t been getting along well for a long time. They may both have hoped the adventure of moving to England might help set things right, but now it was hard to remember whether they’d hoped that or not. They didn’t quarrel much—quarreling had belonged to an earlier phase of their marriage—but they hardly ever enjoyed each other’s company, and there were whole days when they seemed unable to do anything at all in their small, tidy basement flat without getting in each other’s way. “Oh, sorry,” they would mutter after each clumsy little bump or jostle. “Sorry…”

One of the presents given to Cathy at the party was a cardboard music box with a jolly yellow duck and a birthday-card message on the front, and with a little crank on one side: when you turned the crank it played a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” And when Warren came back to the flat that night he found it, among several other cheap, forgotten toys, on the floor beneath Cathy’s stripped bed. He played it once or twice as he sat drinking whiskey over the strewn books and papers on his desk; then, with a child’s sense of pointless experiment, he turned the crank the other way and played it backwards, slowly. And once he’d begun doing that he found he couldn’t stop, or didn’t want to, because the dim, rude little melody it made suggested all the loss and loneliness in the world.

Nobody had to tell him what a triumph of masculinity it was to have a young whore offer herself to you free of charge. He didn’t even need From Here to Eternity to tell him that, though he would always remember how that novel came quickly to mind as he drew her face up closer to his own. She had made him feel profoundly strong. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said huskily, and he kissed her. Then, just before kissing her again, he said, “Oh, that’s awfully nice, Christine.”

“Oh, then you’ve settled it,” Judith said. “Oh, that’s marvelous.”

“Settled what?”

“Whatever it was that was making you both so miserable. Oh, I’m so glad. You didn’t ever really think I believed the nonsense about the illness in the family, did you? Has any young wife ever crossed the ocean alone for a reason like that? I was even a little annoyed with Carol for assuming I’d believe it. I kept wanting to say, Oh, tell me, dear. Tell me. Because you see when you’re old, Warren—” Her eyes began to leak and she wiped them ineffectually with her hand. “When you’re old, you want so much for the people you love to be happy.”