In her reply, Shirley set out her concerns at some length. Francis’s behaviour had been, from the start, confusing; there was “a sort of detachment that did not fit at all with the fact that he wanted to see me constantly.” The invitation to travel to Spain had been made at a dinner party, “obviously feeling that this had no implications that might prevent its being said before other people.” She added that “in all these weeks of being with me Francis has never so much as held my hand.” A few days before he flew out, Francis sent her a coyly “anonymous” letter, advising “that FS had been involved with another woman when he met me, felt he had committed himself to her, did not know how he could extricate himself—the point being that he would rather have SH. Could I advise?” A correspondence continued in this stylised vein, between “Lo Scrittore” and “La Scrittrice.” Francis began, “A writing friend tells us of meeting a seemingly marvellous writing girl by chance (as much chance as can be present at such moments) at a party given by a far from usual mutual friend,” but he owned that it all now seemed to have been “too good to be true!” and that he felt it might be best “to try to salvage an ‘amitié littéraire’” from it all. Shirley responded:

Lady authoress has statement to make … For her part she may say that she does not believe in Chance. That she has no accompaniment and is in fact sola solissima. That the quasi-accompaniment to the party, while congenial, is of quite other inclinations … She must impress upon her readers … that she is of serious nature in such matters, that her experience in this direction has been of a kind that has tended to keep her sola solissima, always allowing for rare possibilities occurring at parties given by common friends … Scrittrice is trying to think of examples of amitié littéraire …

In the spring of 1963 Shirley was working on her first novel, set in Italy, a tale of romantic love eclipsed by its own waning. The Evening of the Holiday was contracted to Macmillan and Knopf after publication in full in The New Yorker: “On Monday I took my piece of writing to Bill [Maxwell] … and was no sooner home than he telephoned to say he Loves It … Having the thing finished is a tremendous weight off me—it was one of the hardest things I ever had to write … partly because it is a piece about happiness, deliverance etc, and it is harder to elaborate happiness than grief—happiness speaks for itself.” The middle section of the novel, when Sophie and Tancredi reach an equilibrium and accept the chance to love, is the first such moment in her writing. Her earlier stories had chronicled the inevitable pain and the perplexities of love; now she was finding herself confronted with the possibility of reciprocity, lives and hearts coinciding, and had begun to write of that. Over the coming months, in the shadow of ever-shifting relations with Francis, she would compose the later sections of the novel, tracing love’s almost inexplicable decline, itself overtaken by the death of Sophie’s aged aunt.

Back in New York that April, the amitié littéraire continued: Shirley sent Francis a clipping from Housman about the bodily ground of poetry, “a shiver down the spine … constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes”; they went to dinner and to the theatre; and Francis continued to see Margaret. In April he drove Shirley to Ossining, where they had lunch with the Cheevers. Muriel continued to be full of hope about their prospects, but she also raised questions:

Surely, dear Shirlers, there is a very deep feeling floating around between you and Francis and that is something indestructible—that is, if the feelings are loving ones, as they are. I don’t know what or how to think of all you tell me, and perhaps by now developments have happened. You know, I can’t help feeling (but I have a personal bias in this respect) that you might consider asking him whether the “other girl” is male or female. Perhaps this is an absurd idea—forgive it, if so. I can only judge by my poor wee self—how I go falling for that type, time and again, and never, really, for the wholehearted male! If this is too far-fetched and you are sufficiently in love to cope with the conflict, there’s nothing like a real love affair to resolve the problem—any problem—tho’ it gives rise to others. My heart and thoughts are with you, Shirlers dear. All that matters is that you are full of possibilities in life and work. I’m enormously pleased to hear that the novel’s going well, it will be a famous one, born of suffering as the best are—but not too much pain—that’s fatal.

In New York, Shirley was deep in writing. She spent the weeks before leaving for Spain working frantically on The Evening of the Holiday, the first instalment of which had been scheduled for publication in The New Yorker the following month. At that stage it was still called “The Fountain”; it is possible that the change of title was a response to the report Shirley had read of Elena’s last days, the reading of the Leopardi poem that had struck her so tellingly when she’d first read it fifteen years earlier. Shirley was also enjoying the fact as well as the prospect of closer intimacy with Francis and reflecting on the abandoned visit to Rome: “I still feel slightly odd but less so than before; no doubt getting accustomed.” In requesting delay, he was perhaps setting out just the kind of complication—of sensibility, and seriousness—that her earlier relationships had lacked, suggesting grounds on which marriage might start to become thinkable.

The uncertainty continued after they returned to New York. “He leaves books, letters, a lock of hair, an Augustus John reproduction that looks like me—phone calls … He doesn’t know what he wants.” Shirley joined him in Connecticut on the first day of summer, they had lunch with his old high school teacher Catherine Wood, and slowly she began to reflect on the appeal of “the ambiguity of F,” having wondered earlier “if the depth, the wish for meaning is only in myself and wished on him in my mind.” She wrote often to Muriel, airing her frustration. “Sometimes he is v sweet and all goes well. Then he goes home and wonders whether he has committed himself to anything, and next time Acts Remote, though he is not much good at that. All very well but I’m getting tired of waiting round for the fcking Judgement of Paris; the Judgement of Shirlers is going to assert itself one of these days…” In mid-July he called at her apartment and they went walking “in the deserted UN garden and saw the espaliered pears … Perfect moment,” a scene she would recall each spring, over and over, through her life, looking back on this as the time “when we began to believe in marrying.” Through these months, Francis was selling some of the artworks he and Beatrice had bought: the Renoir oil, two Picasso etchings, and the Degas pastel (this last for $80,000; his dealer wrote, “it’s a wrench but think of all that pretty money invested in General Motors”). Muriel was convinced that Shirley would soon be “a married lady … and feel sure it will come to pass in the way that’s right for you both. You must hire a housekeeper the very first thing and have plenty of room in the house.” She also advised a more assertive demeanour: “Why don’t you swear at your lover? You’re too ladylike with him by half.” There was to be one last misstep—a wounded outburst from Shirley in early August, after which Francis sent a card, breaking things off once more.

Francis was at pains to explain his situation to her. Shirley summarised this later to Muriel:

A lot of remarks about not getting serious, I mustn’t think of this as love, etc. interspersed with displays of emotion, and passionate attention. I not knowing where I was in all this. Constant talk about wife, constant … Then … in tears, said he could not get used to difference in our ages (25 years); that he had had a Personality for a wife before and did not think he wanted it again … Didn’t really know what he wanted, future a great blank. He said he felt towards me as he felt when he was a child at school and someone offered him a prize: he went to pieces because he didn’t know how to handle it. That he had got into such a habit of calculating the future that he didn’t know how things would be if he didn’t work them out in advance.

In their arguments, she was distressed to find her behaviour echoing her mother’s:

Lean on sink, after days of feigning unawareness or of showing concern; think “I could always die.” Comes, is furious to find tears. We sit down, on floor and sofa. “I asked you if you would look after me” (Harshly). “I think this is one of those times when I need looking after.” (As though there were other times). Utter oblivion to comparable sentiments, requirements. Self-pity, lack of connection … His grief is sacred (But so is everyone’s.) Only true grief is loss of loved one by cancer. Nothing else weighs.—Oh what sorrows everyone experiences, even in their dark imaginings.

They were back in New York at the end of January, and Francis decided, “even after Fez and Meknes,” not to proceed with Delacroix. Shirley moved into Manhattan House and, as spring approached, sat through the day in the building’s elegant garden, working on her novel. In February she heard of the death of Archie Lyall, alone at a clinic in Zurich, and wrote a tribute for a memorial collection that Archie’s friend Patricia Clarke was putting together, one friendship leading to another; another Solaia connection expanding her world. Francis continued to see his analyst, to Shirley’s consternation. His diary in March records the single word “Pressure.” Shirley remained through her life hostile to psychoanalysis. She set down her thoughts on the subject in her notebook, singling out for rebuke its “lure of authority” and the fact that interpretations were “at expense sometimes of sense of humour or proportion.” Other criticisms were more particular:

Analysis, curiously, does not seem to enlarge subject’s tolerance for frailties of others. Encourages engrossing self-examination of own intricacies, allows subject to imagine these of singular interest to others but does not widen compassion or sense of general requirements. For example, F distressed because of guilt towards first wife due to greater pleasure with me. I, seeing him distressed, ask “Is it because you feel guilty?” Doesn’t feel able to contend, goes to psychiatrist. Back an hour later, much relieved: “It’s just because I feel guilty.” … Absorbed in own irrational distress; oblivious to effect on new wife of pronouncement of this kind combined with trip to psychiatrist one month after wedding.

When they travelled to Rome that spring of 1964, she found Francis introspective and self-absorbed. On May 30, recalling how she had the previous year so much imagined their “combined presence” there, she recorded her disappointment, her sense of prospects thwarted:

Borghese Gardens. Here I sit where I sat five years ago, in tutti sensi. Paradoxically, this city never seemed more beautiful, this morning with the slightly uncertain sun, light breeze—oh the trees are marvellous, not yet harmed by the summer. It is—God—some joke so stale, so predictable that it would hardly be worth playing on someone. The whole city cries out with life—pleasure, romance, serenity. This journey—how many years imagined—touches all the nerves, of memory, disappointment, of the worst kind. Touches, alas, that nerve full of tears, that particular hurt, so I sit here …

Within these circles the Steegmullers were distinctive figures. Alfred Kazin’s biographer wrote that Alfred and his then wife, Ann Birstein, had always found Francis charming, “a figure of intellectual grace out of a different era who had survived into ‘overheated New York,’ quietly coexisting with ‘Norman Mailer and other public declaimers who dominated the literary scene at the moment.’” Kazin noted in his journal that “the Steegmullers had this gift of turning their dinner guests into replicas of their social graces.” He was entranced, in the early years of their friendship at least, by Shirley’s social energy, and after one dinner he wrote in his diary of “the magic of Shirley the Hazzard. When will we learn from a woman like this—with her incredible gentleness, the light that fills where she is, that love is a form of intelligence—a way of listening to the world, of taking it in, of rising above one’s angry heart…” He later changed his tune, enraged by the Steegmullers’ withdrawal in the face of the terrible rows they witnessed between him and Ann during the acrimonious breakdown of their marriage, and hating what he called “F’s snubs and little faggy airs of distaste.” The writer Steven M. L. Aronson recalled meeting Shirley and Francis for the first time in 1969 at a small dinner hosted by the poet William Meredith at his sister’s Manhattan home. Also at dinner were Lionel and Diana Trilling, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter. It was a literary gathering at which, Aronson observed, the Steegmullers stood out, not because they were less famous than the others, although that was true. But where the other guests, even in conversation, were somehow “out to gain advantage” over each other, like “literary politicians,” the Steegmullers exemplified a “gentler sensibility,” content to let their work speak for itself. There was a combination of connectedness—mixing with the most exclusive literary circles of New York—and reserve, a detachment, even aloofness, a decision, or choice, not to belong, and this combination would come, over the years, to define their social lives.

Maxwell was, Edward Hirsch observed, “the most present of anyone I’ve ever known as a person. He immediately, if he liked you, started talking to you about your childhood. It sort of dismantled everything else. For me with him it was love at first sight. Friendship was immediate. When he spoke to you it was as if you were the only person.” Benjamin Taylor recalled, “With Bill Maxwell there was no small talk. You just sat down and started talking about books.” Shirley would have prized that complication of sensibility and comportment, that presence, and presence of mind, and presentness, and all the talking about books. She admired Maxwell’s writing, particularly The Folded Leaf, although she was less impressed by The Château, ironically enough the book Francis had helped with. In 1961, early in their friendship, Bill had presented her with a copy, inscribed, “For Shirley Hazzard, whose beautiful and firm beginning it has been my great pleasure to watch.” She wrote the following year to Rache Lovat Dickson that she found The Château “heavy going—it has rather an air of All Done By Hand, it is completely lacking in passion of any kind, or spiritual adventure; this may be a result of his having gone through a profound psychoanalysis between this and his previous books. At any rate, he is an extremely nice person, with a very delicate intuition.” The connection between Shirley and Bill over their longer friendship was intense. Alec Wilkinson described seeing the two of them together as “just sublime. Two gigantic sensibilities that were utterly enfolded with one another.” Maxwell and Francis were also close, but Shirley and Bill were “two people clearly capable of appreciating each other fully. To love each other without having any emotional or erotic complication to it. Just pure love. For the artist, for the character, for the person.” The friendship was a central force in Shirley’s mature life.