Some things, real things, seem to happen not in the world itself but in die gap between actuality and the mind's apprehending; the eye registers the event but die understanding lags. For a moment all sat still, in startled silence. It was Montale who acted first. Without rising from his chair, and despite his bulk, he turned adroitly to the side and leaned forward, below die level of the table, humping his porpoise's big back, and we heard him saying something down there in a muffled tone to the stricken girl, something to which she did not reply. Kristina Kovacs was looking at me with a peculiar, still, and, I thought, sad expression the meaning of which eludes me even now. Franco Bartoli clamped his hands on the edge of the table and pressed down hard, as if he too had seen it turn into a tub of fouled and drowning waters that he thought might be in danger of capsizing. He said something, and then hopped up and hurried away to the kitchen, and reappeared a moment later bearing in his hand a glass of water. Behind him I glimpsed Maria the ancient cook hanging back in horror, clinging to the door jamb and peeping in on the disordered scene out of one unwilling eye. Signora Bartoli sat with her palms pressed to either side of her face, like that figure on the bridge in the Munch painting, producing not a scream, however, but a curious, distressed, chirping sound, like that which a hungry or a frightened fledgling might make. Now Montale, with much grunting, straightened up from under the table with Cass Cleave draped limply across his arms, her head turned a little toward his chest and her bare arms delicately drooping. Against the muted lamplight and the large, vague shadows of the room it was a pre-Raphaelite scene: the swooning girl in the embrace of the big, square, stern-faced man, and the rest of us arrayed in a semi-circle looking on, mute and grave, constrained, it seemed, in a sort of nerveless torpor. I made to rise, but Kristina Kovacs, still with that peculiar, sorrowing look, laid a hand on mine to stay me, and rose herself instead and followed after Montale, who in turn, with Cass Cleave in his arms, and walking with the delicate, slightly pigeon-toed step that is surprisingly common among large men, was following Franco Bartoli, still holding out before him in his hands the untouched and somehow sacral glass of water. And so they processed slowly from the room. As Montale leaned sideways to manoeuvre himself through the doorway he had to lift up Cass Cleave's legs and I was afforded a fleeting sight under her dress of the undersides of her long, glimmering thighs and at the top of them a taut triangle of white cotton, and the vile old beast in me stirred itself and lifted up its questing snout. Which is worse, I wonder, that I should be capable of arousal at such a moment, or that I should feel the necessity to record the fact here? Then they were gone through the door and I was left alone with the chirping woman and the old cook's single, disconcerting and, so it seemed, greedily ogling eye.
It was a long time, and very late, before they would allow me to see her. Why I should have accepted their authority over her I do not know. I kept to my place at the table for a while, moodily smoking and drinking the dregs of the wine bottles; I suppose I was not altogether sober. The cook silently withdrew into her lair, and with the others gone Signora Bartoli grew calm again, and sat sighing and murmuring to herself, trying to pick up invisible crumbs from the table with fumbling fingertips, in that way of the old, as I know, for lately I often catch myself doing the same thing. Presently, however, she began casting alarmed, sideways glances in my direction, in an increasingly agitated fashion, I suspect it was that as the minutes moved on she was progressively forgetting what had happened, and was wondering who this mistily familiar stranger might be, or how he had come to be here, alone with her, in her own dining room, from which, as the scattered place settings seemed to attest, another group of mysterious and unruly guests had lately and precipitately fled. Then Franco Bartoli came back, all pursed and accusingly silent – had Cass Cleave come round and spilled my secrets to him? – and sat down, keeping his eyes downcast and softly clearing his throat. The moments creaked past. He would not speak, and nor would I, so that a sort of wordless contest formed itself between us in which we were both determined to prevail. I watched him narrowly, and considered firing off a fresh salvo on the topic of the Eton Atheist and his poetical works, just for the hell of it; before I could touch taper to powder, however, Montale reappeared, in quietly masterful mode, although a little unsteady on his toes, for he too had been drinking unstintingly throughout the evening. He said that Cass Cleave was asleep and should not be disturbed – remarkable, how everyone becomes a physician on these occasions – and dealt me in his turn an accusing look. He stood for a moment in heavy silence, his hands braced on the back of a chair and his bullish shoulders bunched inside his straining jacket, glaring at a plate, as though he were struggling with the urge to come round to my side of the table and take me by the scruff and chuck me out into the night – he could probably have done it, too, for I admit I was not in full possession of my strength – but Bartoli spoke to him rapidly in Italian, saying something I did not catch, and after another moment of menacing hesitation he nodded grimly and let go his grip on the chair, and, with a bow to Bartoli's mother and a parting glare at me, turned and trundled off. The silence returned. Bartoli began clearing his throat again, annoyingly. Maria the cook came in and crept around the table, stealthily gathering the dishes, giving me a wide berth. I stood up, making as much commotion as possible, and stumped out of the room, going I knew not where.