Marin Dronţu is right: white doesn’t suit her. She’s incredibly blonde – the white-blonde of corn straw. Light colours make her inexpressive. In the sun her eyes, which are green, turn violet, her cheeks lose the contour which usually shadows them towards the corners of her lips and the line of her neck no longer reveals that fine familiar curve.

I watched her for a long time as she went away, jumping carelessly from one stone to another, between rubble and plaster.

I’ve often wondered what kind of a life Marjorie Dunton leads. She doesn’t love her husband, and he doesn’t love her. This at least is clear between them. They have common interests which make their partnership pleasant: music, skiing, swimming. They also have their individual preferences. He likes bridge and she likes novels.

Enough for a marriage between two such intelligent people. Still, I find it hard to believe you can get by on so little. At least Phill has the refinery laboratory, where he can continue his work and perform experiments. But what has Marjorie got?

Young Dogany suffers in vain. I don’t think Marjorie will ever love him. I don’t think she’ll ever love anyone. I say that with a certain sadness, but a certain pleasure too, as I wonder if I wouldn’t suffer knowing her to be in someone else’s arms. I can’t explain it, because I’ve never expected anything beyond the fact that we get on well together.

Three years ago, when the Duntons came here, Marjorie intimidated me. I was afraid of what might happen. I had so much work to do, and God knows I didn’t need romantic complications. Things resolved themselves naturally. Marjorie is excellent company.

Back then we were reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I remember speaking animatedly about the book, about its passion, about the hallucinatory poetry of its heroes. She knew the book, but didn’t like it.

‘I don’t like overwrought books,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested in the Brontë sisters, I recommend Charlotte. She’s simpler, “homelier”, calmer.’

She lent me Shirley, Charlotte Brontë’s novel, which I loved straight away, on first reading. It was relaxing, clear, with a certain juvenile naivety, through which I tried to see Marjorie Dunton. I congratulated her on her discrimination, which later I saw reconfirmed many times in literature and music.

I asked her once if she’d ever thought of writing. She laughed. ‘What a notion!’ Still, when I get a letter from her in Bucharest in winter, I’m amazed at the liveliness with which she imbues little happenings, the images she evokes, how she can lightly, negligently, drop a confession between the lines.

*

I’d been working all day and, tired as I was, hadn’t expected I’d stay so late at the Nicholsons’. These people have managed to create here, in Prahova, in Uioara, real society life.

It’s probably their national character. At first their insistence on keeping up society manners here in the back of beyond struck me as somehow comic.