Those first words were “Thank you”, spoken in so frank and natural a tone that they dispersed the dark clouds of ill humour hanging over him and went to his heart as he heard them. “Thank you very much, doctor,” she said, cordially offering him her hand, “for accepting my husband’s invitation in the end. I hope I shall soon be able to show you how extremely grateful to you I myself am. It may not have been easy for you; a man doesn’t readily give up his freedom, but perhaps it will reassure you to know that you have placed two people deeply in your debt. For my part, I will do all I can to make you feel that this house is your home.”

Something inside him pricked up its ears. How did she know that he had been unwilling to give up his freedom, how was it that her first words went straight to the festering, scarred, sensitive part of his nature, straight to the seat of his nervous terror of losing his independence to become only a hired servant, living here on sufferance? How had she managed to brush all such thoughts of his aside with that first gesture of her hand? Instinctively he looked up at her, and only now was he aware of a warm, sympathetic glance confidently waiting for him to return it.

There was something serenely gentle, reassuring, cheerfully confident about that face. Her pure brow, still youthfully smooth, radiated clarity, and above it the demurely matronly style in which she parted her hair seemed almost too old for her. Her hair itself was a dark mass falling in deep waves, while the dress around her shapely shoulders and coming up to her throat was also dark, making the calm light in her face seem all the brighter. She resembled a bourgeois Madonna, a little like a nun in her high-necked dress, and there was a maternal kindness in all her movements. Now she gracefully came a step closer, her smile anticipating the thanks on his own faltering lips. “Just one request, my first, and at our first meeting, too. I know that when people who haven’t been acquainted for very long are living in the same house, that’s always a problem, and there’s only one way of dealing with it—honesty. So please, if you feel ill at ease here in any way, if any kind of situation or arrangement troubles you, do tell me about it freely. You are my husband’s private secretary, I am his wife, we are linked by that double duty, so please let us be honest with one another.”

He took her hand, and the pact was sealed. From that first moment he felt at home in the house. The magnificence of the rooms was no longer a hostile threat to him, indeed on the contrary, he immediately saw it as the essential setting for the elegant distinction that, in this house, muted and made harmonious all that seemed inimical, confused and contradictory outside it. But only gradually did he come to realize how exquisite artistic taste made mere financial value subject to a higher order here, and how that muted rhythm of existence was instinctively becoming part of his own life and his own conversation. He felt curiously reassured—all keen, vehement, passionate emotions became devoid of malice and edginess. It was as if the deep carpets, the tapestries on the walls, the coloured shutters absorbed the brightness and noise of the street, and at the same time he felt that this sense of order did not arise spontaneously, but derived from the presence of the quietly spoken woman whose smile was always so kindly. And the following weeks and months made him pleasantly aware of what he had felt, as if by magic, in those first minutes. With a fine sense of tact, she gradually and without making him feel any compulsion drew him into the inner life of this house. Sheltered but not guarded, he sensed attentive sympathy bent on him as if at a distance; any little wishes of his were granted almost as soon as he had expressed them, and granted so discreetly, as if by household elves, that they made explicit thanks impossible. When he had been leafing through a portfolio of valuable engravings one evening and particularly admired one of them—it happened to be Rembrandt’s Faust—he found a framed reproduction hanging over his desk two days later. If he mentioned that a friend had recommended a certain book, there would be a copy on his bookshelves next day. His room was adapting, as if unconsciously, to his wishes and habits; often he did not notice exactly what details had changed at first, but just felt that the place was more comfortable, warmer, brighter, until he realized, say, that the embroidered Oriental coverlet he had admired in a shop window was covering the ottoman, or the light now shone through a raspberry-coloured silk shade. He liked the atmosphere here better and better for its own sake, and was quite unwilling to leave the house, where he had also become a close friend of a boy of eleven, and greatly enjoyed accompanying him and his mother to the theatre or to concerts. Without his realizing it, all that he did outside his working hours was bathed in the mild moonlight of her calm presence.

From that first meeting he had loved this woman, but passionately as his feelings surged over him, following him even into his dreams, the crucial factor that would shake him to the core was still lacking—his conscious realization that what, denying his true feelings, he still called admiration, respect and devotion was in fact love—a burning, unbounded, absolute and passionate love. Some kind of servile instinct in him forcibly suppressed that realization; she seemed so distant, too far away, too high above him, a radiant woman surrounded by a circle of stars, armoured by her wealth and by all that he had ever known of women before. It would have seemed blasphemous to think of her as a sexual being, subject to the same laws of the blood as the few other women who had come his way during his youth spent in servitude: the maidservant at the manor house who, just once, had opened her bedroom door to the tutor, curious to see if a man who had studied at university did it the same way as the coachman and the farm labourer; the seamstress he had met in the dim light of the street lamps on his way home. No, this was different.