Tell him that I’m in the bath and that he should call me in five minutes.”

She held her breath and listened with her ear cocked towards the next room so that she could also catch the voice coming from the receiver. She heard it vibrating metallically, as far away as though it came from a minuscule gramophone record.

“Hello. Is that 2-65-80? Are you sure it’s not a wrong number?”

“No, sir. It’s not a wrong number.”

“Then who’s speaking?” the little metallic voice asked.

“Miss Nora asks that you ...”

“I’m not interested in what Miss Nora asks. I want to know who’s speaking.”

“Sir, Miss Nora is in the bath and she asks you ...”

“I don’t want to know where Miss Nora is. I want to know who you are, buddy.”

A moment’s silence followed, then a brief noise, cut off as the receiver dropped into the cradle somewhere far away, breaking the connection.

“Now what ...?” he asked Nora, with a calmness that suggested that the strange conversation hadn’t bothered him.

“Nothing. Go back to your spot in the armchair and wait for me. I’ll be there in a second.”

Nora came in dressed in a white bathrobe that was a little too big for her.

She made straight for his armchair, switched on the small, shaded lamp on the the nearby sofa and slid it close to him, abruptly illumining his face.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I want to see you. Imagine that, I’d forgotten what you looked like. The whole time I was in the bath I was racking my brains trying to remember.”

She scrutinized him with great seriousness while he calmly put up with her scrutiny.

“Have you finished?”

“Yes, for the time being. Your face isn’t strongly defined. Difficult to remember.”

He lifted his shoulders. She recognized the gesture.

“I don’t like that lifting of your shoulders.”

He didn’t reply, while she watched him at greater length, tracing his vaguely outlined features, in which she discerned a blend of fatigue and boyishness.

“You’re a murky kind of guy. I bet you came out of the fog.”

On the sofa were the two bottles purchased at the pharmacy. Nora took them and went to the side of the night table in order to dress her “wounds,” as she called them, exaggerating to make a joke.

She pulled aside the bathrobe with a considered modesty and unveiled her right leg up to the knee, only as far as was necessary to put on the bandages. Properly speaking, she wasn’t wounded. They were more like scratches, although very bad ones, since even after her steaming hot bath they were still bleeding slightly.

He followed the operation from the armchair, waiting as if to hear her cry when she pressed the iodine-soaked swab against her bleeding ankle. But her gestures had the polite, objective quality of those of a nurse bending over an unfamiliar patient. Her black hair fell over her forehead in a gesture absent of flirtatiousness.

She continued for some time to run the cotton swab over her ankle, then over her knee, completely absorbed in what she was doing. Finally she interrupted her movements as though she had just remembered a forgotten matter of business. “You weren’t bothered by that phone call just now?”

“No.”

“Just as well. I’m ... I’m used to it.”

She took up again her delicate operation, cleaning with oxygenated water then with the iodine tincture a small cut she had not noticed until now.

“Yes, I’m used to it. To that and to other things. Look, Grig ... You’d have to meet him.”

“Isn’t he coming here this evening?”

“He was supposed to ... But now he won’t be coming. Not this evening and not many other evenings ...”

“I’m sorry, believe me.”

“I’m not. I swear I’m not.”

“Do you love him?”

Nora sensed an ironic undertone in his question.