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a job on the spot. Instead, she picked up the gold-and-white telephone and rang her mother to find out the name of the governesses’ agency she had used. Then she wrote, on beautiful cream-colored letterhead, a character reference stating that Louisa was known to her personally; she could vouch for her good character, as well as her exquisite German and French. She blotted it and put it into an embossed envelope. For a moment it almost seemed as though she might invite Louisa to stay for coffee, as though they would even become friends, but of course that didn’t happen. Louisa never saw her again, though Mrs. Grenvillestood as she was leaving and kissed her impulsively on the cheek, wishing her luck.
    Two weeks later, just when the money from the jewelry had run out—she had one pair of stockings left, and had to choose between bus fare and breakfast—the woman at the agency sent her to a tall whitewashed house in South Kensington, where she was hired on the spot to teach a precocious, lame little boy not strong enough to go to boarding school. She never became as fond of him as she had hoped—he mocked her accent and was skeptical about her grasp of geometry—but she had no trouble feeling romantic about his parents. His mother looked like a nun, always dressed in gray, with her dark hair pulled back into a chignon and her pale forehead always slightly puckered with the weight of conscience. She was the daughter of a rich industrialist in the Midlands who had converted to Catholicism after his wife’s death and given away a large part of his fortune. Now she was writing his biography, with the help of a Jesuit priest. Her husband too seemed burdened with some undisclosed worry; he was a Balkans expert at the Foreign Office, and seemed to understand better than most why Louisa could not return to Germany. Occasionally he even sought her out to discuss the situation there. She reported what the refugees had told her, and what her father had written about the massive rearmament going on. It was plain, Franz said, that sooner or later Germany would be going to war. When Louisa repeated this to her employer, he nodded grimly. She hoped, though she did not place much faith in it, that maybe he was taking the news back to the Foreign Office.
    But most of her fears were about Julian. She no longer asked herself what she felt for him, or didn’t feel; it only mattered that he should feel something for her, that she shouldnot lose him entirely. More and more, she was nervous and clumsy around him, which made him irritable with her, and then she grew clumsier still. There always seemed to be a bit of food dangling from her mouth, or a sneeze coming on, at the very moment he glanced over at her.
    She tried harder than ever to be entertaining, she even told funny stories she had read in books, pretending such things had happened to her, but her voice sounded false and strained, and anyway he wasn’t willing to be charmed. It had been three weeks since they’d gone back to his aunt’s house. Even his friends at the pub no longer addressed her so often; sometimes whole evenings passed when all she could do was to laugh appreciatively, from the sidelines, at their jokes.
    With the warmer weather, they had moved from their table by the fire into the back garden, where rickety tables were set up under the trees and the air was scented with the wisteria growing up the wall. People brought their dogs, Labradors and chows and Pekingese who wandered panting from one group to another, to beg for scraps. The sky was a fresher blue, surely, than it had ever been in Nuremberg.
    Sometimes people at the other tables would call to Julian by name; jokes would be exchanged about the Test match or the scandalous behavior of a politician’s wife, but he never introduced her to them. After smiling at him in vain, then at her hands, then at whatever dog was closest, she would stand and announce that she was going. He stood, as the others did, to