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Elisabeth be more delighted by anything than to be caught in a screaming, hilarious rundown between Birgitta and myself?—and they teach me brännboll, bits and pieces of fly-catcher-up and stickball, which combine into a game they played in Stockholm as schoolchildren. When it rains we play cards together, gin or canasta. The old king, Gustav V, was a passionate gin-rummy player, I am told, as are Birgitta’s mother and father and brother and sister. Elisabeth, whose circle of Gymnasium friends had apparently idled away hundreds of afternoons at canasta, picks up gin rummy after just half an hour of watching a few games between Birgitta and me. She is captivated by the patter I deliver during the game, and takes immediately to using it herself—as did I at eight or so, back when I learned it all at the feet of Klotzer the Soda Water King (said by my mother to be the heaviest guest in Hungarian Royale history—when Mr. Klotzer lowered his behind onto our wicker, she had sometimes to cover her eyes—and a marathon monologuist and sufferer at the card table). Says Elisabeth, sadly arranging and rearranging the cards that Birgitta has dealt her, “I got a hand like a foot,” and when she lays down her melds in triumph, it pleases her no end—it pleases me no end—to hear her ask of her opponent, “What’s the name of the game, Sport?” Oh, and when she calls the wild card in canasta the “yoker”—well, that just slays me. How on earth can she be going to pieces? I’m not! And what about our serious and maddening discussions of World War II, during which I try to explain—and not always in a soft voice either—to explain to these two self-righteous neutralists just what was going on in Europe when we were all growing up? Isn’t it Elisabeth who is in fact more vehement (and innocently simple-minded) than Birgitta, who insists, even when I practically threaten to slap some sense into her, that the war was “everybody’s fault”? How then can I tell that she is not only going to pieces but also thinking from morning to night about how to do herself in?
    After the “accident”—so we describe in the telegram to her parents the broken arm and the mild concussion Elisabeth sustains by walking in front of a truck sixteen days after I move from Tooting Bec into the girls’ basement—I continue to hang my tweed jacket in her closet and to sleep, or to try to, in her bed. And I actually believe that I am staying on there because in my state of shock I am simply unable to move out as yet. Night after night, under Birgitta’s nose, I write letters to Stockholm in which I set out to explain myself to Elisabeth; rather, I sit down at my typewriter to begin the paper I must soon deliver in my Icelandic Saga tutorial on the decline of skaldic poetry through the overuse of the kenning, and wind up telling Elisabeth that I had not realized she was trying only to please me, but altogether innocently—“altogether unforgivably”—had believed that, like Birgitta and like myself, she had been pleasing herself first of all. Again and again—on the Underground, in the pub, during a lecture—I take her very first letter, written from her bedroom the day she had arrived back home, and un-crumple it to reread those primary-school sentences that have the Sacco and Vanzetti effect every time—what an idiot I have been, how callous, how blind! “Älskade David!” she begins, and then, in her English, goes on to explain that she had fallen in love with me, not with Gittan, and had gone to bed with the two of us only because I wanted her to and she would have done anything I wanted her to do … and, she adds in the tiniest script, she is afraid she would again if she were to return to London—
    I am not a strong girl as Gittan. I am just a weak one Bettan, and I can’t do anything about it. It