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whether he is suggesting this as a name or expressing surprise at his mistress’s suggestion that a child of his might be a girl.
    How do you feel, my little one? he asks.
    In the mornings I don’t feel so fine, but it passes, and in the afternoon I feel quite hungry, and I don’t know why we are driving up and down the lake-side like this, it is so dismal, and I would like to eat some cakes. They make a special sort of cake here which my mother is always talking about, of almond paste.
    You know, I have never had a child, he says, and I was—how do you say it?—
rassegnato
.
    He tries to put his arms round her. She struggles.
    You are the mother of my child, he protests. It is not far from being a wife. If I could, I would make you my wife.
    It might seem that in such a situation this was an honourable response. Yet far from satisfying Laura, it infuriated her. He is turning her, transforming her at this moment, she feels, into his wife in Livorno—into his wife to whom he has always wanted to say ‘You are the mother of my child’, but has never had the opportunity. She, Laura, is now the mother of the child of the pater-familias. And just as she has been transformed, so too, she fears, has his wife in Livorno: Esther will now represent all that is seductive and free and not inexorable. For two months she has been peaceful and happy at the thought of her child. But to bear a child for a man, and to be condemned to bearing it for him irrespective of her will—she starts to sob.
    She allows herself to be comforted. Umberto is the cause of her distress, but he can alleviate it. Not by removing the cause—which is the fact of his being the father elect—but by temporarily surrounding her with his own physical presence so that her awareness of herself and her bitter destiny starts to dissolve, as the outlines of a gate dissolve in the dusk or the words of a letter become illegible in the gathering darkness of a room. In his arms she feels her interests receding, and her name, with the intonation it once had when she was a child, emerges from some remote repository inside her and surfaces everywhere through her childish, so easily irritated, skin.
    When she touches the straying, grey, mane-like hair brushed back above the ears of his massive head, it is with the amazed inquisitive touch of a child.
    When Laura was a small child she realized, through her own observation and by way of remarks made by her mother, that there were certain secret aspects of a woman’s body which might be prized above all others and which could equally well be more shameful than anything else in the world. As she grew up, she became convinced that in everything which related to these aspects she was peculiarly sensitive. She had only to be frightened (or so she believed) for her fear to bring on menstruation. If a man touched her in a certain way on her shoulder, she would feel a convulsionin her womb. Ordinary brassieres would chafe her nipples. She used to be ashamed of this sensitivity because it made her awkward and irritable. But she also used to be glad of it because she believed that one day she would be able to share her secret with a man who would become as infinitely curious about it as she was herself.

    At the hotel they have dinner served in their own suite. Laura is still tearful and Umberto tries to distract and entertain her with outlandish stories about the intrigues of Livorno. When the meal is over, he takes off his jacket, undoes his collar and tie and says:
    Come my little one with eyes green.
    She appears reluctant.
    If it is dangerous, my sweet, we will lie side by side and hold hands—no more—like children.
    She has never for one moment doubted that she wanted to have the child. The child will be hers like nothing else in her life has been. She has no dread of the scandal it may provoke because she has her own fortune and can live wherever she likes, and also because she believes that the individual will should