Old Acquaintance by David Stacton

sometimes responsibilities lie in wait to assume us, rather than we them, and of that she had always been afraid. She had known Unne off and on now for a year. A year with anybody else would have exhausted her patience, which was to say, her curiosity. But Unne was self-contained. She had seen what was behind all that decorum only once.
    A diplomat’s daughter learns tact, but has no home. Shehas at best only a temporary foothold in permanence, when the tour of duty is a long one. She learns she has no part in other people’s lives. Now she was going away from everyone she had pretended, for the past two years, she had known all her life. It was at that farewell party that Lotte had acquired her.
    Unne was upset. Her only security was to live in a world in which nothing is ever moved, and the people we see today are the people we will always see. Hence that calm. In herself she carried the stability she needed and could find nowhere else. The world is empty. It is a lovely garden we may visit only during visiting hours, when the owners are away. Unne knew that at fifteen, and was capable of being resigned to it at twenty. At forty she might even enjoy it. But not at twenty-three.
    Lotte had found her seated alone, halfway up the back service stairs, with her head in her arms, pretending not to cry. They had toasted her away, and unable to bear it, she had smiled with pleasure and then hidden here.
    “Isn’t there anything more to the world than a dinner party?” she asked.
    It was useless to tell her that for well-conducted people the world is a dinner party, and nothing else.
    “Isn’t there anything, anywhere?”
    Lotte was compassionate. There are some people to whom the best way to be kind is not to lie. They are the people like ourselves, who do not mind being told the truth, because what we believe the truth to be is what they believe it to be.
    “No,” she said.
    Unne leaned against her. “I want to touch someone,” she said. “I want to feel warm.”
    Lotte was powerless to help. Such things made her uneasy.She was the wrong sex. What Unne needed was the cool heat of a vast difference between the sexes, and more affection than sensation. But why say so?
    Instead she said, “Why not come to Paris with me?”
    In the beginning she had been grateful for the company. There are times when a light in one’s own house comes to look as lonely and as exclusive as the lights in other people’s houses, whom we do not know either, as we walk by. But it is rather depressing, also, to see a pale carbon of yourself when young. Yet she was glad Unne was back.

XI
    T HE next day they were locked up in their rooms, at least until the festival began, for a storm had blown up during the night. The rain on the terrace had the angry, desultory sound of men peeing against a wall. It was full of small beer, and besides, might give birth at any moment to Orion, for rain is an emotional conductor.
    Paul was in his bedroom reading a book Charlie had not written. Charlie was in the living room toying with the remains of a stale croissant and trying to write a book which Paul would not read. Nor would he read it himself. He did not write the sort of book he liked to read. His own favorite reading consisted of memoirs, gossip, history, and cheap thrillers, the bloodier the better. His books were about what happened to people he could no longer remember or had never known.
    He was a one-book author. Having written it, he sensibly did not try to write it again, but instead wrote other books.As a matter of fact, he did not know how he had written it, though it was reputed good.
    “I may not live up to my promise,” he told Lotte once, “but at least I succeeded in living it down.”
    He had a wonderful freedom, for the books he wrote now had made him rich, whereas that one good book, halfway good book anyhow, had preserved his reputation. When he and Lotte were young, they had neither of them expected this life they lived now. At