Dorothy, called Dot, and sometimes, with an aptness it would be heartless to acknowledge, Dottie, a mere fortnight dead, is already, this day in Venice, fading in his thought. Perhaps she had not been sufficiently present, when alive, for the memory of her to flourish properly after death. This he thinks is a strange conjecture. She was a large woman, tall, that is, but not at all heavy. He recalls his surprise, the first time he took her in his arms, the first time she submitted to being taken into his arms, at the lightness of her; it was as if all her long bones, of which she seemed to have more than the normal human quota, were hollow as reeds. He might have been embracing a tall delicate bird, at once graceful and ungainly, a heron, perhaps, or a cormorant. It strikes him how much she resembled his mother, they were the same type, lean, dark, driven. Why did he not realise this before now? She was secretive, was Dorothy, and led an endearingly furtive existence. The house where they lived for the five years of their marriage was not large yet she could somehow manage to disappear in it. A whole morning would pass without a sound from her, so that he would assume she had gone out, then suddenly, padding from his workroom to the kitchen or the lavatory, he would chance upon her lurking in a passage or a doorway or the dim recesses of a room. She would start and turn to him quickly, holding her hands behind her back and widening her already big eyes in a look of desperate innocence, like a naughty child caught in the act. When he was with her he had always the impression that she was listening beyond him for something in the house, some small telltale sound that would give her away. He wondered what she did all day long. She took up projects — gardening, carpentry, exotic cooking — but quickly tired of them. He could always tell when a pastime had palled, for she had a particular way of laying a thing down out of her hands, a cookery book, a pair of secateurs, a ball of wool pierced heraldically with two crossed knitting needles, and turning vaguely away, with a faint vague sigh, trailing her fingers along a chair-back or the edge of a window-sill. The thing would stay there, where she had left it, until by a mysterious process of temporal transformation its original identity would blur and it would become a mere object, a fixture, lifeless and inutile, and as often as not he would be the one who in the end would put it away, discreetly, without comment. She had the guardedly distracted air of holding back some large revelation, or terrible confession. In latter days she had grown increasingly remote, and he would catch her looking at him with a frowning surmise, as if she were trying to recall who exactly he was. He would say something and feel that he was calling out to her, more loudly than he had meant to, and the light of recognition would dawn in her face and she would smile her radiant helpless smile that seemed to start from a long way off and make its way to him over immense and difficult distances.
      The thought that torments him now — we are still in Venice forty years ago, the wound of her loss is still raw — is that he did not value her enough. He took her, as the saying is, for granted. He did not understand her and did not try to understand her. He was content, more than content, to have her as an enigma. He was proud for having taken her on, this big reserved woman whom others shied away from uneasily. She was the kind of wife he should have, a wife fit for a great man, the great-man-in-waiting he knew himself to be; he thought with satisfaction of the biographers, when in time they got to work on him, puzzling their heads over his choice of helpmeet. What he did not consider, what he did not bother to consider, is that she was an enigma only to him, not to herself. What for him was strangeness was for her the perfectly ordinary. The fact is, as he suddenly sees, she was just another human soul, a little more peculiar than the usual, perhaps, a little more tentative, a little more guarded, but essentially no different from all the others, including him. This failure on his part, this cavalier withholding of comprehension, acknowledgement, sympthy, is the source of the guilt that is now corroding him like acid. Is it that he did not love her? The earliest lesson he learned from his mother is that love is action — what you do, not what you feel — but now he wonders if it was a false lesson, if his mother was wrong in this, as she was in so many things. Perhaps to love truly is not to act but to understand? Putting this and other like questions to himself makes him shiver. He is not accustomed to doubt, and certainly not to self-doubt. He has no time for psychology — in the beginning was the deed! — and despises those who have. He sees now how vulnerable this leaves him, how ill-equipped for the unprotected place where suddenly he finds himself standing all alone in bewilderment, pain and rage.

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