She could not turn back. It was no longer for the movie’s sake, or for the sake of any rational need. She surrendered, as to a long-resisted vice. With shame and with a trembling foreboding that there must be bitter consequences to so unseemly an act, yet with a maenad’s reckless pleasure in the very enormity of the risk, she placed a microphone behind the headboard of the bed in their best guest room. His father’s mistress, Mrs. Reade, was expected to be visiting Worry soon. She was also a friend of long-standing, and the wife of the director of an Iowa insurance company in which Grandison held a controlling interest. Surely in these circumstances her father would reveal something.

Her father did not go to Mrs. Reade’s room till late in the evening, and Boadicea had to sit in the sweaty embrace of her earphones, listening to the interminable sound track of Toora-Loora Turandot, a weary old Irish musical that Mrs. Reade had taken upstairs from the library. The minutes crept by, and the music poked along, and then at last Grandison knocked, and could be heard to enter, and to say: “Enough is enough, Bobo, and this, surely, is too much.”

“Darling?” said the voice of Mrs. Reade.

“A moment, my love. I have one thing more to say to my daughter, who is eavesdropping on us at this moment, while pretending to study her French. You are to be finished, Bobo. In Switzerland, at a very highly recommended finishing school in Vilars. I’ve already informed the principal at Amesville that you’ll be going abroad. To learn, I sincerely hope, better manners than you’ve shown evidence of these last few months. You’re to leave at six in the morning, so let me say now, by way of parting, shame on you, Bobo, and bon voyage!”

“Good-bye, Miss Whiting,” said Mrs. Reade. “When you’re in Switzerland you must look up my niece Patricia. I’ll send you her address.” At that point the microphone was disconnected.

All during the drive from Des Moines — and they were now, a sign announced, only twenty-two miles from Amesville — Boadicea had been too upset to talk. She hadn’t meant to be rude to Carl Mueller, though it must have seemed like rudeness. It was anger, raw white anger that would return in surges of never-diminishing intensity and then, for a while, recede, leaving behind, like the wastes of oil and tar on a seaport’s beach, the blackest of black depressions, a horror-stricken sorrow during which she would be assaulted by images of violent self-immolation — of the Saab crashing into a power pylon and bursting into flames, of opened veins, shotgun blasts, and other spectacular annihilations, images she rather entertained than resisted, since to have such monstrous thoughts was in itself a kind of revenge. And then, suddenly irresistibly, the anger would return, so that she would have to press her eyes closed and clench her fists to keep from being overcome.

Yet she knew all the while that such transports were ridiculous and uncalled-for and that she was, in some sense, indulging herself. Her father, in sending Carl Mueller to the airport, had meant no slight, still less a chastisement. He had planned to come for her himself, his note had said, until this very morning when a business crisis had required him to go to Chicago. Similar crises had brought similar disappointments before, though never so passionate nor so unremitting as this. She really must calm down. If she returned to Worry in this state, she was certain to betray herself before Serjeant or Alethea. Just the thought of them, the mention of their names in her mind, could start her off again. Two years she’d been away, and they had sent a stranger to welcome her home. It was not to be believed, it could never be forgiven.

“Carl?”

“Miss Whiting?” He did not take his eyes from the road.

“I expect you’ll think this is silly, but I wonder if you could take me anywhere else but to Worry. The nearer we get, and we’re so near now, the more unable I feel to cope.”

“I’ll go where you like, Miss Whiting, but there aren’t all that many places to go.”

“A restaurant, somewhere away from Amesville? You haven’t had dinner, have you?”

“No, Miss Whiting. But your folks will be expecting you.”

“My father’s in Chicago, and as to my brother and sister, I doubt that either of them has gone to any personal expense of energy on account of my arrival. I’ll simply phone and say that I stopped in Des Moines to do some shopping — it’s what Alethea would do — and that I’m not equal to driving on to Amesville till I’ve had dinner. Do you mind?”

“Whatever you say, Miss Whiting. I could do with a bite to eat, I guess.”

She studied his blunt profile in silence, marvelling at his impassivity, the quiet fixity of his driving, which could not, on these monotonous roads, require such unwavering attention.

As they were approaching a cloverleaf, he slowed, and asked, still without looking at her, “Somewhere quiet? There’s a pretty good Vietnamese restaurant over in Bewley. At least, that’s what they say.”

“I think, actually, I’d prefer somewhere noisy. And a steak. I’m starved for the taste of rare midwestern beef.”

He did, then, turn to look at her. His cheek dimpled with the inception of a smile, but whether it was a friendly smile, or only ironic, she couldn’t tell, for his sunglasses masked his eyes. In any case, they were not, she would have supposed, especially candid eyes.

“Aren’t there places people go,” she insisted, “up by the border? Especially on Saturday nights. This is Saturday night.”

“You’d need ID,” he said.

She took out a plastic packet of cards and handed them to Carl Mueller. There was a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a Reader’s Digest Subscription Library card, an Iowa Women’s Defense League Registration card, a card declaring her to be a tithing member of the Holy Blood Pentecostal Mission Church (with a laminated photo), and assorted charge cards, all of them identifying her as Beverley Whittaker, age 22, of 512 Willow Street, Mason City, Iowa.

The Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse combined wholesomeness and elegance in a manner archetypally midwestern. Under a glowing greenhouse ceiling lattices of pipes supported an aerial meadow of herbs and houseplants in hanging pots and tiers of terracotta planters. Beneath the greenery a great many antique kitchen tables of oak and pine (all tagged for sale, as were the plants) were grouped about an implausibly large dance floor. It really had been, long ago, a roller rink. Two couples were out on the floor dancing, with lively unspectacular competence, to the Chocolate Doughnut Polka. It was only seven o’clock: everyone else was eating dinner.

The food was wonderful. Boadicea had explained the exact nature of its superiority to anything they might have eaten in Switzerland, had explained it into the ground. Now, with dessert still to be chosen, she had to think of something else for them to talk about, since Carl seemed perfectly prepared to sit there and say nothing. Even with his sunglasses off, his face was unreadable, though handsome enough, considered simple as sculpture: the broad brow and blunt nose, the massive muscles of the neck tapering into the simple geometries of his crew cut, the emphatic carving of the lips, nostrils, and eyes, which yet, for all their distinctness, yielded no meanings of a psychological order. If he smiled, it was that mechanical sort of smile that suggested gears and pulleys. Clank, screek, snik, and then a little card emerges from the metal slot with the word SMILE on it. Sitting there, facing him across the little spray of bachelor buttons and petunias, she tried it herself — tightening the corner of her lips, and lifting them, notch by notch. But then, before he’d noticed, the pendulum swung back and she felt the sting of guilt. What right had she to expect Carl Mueller to be forthcoming with her? She was nothing to him but the boss’s daughter, and she’d taken every mean advantage of that position, commandeering his company as though he had no life or feelings of his own. And then blaming him!