"She married," the girl said. "Married my father but she couldn't get away from her one. Do you understand? And Kyle took my father's role in his novel — the sympathetic boy from Glasgow — and told how the marriage foundered — ‘got fucked,' he says, ‘foundered' is my word — because of how she was trapped. I don't know if she told him directly or if he divined it but he uncovered her shame — that's how the Bible put it, isn't it — uncovered it to the world, and she couldn't live with that. She'd been emotionally fragile for a long time, but now she couldn't cope with life any more. How do you remember her?"

He couldn't say: "Only her arms and her sky-blue knickers" — and the decisive way she zipped up what he had hoped — hadn't he? — might be more than it was. 

Or that he hadn't thought of her in years, not till last night when that dark young beauty had smiled at him as she took his order and somehow, for no reason he could be sure of, jolted his memory.

"It was only one afternoon," he said and told her how she had asked directions outside the zoo — this itself a sudden stab of memory — and how he had gone with her to the American Express offices in Piazza di Spagna, and then after a glass of wine and chicken sandwiches and a granita and coffee in the Caffè Greco back to his room. 

"She was sweet," he said, "and I think she was happy."

It sounded to him as if he was excusing himself. She hadn't been a virgin, he remembered that, but she wasn't a tramp either, he was sure of that, a nice girl really.

"She was always sweet," the girl said, "but not often happy."

Which of us is? he almost said, but that would have been the lunatic in the privacy of his mind speaking.

There were always happy days, or at least moments in days. Curiously this was one. 

"Kyle makes him out to be a monster, my grandfather I mean. I never knew him, but I've read his diaries, which Kyle found in Lindy's desk when we cleared her apartment after she went into the Home. I don't think he abused her, physically I mean. But he couldn't let her go. Kyle decided different. I can't forgive him. Do you mind that I'm telling you this? Does it embarrass you?" she asked again.