Triumphantly Caroline lifted her finger from the fine italic type. There was nothing to mar the success of this afternoon. Not only had she taken the car out alone for the first time, driving unerringly on the right-hand side of the road, but what she had achieved was not a simple drive but a cultural excursion. […] how gratifying if she could, at last, have something of her own to contribute to [Neville’s] constantly accumulating hoard of culture.
Though she could not have admitted it even to herself, Caroline had become almost anaesthetized to Italian art. Dutifully she had followed Neville along the gallery, listening politely while in his light well-bred voice he had told her intimate anecdotes of history, and involuntarily she had let her eyes wander around the room, glancing anywhere but at the particular portrait of Neville’s immediate dissertation.
Ah, I’m glad you picked that one out. It’s generally thought to be the best thing in the collection—a Bronzino, of course.
Caroline shivered, ‘I don’t like him,’ she said. ‘Let’s look at Giovanna again,’ and they had moved back to the first portrait, and Neville had said casually, ‘Do you know, she’s rather like you.’
Caroline knew that she wanted to take the fork to the left, to Florence and home and Neville and—said an urgent voice inside her—for safety.
‘It would be so silly to give up,’ she told herself, desperately trying to rationalize what drove her on. ‘Just because one’s afraid—’ and then she had to stifle that thought too, and there was nothing left in her brain but the steadily mounting tally of steps.
‘But how idiotic,’ she said to the air. ‘The whole thing’s absolutely pointless[.]’
All her being was suddenly absorbed in the single impulse to hurl herself from the sloping platform. ‘I cannot go down any other way,’ she said, and then she heard what she said and stepped back, frenziedly clutching the soft rotten wood of the doorway with hands sodden with sweat. There is no other way, said the voice in her brain, there is no other way.
She could not move. It was not possible that she should dare to go down, step by step down the unprotected stairs into the dark below. It would be much easier to fall, said the voice in her head, to take one step to the left and fall and it would all be over. You cannot climb down.
So Caroline came down the dark tower. She could not think. She could know nothing but fear. Only her brain remorselessly recorded the tally. ‘Five hundred and one,’ it counted, ‘five hundred and two—and three and four—'
