Countess de Montevesso

Cosmo knew her only as a fair head hovering near his father's armchair, one of the two girls glimpsed in the Park during school holidays, and he cannot picture her grown, married for years, the daughter of an ambassador. She remembers his home and his parents far better than he does, having lived at Latham Hall for three years while he was away at intervals. She matters because her return into Cosmo's life is the hinge on which the novel's Genoese present opens onto its buried past, and because the gap between the child he recalls and the woman he is about to meet is itself the story's central question.