While vacationing with his family in Barbados after the Second World War -- his first visit home since the war years cut off travel -- Neville learned from his brother that no passage back to New York was available until September, though he wanted to return by the first of May. Near the end of March he watched a New York-bound ship leave the bay, and that same afternoon, in an easy chair in his hotel room, he vividly rehearsed in imagination every step of boarding it: the tender out to the ship, the gangplank, the smell of the sea -- trusting that his inner enactment would compel the outer world to match it.