He burnt the edge of his mother’s sunshade at the gas-mantle, and felt the tears running down his cheeks and dropping onto his pyjama collar.

Even in the first moment of his guilt and shame, he rememberered to put out his tongue and taste the track of the tears. Still crying, he said, “It’s salt. It’s very salt. Just like in my poems.”

He went upstairs in the dark, with the candle shaking, past the box-room to his own room, and locked the door on the inside. He put out his hands and touched the walls and his bed. Good morning and goodbye, Mrs. Baxter. His window, facing her bedroom, was open to the windless, starless early morning, but he could not hear her breathe or sleep. All the houses were quiet. The street was a close grave. The Rossers and the Proberts and the Bennets were still and safe and deep in their separate silences. His head touched the pillow, but he knew that he could not sleep again. His eyes closed.

Come down into my arms, for I shan’t sleep, girls asleep on all sides in the attics and spare rooms of the square, red houses with the bay windows looking out on the trees behind the railings. I know your rooms like the backs of my hands, like the backs of your heads in the pictures when you are leaning over onto the next-door shoulders. I shan’t sleep again. Tomorrow, today, I am going away by the 7:15 train, with ten pounds and a new suitcase. Lay your curling-pins on my pillow, the alarm at six-thirty will hurry you back to draw the blinds and light the fires before the rest come down. Come down quickly, the Bennets’ house is melting. I can hear you breathe, I can hear Mrs. Baxter turn in a dream. Oh, the milkmen are waking!

He was asleep with his hat on still, and his hands clenched.

2

The family awoke before six o’clock. He heard them, from a sunken half-sleep, bothering on the landing. They would be in dressing gowns, stale-eyed and with ragged hair. Peggy might have put two blushes on her cheeks. The family rushed in and out of the bathroom, never stopping to wash, and collided on the narrow top of the stairs as they nagged and bustled to get him ready. He let himself sink deeper until the waves broke round his head again, and the lights of a city spun and shone through the eyes of women walking in his last remembered dream. From the lapping distance he heard his father shout like a man on the opposite shore:

“Have you put the sponge bag in, Hilda?”

“Of course I have,” she answered from the kitchen.

Don’t let her look in the china-pantry. Samuel prayed among the women walking like lampposts. She never uses the best china for breakfast.

“All right, all right, I just asked.”

“Where’s his new hairbrush?”