I’m glad, Maynard, she said.

Handing over the keys, so to speak. It was official. He made it so.

I knew you would be, he said. I’ll write.

It struck coldly, not the parting, it was not a parting, it was the act of disposal.

You’re pale, darling, Mother said.

It made you turn your face.

I need exercise, she said. I’ll have to start walking some of the way in the morning.

She wanted to be left alone. Making events, they are your very own, also the consequence, whether the bitter abstraction of your own subsequent regrets, or the even more relentless concrete kind. Because Eden Standish found that she was pregnant.

It was one of those things that didn’t, couldn’t happen to yourself, she said, over against the evidence. Sitting at the window in Regent’s Park or walking through the streets towards Victoria, her mind remained fixed to this, like the falling body to its parachute, though without the promise of ultimate salvation, there was no land. I’ve got to, I’ve got to, she said. After the first numbness she lived on half-formed, half-directed phrases. She sat holding her hands, she sat very close to the predominating misery. Sometimes she wished that her age, that recent events, would slip away from her in a moment of temporal dissolution, and that she could creep like a child under an eiderdown of sleep. But without this dispensation, she remained herself, avoiding eyes, the sudden footstep, or a voice, that intruded on her physical condition.

You shall take me to a concert, said Mrs Standish. I expect it will do you good.

As if, as if. It made you turn quickly.

Why? said Eden.

In front of your face you hung the defensive gauze of faintly irritable inquiry.

Because I think you’re moping, said Mrs Standish, trying to look wise.

As if I should have a reason to mope, said Eden.

But her pulse went slower, relieved.

Alone or in crowds, you could hide, it was the half-way combination that made you start, wonder, the tête-à-tête, or the few friends. Listening to music Eden envied her mother, the immense satisfaction of the face, the half-closed eyes, whether this satisfaction were sincere, springing from the music itself, or merely from being in the right milieu. But her mother, bogus or not, sat in the firm protection of her own established envelope. Succinct, satisfied, proof against any physical or emotional disturbance, except perhaps disease or middle age.

They were playing Brahms. I am listening, I must listen to a Brahms concerto, Eden felt. She fastened on her hands, must give to music a structure, because this is the only way to listen, avoiding the backwaters of your own mind. It rose in waves, the Brahms concerto, blown beneath the carpet, the heavy, dusty waves, as if it were pinned down round the edges of the room, as if your hands could not stretch out to rescue a phrase from the heavy folds of its own just frustrated passion. More often than not, music moved like this. There was very little freedom. Except in the motion of a breast, Mother’s, moving on its own wave of personal retrospect.