Elyot will be home, remembered Mrs Standish. Elyot, for good. For what? Her foot tapped. But home. She smiled. She must remind Julia to air the room. As if Julia never remembered such things herself. The foot tapped, swayed. There were moments in music when you couldn’t believe in your own past doubts. These had been conjured away, were so much nothing, in the house, in the bedroom, in the nights lived and forgotten. Elyot stood on the stairs in a ragged, undergraduate moustache. I am going to work, Mother, he said. She hoped he would be a writer. If only one of her children were creative, her vanity would flourish like a tree, cover the dead branches of the bitter moments, the leaves as green, as soothing as the stroke of violins.

Opening her eyes Mrs Standish glanced on Eden. It gave her a little shock. This was more than the momentary effect of music. She closed her eyes again, not so much in retreat, she hoped, as to concentrate, yes, to concentrate on he problem of Eden, as if she knew much, well, anything, of her daughter’s life, of her daughter’s mind. Beyond the face was supposition. The growing pains of love. Something of this nature. And of course desperate. Love is desperate in the beginning and the end. Still far from the ultimate stage herself, she was sure, Mrs Standish could afford smugness.

The bland unison of ’cellos took possession. A long way beyond Eden. And without bearing. Her mother made her desperate. To touch, now, the eiderdown, she would have screamed, or broken down like a small child, cried into an eiderdown. Because the clarinet had lost control. It ricocheted among the strings. Her throat was as taut as strings. It was the pulse in drums, the big drum, that they screwed too, too tight.

She thought she was going to suffocate.

I – I’ll wait, she heard herself. In the street. You’ll –

Then she got up quickly, went in the rustling of programme sheets, that was also a protest, the sucked teeth. In the doorway the misery of violins fell upon her head. She groped her way down the concrete tunnel of the stairs in a long echoing of horns. Then there were stars, she saw, and the irrelevant spire. She was standing on the pavement, with the irrelevance of one anonymous star among many. After all, she said, one expected this.

Watching the calendar put a kind of lethargy on her. But she had to speak, somehow, somewhere. There was the girl, Valerie Stevenson. She worked for a publisher, fitfully, with long weekends in the country houses of relations, and the undefined weekends. Yes, felt Eden, it must be Valerie Stevenson. She had a sleek head, also a habit of sitting on the carpet towards midnight, and talking about life, less abstract by 2 a.m., by 2 a.m. life became more specifically men. Valerie Stevenson, Eden decided, would be this less personal confession, almost professional advice.