Now, she said, the face, this face, floated on a wave of nausea, jerked forward on the leaping nerve, and the hand that grew from a sleeve, to lift, to touch.

No, she said.

She heard her heels startling the chair.

Not – not now, she said. I didn’t exactly realize. I didn’t know. Perhaps a little longer, she said.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Her own feet, they went plap plap, she heard them plap plap, after her in the passage, moving in the now static dream. She could feel his face rooted there under the electric bulb. Then her nails were on the shut door.

Almost running, there were no faces, there was no sound, in the street, in her neighbourhood. Now it was mostly like this. As if one recent event had washed back everything else and left her standing with her own preoccupation. She could not help it. She was ashamed. But she could not help. There was only one purpose, ultimately one person, in spite of the selfless aspiration, which was hypocrisy, you were your own focus, you were your own mind, your own body. She paused, her hand on brick, trying with her hand to force back her own nausea.

When she got in, she knew by the trunk standing in the hall that somebody had come. It was Elyot, of course. He appeared from a doorway, the familiar and yet foreign face.

Hello, Eden, he said.

The moustache shaved, he seemed waiting diffidently for recognition. His eyes preoccupied with his own personal and quite insignificant change. It was natural, she supposed. But younger than Elyot, she now felt older. The last year had made her so.

Hello, she said.

She tried to make herself mention the absence of the moustache, and failed. She was a mingling of her own hungriness and nausea. She held her coat with her hands in front.

You look sort of green, don’t you? he said.

It made her tingle with sudden fright, wonder if a glance.

I’m feeling a bit off, she said. Something I ate at lunch.

An elaborate banality of the voice that she hoped was sufficiently and not too casual.

What are you going to do with yourself? she asked.

How?

I mean, now that you’re down for good. What are you going to do?

That made him retreat. She could feel it, also a certain pleasure in achieving her own defence.

God knows, he said. Wait and see.

She made him uncomfortable. She was darker, remoter than he remembered, the Eden as a child, which was then just a discrepancy in ages, now a distance that came perhaps from experience. Eden had fitted herself into a fresh pattern. It made him feel gauche. Watching her as she went on up the stairs, casually out of the corner of his eye, there was self-possession, an indifference in the trailing coat. His superior years fell away from him. She implied that he didn’t know, and he didn’t, he was hesitating at the bottom of a staircase, he was waiting to see, still with no purpose in the general pattern.