There you are, her mother said, glancing over a book.

Mrs Standish was annoyed. She would hide her annoyance in indifference. She burnt with an intense dislike for that Valerie Stevenson. No better than a magpie, she said to herself. She was pleased with that.

Eden went on up the stairs. The carpet had worn, the dress tarnished that her mother wore, the refurbished gold gown that she liked to put on in the evening, she sat there in a pool of gold, of light, liquescent in the Louis XV bergère, and not quite real. Altogether there was an air of unreality about this house, of remoteness in chance unity. In the sitting-room her mother’s thoughts touched on some cloudy shore of their own. She put up the book in front of her face. In a minute she would say the dinner was getting cold. And on the upper landing underneath the roof, Elyot would be sitting, equally remote. Eden went into her own small box, closed it on herself, on her experience.

On the upper landing, underneath the roof, he heard the closing of the door. It was Eden slipping in, after a week’s withdrawal, slipping into his own thoughts, the renewal of disturbing influence. Elyot leant out of the upper window. In the warm evening he had taken off his coat. He hung out facing the dusk, across the street the window of light where two girls in a kitchenette fussed and giggled preparing dinner, exchanging anecdotes. A taxi floated, dimensionless, its roof, passed dissolving in the street. She asked him what he would do with himself now that he had come down. It hung interrogatively in the evening street, tingeing his skin with sweat beneath the shirt. Because your own inadequacies suddenly faced you, hanging formless, but definitely implied in the approaching night landscape.

Light fell on the opposite façade, from a light released below, from Mrs Standish turning on the light. She felt bitter, bad-tempered. It was not like her. She looked in the glass at her face, which was like her, and yet unlike. One is very unlike one’s face, she felt. She put up her hand, touched it. How awful, she said, when this suddenly crumbles away, leaving, leaving – It horrified her, this. She heard Eden walking overhead. Nervously she went in to Julia, the swish of her skirts gave her some courage, she went in to ask why, why the dinner was late.

A preparing of dishes, a washing, as before. Eden dried her hands on the towel she found for her in her room, not waiting, but probably put there after she left. Searching for her nose in the half-light, she applied powder. All these actions, gestures, the bowing of the body before habit. Out of these and the numb mind, she would grow again, she felt, not so much herself, this was immaterial, but what she would do. The transient pain in her body, the little whimper for the lost and finally regretted child, waking in her some emotional theme that she wanted to express, she lost herself in the darkness. She put her hands to where her face had been. She listened for some word in the darkness, that you listen for, listen, of reassurance.