He listened. Sometimes he could almost hear her listening to his thoughts. Or insinuating herself into his thoughts, critical. Eden was the dark street. He retreated quietly into the room. To do something. That shiver on the skin. Soon it would be dinner, the voices call to a roast, and family conversation. You will have £400 a year, she said. It had an accent of certainty as opposed to the night sounds. Inside the room it was also safer, even if smug, among the sheaves of notes, the stuffy hours from museums and libraries, the Cambridge lectures that became a kind of automatic writing, but something to hold between you and doubt. There were the notes on Büchner. My son is going to write a book on, well, anyway a book, she said. Pulling off his shoes, he put on slippers. These were easy to the feet.

Part Two

8

Mrs Standish asked everyone if they would have some soup, in a tone of voice that expected the offer to be refused. It was the consequence of many years spent ignoring the second-best. The material second-best, of course. Spiritually, she liked to believe, she managed to keep to the heights. A precious country, it was also cheaply reached.

Will you have some soup, Elyot?

The voice glanced. It was not the glance of diffidence. It definitely implied a disparagement of soup. Looking at her as she sat amongst them, at the dining-room table, in the lap of a flat Sunday. Elyot decided that his mother could never lay claim to the quality of diffidence. Doling soup, her hand, obviously disclaiming the significance of its own gesture, turned it to an act of magnificent charity. This she distributed impartially to those about her, to Eden, to Connie Tiarks, to himself, delivered through the medium of Julia. She sat there indolently in the remnants of her beauty, fondant, with a head of spun caramel, her hand resting with distaste upon a ladle.

The tureen in front of her had suffered too. Originally perfect, glimpses of this perfection still defied chips and rivets. Elyot felt the touch of nostalgia in the green and gold of the soup tureen, as it drifted out of the conversation, into a sudden focus. There was a horrid attraction in the little gilded pineapple on the lid, that now covered what remained of the soup. Ignoring words, that were irrelevant, he could not keep his eyes off the little pineapple. It stood out like a boss on the face of the last ten years, a tangible reminder of escaped time.

Because it was almost exactly ten years since the tureen made its appearance, that evening, he remembered, his mother telling him what she couldn’t afford, but did, the evening that was somehow significant without an explanation, the noises in neighbouring rooms, and Eden coming in, she had been away. Just down from Cambridge, you hung about, you hung out of windows, you waited for strangers to value your unique and sensible qualities. To unpack this from under the weight and cynicism of ten years was painful. It was also midday Sunday. They were eating soup.