There was a singular, feverish sense of waste running through Eden Standish’s life. As if in her fear of an accusation of withholding, she was determined to give too much. It left her haggard, untidy. She was sometimes conscious herself of the untidiness of her life. Those grimly intimate moments walking home alone, by lamplight or in rain, where each dark perspective of a street opened in a queer subjective way into the more guarded places of the mind. Then she could be honest with herself, even derogatory, labelling as sensuality the impulse that prompted her relationships. It was easy at midnight to forget the little flickers of pity that might have exalted a transaction of the body. But by lamplight or in rain, it was difficult to ignore the carnal, not to see things in tones of the butcher’s shop.

Mrs Lassiter never drinks coffee, said Connie. She’s afraid it’s bad for her heart. She’s afraid she’ll die.

Really, said Mrs Standish. Can’t you make her, Connie? There are a great many people ought to die.

Oh, Mrs Standish!

Mrs Standish sipped her coffee, vacantly, beyond this evident vacancy a less evident contemplation of Gerald and Adelaide Blenkinsop. Not that she wanted, by any means, but she did not see why Adelaide could not ask her just once, so that she might refuse.

Julia handed coffee. She rumbled as she bent. Handing coffee, Julia became particularly impersonal. It surprised you when her apron gave a reminder of something you already knew. The life of Julia Fallon rounded out of scraps of accumulated dialogue, let fall in the kitchen or making beds, the life in Clerkenwell with Mrs Barnett and her cousin Joe. There were also the fragments of Julia’s life that you had experienced yourself, clear and deliberate these. There are roughly speaking the deliberate lives, like the life of Julia Fallon, and the vague, less intentional lives, like the life of Adelaide Blenkinsop. Vague and digressive, Adelaide’s, but Julia’s as deliberate as a box. Eden had it, from memory, the sides of Julia’s box. She could open it on its particular smell. She could walk into Mrs Barnett’s kitchen, from description, to the smell of steaming cloths, into the shop that rang a bell, that fell among fruit-drops and peppermints. At the end of the street, against the Baptist chapel, the carpenter’s shop where Joe Barnett worked, the shavings dragged to the edge of the pavement, the scent of pine that rose with a chapel bell. But most indelibly Julia had suggested the shape of Joe Barnett’s face.

Mind, you’ll spill it, Julia said.

Oh yes, the coffee, the coffee after lunch, that had tasted bad, she had never grown to like it. In the morning it was different, the slow nostalgia of the morning coffee before catching the bus. Drink it up, Mother said, as if you were a child still, as if it were your last cup, as Mother’s sleeve trailed across the butter. The buses are stickier that move by early morning. You began to listen for the tone of buses, going to work on top of a bus. Buses moving into Bloomsbury on a sticky swell.