This is Eden Standish, you could hear Adelaide still. She’s in that book shop, Adelaide said, the one in Bedford Street. For Adelaide one was always in a shop. One did not work in a shop. Only the lower classes did that. But the shop in Bedford Street had a kind of fascination. Left Wing literature, you know, Adelaide continued, for her more emancipated, her intellectual friends. She explained with an air of uneasy exaltation, as if she were about to sacrifice her own throat. Because she liked to take things seriously, even other people’s things. Irony pained her, particularly in Eden. When Eden said: Yes, Adelaide, I’m in a book shop, so many hours a day I stand prescribing for the moron, for the earnest, but more particularly the moron, Adelaide always replied, surprised: I thought you were a communist.

Mrs Standish was handing a box of small crystallized fruits.

Will you have one, Elyot? asked Connie Tiarks.

Her hand fumbled. She could have cried for her clumsiness, for the uncertainty of everything she did. She could feel the presence of Eden, the oppressive certainty of Eden. If one could act, without hesitation, like Eden Standish.

If one could push out from the grey fog of ideas, felt Eden Standish. Sometimes she felt that she was choking with unassimilated ideas. Then she clung desperately to her passion. She had this, the rightness of direction, in a scattering of cliché and terminology, at the meetings, in the Bedford Street book shop, or upstairs on the evenings when they held discussions. She had a belief in her passion. She looked at her hands and tried to ignore the voice of the Bloomsbury intellectual spilling statistics from Russia, from Spain. Her passion was something apart from economic equations. All her life she had been waiting to give expression to this, it was standing in her, somehow lamplike, waiting for her to lift the grey pall of words, giving it leave to shine. Instead you talked. You talked to the earnest uncommunicative faces. You exchanged the phrases that you used, there was no distinction between mouths. Except the aloof face, he remained a little aloof, unable to interpret, or the hands that did not know how to behave, folding and unfolding the cap. He had not been there before, he said. It was strange. It was a silence between you that you did not know how to break. You waited, hoping for some communicative language. Then you began to know. It was not so much from remarks. But you knew. You knew that this was a familiar presence. You heard the flow of Julia’s voice lapping round the known face. And it was not all your discovery. It was also his. There was no need for names, the Joe Barnett and the Eden Standish. It was like pitching straight into what was already a common life. Julia Fallon had made it this. For a long time now, you had been interchangeable in her voice. But outside this discovery, people were still discussing political ideas. People stood in supposedly united groups. There would be a collection, someone said. Then you watched him handle money, the hand searching in the pocket, then the coins offered on the palm, very slowly, surprised, as if dealing in a foreign substance.