I expect, Connie, you have the makings of a saint, she said rather irritably. That old woman! Holding wool for old women. Though sometimes it’s kinder to kill. One might consider it in that light. The saint who killed, as opposed to the saint who continued to hold wool.

I beg your pardon? asked Connie Tiarks.

Beyond the field, the almost physical green, it was so painful, it was Raphael, his face withdrew on glass from the remarks she made. If she listened she would hear the door. Beyond this, the pavement that she would not hear. Except as part of herself, the intimate misery, he was gone. Connie Tiarks clenched her hands. She knew now why she lay with her face in the pillow, her mouth rounded into an O, trying to express the inexpressible misery. She could not say she loved him, although it came bellowing back at her out of the room.

It doesn’t matter, sighed Mrs Standish. It was something quite irrelevant.

9

You walked out of the yard and down a couple of steps into the kitchen. Here the predominating smell was one of damp tea leaves and drying cloths. Out of these closely associated and first noticeable smells, objects formed gradually, the deal table and chairs, the painted tin canister, the bundle of coupons that stuck out behind the clock. With these Mrs Barnett hoped in time to get herself a fancy tea service, with real hand-painted flowers. At least, on the coupons it said that. Julia and Mrs Barnett sometimes sat and thought about the tea things they would get. They crooked their fingers thoughtfully in the steam of strong Indian tea, that they drank from less elegant cups, bought like the canisters at Woolworth’s. The tea service even became a topic of conversation. One of the absorbing factual topics in which the Barnetts liked to indulge.

How many cups to go, Ma? asked Joe, washing his hands at the basin when he came in.

Cups, I dunno, but coupons, I do. There’s eight, said Mrs Barnett.

She heard him splashing water in the basin, water on tin, and the noise he made dipping his face. He made a noise blowing through his fingers, like a plunger rising to the surface. She heard all this without seeing. Even if she turned, which she didn’t, it was only Joe coming in from work, even if she turned she could not have seen, only his behind protruding from where the coats hung, her own with the piece of matted fox, Joe’s greatcoat, and Julia’s blue, if Julia happened to be there. It was all so much a part of custom, Joe washing his face after work, or on Sundays, only closer to tea, that Mrs Barnett went on talking to the pots that she moved mysteriously about the stove.

Yes, she said. Eighteen pieces. With pretty variegated flowers.

And who’s the mug?

She heard him throw the water.

The mug? The mug? said Mrs Barnett. Who said anything about a mug?