The Barnetts were not communicative people, emotionally that is, except Mrs Barnett perhaps, and even then it was not Mrs Barnett’s own emotions. What Mrs Barnett expressed emotionally was part of a mass emotional effort, like at the meetings in the chocolate-coloured Baptist chapel at the end of the street, or an expression of national disaster with the other women in the neighbourhood. Mrs Barnett was a public wailer. A pale, dank woman, she had a belief in disaster and death. She liked to talk to the undertaker, Mr Coghill, who lived two doors up. It was beautiful, the plaster flowers, the paper lace, the varnished coffins that Mr Coghill made. Nothing she liked better than to close the door of her little sweet shop, and slip up to Mr Coghill’s, to stand in the odour of sanctity and death. Then Mrs Barnett would frequently brim with tears of pleasure. But that was one thing. She did not obtrude on Julia’s preoccupation, even though she sensed something of this. She kept it behind her spectacles.

They says a slop basin, murmured Mrs Barnett, reverting to the concrete topic of the tea service painted with variegated flowers. I suppose, decided Mrs Barnett, you can always use a slop basin when the sugar’s gone an’ broke.

Very often in Ebury Street, Julia stood by a window looking out. She was in a muddle, she told herself, which meant that her values had been confused, and by someone else; never would Julia Fallon have allowed such confusion to settle on herself. To say to Someone. There she stopped. She listened to her angry duster, flicking where there was no longer any dust. To Julia Fallon there had been a contradiction of nature. It was as if oil and water had mixed.

Julia’s a thoughtless girl, said Mrs Standish on one occasion. I’ve a good mind to tell her she can leave.

She had contemplated this at least twice a week ever since Julia came to her.

Julia! Julia! called Mrs Standish, pulling fretfully at drawers, that broke her nails, that stuck, or else came galloping out to hit her in the stomach.

It happened on Julia’s afternoon off. It would. Mrs Standish’s headache, one of her regulars, that made her regret her sensibility, clamoured for one of those little French cachets, it was the chemist in the Rue St Honoré, the little French cachets soothed her as no English aspirin ever could. Before Julia hid the cachets out of stupidity or spite.

Elyot! called Mrs Standish from the landing. Are you working, Elyot? she called.

He opened the door on a scent of eau-de-Cologne, a warning gust from the floor below, it transported him to a different climate, in which the nerves already fluttered in a kind of tropical exasperation.

I wonder, Elyot, his mother said, her voice entirely tentative. I wonder if you could go perhaps – the hesitation, the doubt wrung a pathos of words – if you could go to Julia’s and ask, not if you’re busy of course, but I thought, not so very long on the bus, and ask what she’s done with those cachets, you see, my head, they’re the little ones from the Rue St Hon –