The voice quivered out of eau-de-Cologne. He could have crushed it, the sprig of white geranium on a staircase window-sill.

Yes, he said.

It went, flatly, ironical. Yes, Mother. The bleat of a white word.

Thank you, dear, she said. The blow on the bus will do you good.

He went downstairs. He reached the more temperate region of the hall. There was an impotence in irritation divided from its origin. Sideways he caught his face in the window of what had once been Mme Adorée’s, which was now antiques. The bits of bric-à-brac, reminiscent of his mother, reminded him that technically, to the detached observer, he was all filial affection. He kicked his foot against some ironwork and nearly fell.

The journey to Clerkenwell was at least, as Mrs Standish put it, a blow. The wind made his eyes water, and the openings to streets on which he looked, farther on for the first time, all this made him narrow his eyes, made him remember much time spent with books. He remembered also occasions in a country lane walking against the sky. Houses, the façades of shops, and then the little pinched villas with their cataract of dull lace, slid between the lane, the sky, and his own face. There was a mystery of juxtaposition abroad which Elyot Standish had forgotten to suspect. He had begun to arrange his life in numbered pages. He had rejected the irrational aspect of the cramped houses, the possibility of looking inward and finding a dark room. Just as he had forgotten how he lay on the sand at Ard’s Bay, feeling a blaze of sun in his dissolving bones.

In the street where Julia lived with Mrs Barnett, he trod suspiciously, excited, through the shreds of newspaper that blew against his feet. The chocolate chapel, a kind of Victorian Italianate, stood remote and closed between two pendent wings of houses. A little twinge of passion started in him, somewhere, remotely, it was part of this mingling of the past with the present, the known with the unknown, Julia holding her face to be kissed before darkness, and the present taken-for-granted Julia, who lived beneath the green sky, against the dead, chocolate-coloured chapel. Later on you forgot how to talk to servants, he felt.

His ringing at the door, at the closed, bleary shop, brought a neighbourly head in curlpapers from an upper window in the next house.

Mrs Barnett and Julia was gone to the pictures, the head said.

When would they be back? he asked.

The head was doubtful.

Was it anything she could do? she said. Or there was Mrs Barnett’s boy, Joe, who worked at Crick’s along on the corner.

He started again, expectantly, walking down the pavement, through the net of strange sensation that the street spread. The sky grew paler. Voices called across the backyards.

In Crick’s workshop it was still light enough to see, you sensed an air of anticipation, the whistling of the boy Mo, the sawdust in his hair, his eye fixed on some future pleasure, the girls who stood in groups outside the fish-shop door. The mouth of the boy Mo frequently got pensive over a bowl of jellied eels, as he stirred the money in his pocket and thought of girls. Now in the half-light they drifted in their giggly groups, their tight buttocks and sleek calves, up against the planks of three-ply and the pieces of unfinished furniture. You could hear old Crick on the telephone. You could see his shadow in the little office, under the electric light, the quiff of hair that was standing out, and the belly of his nose. The boy Mo whistled. It would soon be knocking off.