The dinner was served. They went down, they tossed back the skein of colour on the stairs, the clown colours that trickled into colder black and white, the shrill to the bass tones. Elyot Standish, in silence, knew that he was being dull, would be the stone round somebody’s neck, the Jewess, perhaps, with the mauve eyelids that looked as if a mauve snail had made a desultory pattern there. They were going down, down. A ladder of words. Silent, you missed the rungs, fell. In the hall from which coats and hats had disappeared. The hall was a model of discreet bleakness, of rich nonentity, that was a comment also on the lives of Gerald and Adelaide, the lives they partly lived in their town house. The house was suggestive of long weekends, flowers up from the country, dust sheets after the season. There was condescension, you felt, about the town houses of the rich, they sighed after Cowes, they waited for September.

The dining-room had dwindled to candlelight and reflexions, divided up into the little particles of light, only partly substantial. Except the chairs, the eagles on the backs of the chairs; these dealt you a kidney blow and waited.

She had the most, the most dove-coloured face, quavered Desmond Harcourt.

It began to tinkle, glass or silver, or Mrs Mounsey’s beads. There began to be food, that arms let down into appropriate places. The mind fished for an opening.

Surely, said Muriel Raphael, I’ve met your mother?

She touched the soup tentatively with her spoon, as if she had seen soup for the very first time, or as if she meant it not to encroach on her effort to establish Mrs Standish, met in the gallery, was it, or somebody’s room, anyway, the burst seams, the reddish hair, was the mother of silence on the left, she wasn’t exactly partial to either. The face of Muriel Raphael hung above soup. The orange cheek-bones, touched into a life of their own, had no connexion with the rest of the face.

It must have been the gallery, she said.

The daughter of Raphael, of Raphael and Kiev, she was decorative, she had learnt to choose positions, from standing on a soft carpet by many pictures. She knew what to say about Picasso and Matisse. You got out into the street and found you had been sold a Rouault by Muriel Raphael. Elyot found her repulsive. Her voice cut. She was reduced to voice, and the steely texture of her dress, that moved with her body, metal-plated. He could see the nipples when she turned to him.

Mrs Mounsey had begun to talk, it was her privilege, about herself.

I’m at least honest, Mr Blenkinsop, she said. I’m a sensualist. When I was a child, I liked to take off my shoes and paddle in the mud. I liked the feel of mud. I like to feel it coming through my toes.

Am I to expect metaphors? asked Gerald.

Good God, no! cried Mrs Mounsey. When I say mud, I mean mud.