Yes, Juan, said Adelaide. One admits, I suppose, the atrocities, but –

Her mind gave out vaguely in the shallows. If she could shift to anything, say, Bach. Spaniards sometimes frightened her, their eyes. Juan or Eden Standish, in opposite camps. Yes, they were frightening, the convictions of other people for the things you did not understand. She preferred Juan as the attaché, was it ten years earlier, those elegant little lunches at the Ritz. Something in vine leaves. It shrivelled up in a voice.

The true Spain, said the voice, the destructive rabble, the red, the red.

Only the touch of glass was cool. Adelaide looked at Elyot Standish. Gerald approved of Elyot. But not the mother, said Gerald, she smells. Oh, Gerald, said Adelaide. He made her feel bohemian.

Elyot and Muriel were silent. He bored her, or not altogether, she was not sure, perhaps she would find out, later, but not now. She was very conscious of her arm, naked, and a pale, faded brown lying on the darker table-top.

Her nakedness, because the steel-plating was no remedy for this, reached him through the envelope of claret. The arm, the brown arm with the darkish hairs, the thin arm of Muriel Raphael. She cast very little shadow. She could stand, you felt, shadowless, under a full light, the burnt, flinty flesh, the orange clay modelled too abruptly, too formally into cheeks. He found himself suppressing the laugh that began to saunter down his nose. If you could fasten your teeth in the naked arm of Muriel Raphael, to shatter the reflexions in the glass and wood, to cut the tangle of remarks that strayed without point or purpose, except when camouflaged with claret, out of the surrounding mouths. Or if there were a point, it lay in a clever arrangement of words and refined sensation, the point of glass and wine and peaches. Not to forget the flickering of candles. These just failed to go out.

The evening followed the worn path of other evenings in Gerald and Adelaide’s house.

In the drawing-room was a Poussin that Adelaide had inherited from an uncle, the pediments of stone, the deep Mediterranean sky that no wind moved across. Remote in its solidity, it was remote and present too. It was like the evening you had sat before dusk on a carpenter’s trestle in Clerkenwell. This started to form again in the less substantial debris of the conversation. So that Adelaide’s head began to dissolve cloudily against the Mediterranean sky, and Gerald, the solid, material slabs of Gerald’s life, the hands held talon-wise in the manicurist’s bowl, lunches at the House, all less significant than Clerkenwell and Poussin. Adelaide talked about her husband. My husband, Adelaide said, to reassure, to wrap a kind of mystical aura round the fish skin of Gerald Blenkinsop, his official kisses. But did it? So you’re Elyot Standish, said the voice of Joe Barnett. It took for granted. The Italianate chapel was a chocolate tower that did not melt. You waited calmly for the bells. Poussin’s two old men walking to draw water, moved and did not move, they had time and all time, the certainty of time in which to step from stone into the dark grove of Mediterranean trees. Nearer, and in a different convention, three people stood in the naked light, or the two and Eden’s face, it was not more than this, that you dared not think of, that returned, the expression on Eden’s face. Certainty exists, taken for granted. There is also evidence in the knowledge of Poussin, but not the personal evidence. Then Eden’s face. This was very personal. It remained with him, the unguarded expression, the intensity of an expression divided even from a face.