What is it you find in Poussin? asked Muriel Raphael.

Her presence insinuated itself. Elyot closed the door very quickly on the more private, personal moments. Even then, Muriel’s smile. He had to defend himself.

I enjoy his conviction. His detachment. Particularly his detachment.

I’m sorry, she said, her drawn mouth.

She found, she regretted, that he interested her. To reach out and touch something she wasn’t sure it was possible to touch.

The air moved with little convolutions of smoke, the spirals, the baroque scrolls, in deference or not to the furniture, there was too much premeditated pattern. There was too much Mrs Mounsey. And in the corner the Wild Boar, Adelaide’s guardee cousin who collected pictures, listened to Desmond Harcourt lay the law. You waited for the ultimate gasp of smoke. You waited for Desmond Harcourt to take flight in nothing. But you wooed, in the meantime, you seduced with words, the guardee or the Jewess. This was social intercourse. The rape of the ear.

Mrs Mounsey started to go. A puce retreat to Maida Vale and sensualism.

Yes, it was time, it was time, the voices remembering discretion. There is always a certainty about departures that is quite absent from arrivals. There is not the doubt of destination. It is sleep, or sex, or cold pickings in the larder. You are back on your own track.

Good-bye, Elyot Standish. We also have a Poussin, said Muriel Raphael.

Her smile remained a symbol of emotion, not emotion. You accepted it, the hieroglyph. It was like Adelaide reading off the success of her party, knowing by the right reactions. This consoled Adelaide, just the equation. But Elyot Standish, watching what became back, buttocks, the splintering of steel, regretted the dimensionless. Even the hand of Muriel Raphael and all it offered. The sloping belly, the dress where it shaped the thighs. The whole physical Muriel, which was still the hieroglyph.

Elyot, said Gerald, his voice already light with relief. We must ring each other up. We must dine one night at the House.

The word dine in Gerald’s voice implied all sorts of confidences. Those dinners with Gerald tête-à-tête, the cold narrative of a very private life. Eden had once said apropos of something you forgot, and anyway immaterial: Elyot and Gerald Blenkinsop. Because for Eden, there were the Elyots and the Geralds, the linked, the passionless. His mind settled in a fury on Muriel Raphael, to contradict, but encountered the deliberate equation.

Outside in the street a few dim electric flowers blossomed in a yellow fog. There was also the Spaniard. They walked a little, their unnatural voices, their unnatural warmth against the damp of a pavement the other side of the shoes.

England is very puzzling to me, the Spaniard said. I go into the houses of the rich, the houses of the Blenkinsops, I eat their food, I speak their language. It is like an unpleasant dream. The dream language, hinting at things. Sometimes I think, not hinting. It is an elaborate charade that meant something once, a long time ago. When the figures, the gestures were related to enthusiasms.