Leaving the bus, which her indulgent frame of mind had made a pleasant and familiar object, and turning into Raphael and Kiev’s, Mrs Standish was uplifted by the thought that soon, in that atmosphere of dusty damask and Turkish cigarette smoke, she would once more make the attempt to look at more than pictures, to lose herself, and even if she failed again, she would still know the moral satisfaction of having tried.

In the gallery there were all the usual things, the faces you could not quite connect with places and events, the face of the Jewess talking to a young man who tied himself into knots in the corner. Mrs Standish looked hopefully at canvas, inhaled the smell of pictures, that was also a nostalgia, afternoons in the studio, with tea she made in the brown teapot, and all the canvases that Willy wasted, the lumpy, muddy, nude girls, and arrangements of fruit in the art nouveau dish. You began to feel sentimental, a little bit out of it, in a world of Picasso and Contemporary Movements. As a girl Mrs Standish had never realized she was contemporary with her period. She suspected that contemporaneity was an invention of the thirties, a term coined by your children to keep you out. It made her raise her chin sharply at the dissolving guitar on Raphael and Kiev’s red damask. And the Movements. By middle age, these had become either incomprehensible or irrelevant – Communism, Surrealism, the Oxford Group – but at the same time still a source of irritation, of knowing you were caught in the backwash, were fixed there irrevocably, that the unattainable was a dissolving guitar.

Why have I come here? said Mrs Standish.

She is quite ridiculous, pretentious, the red-haired mother of Elyot Standish, said Muriel Raphael. And why should she materialize at just this moment, too apposite, a reminder?

Then she added, audibly, to the young man who expected a reply:

We’re a gallery, not a forcing house.

She sounded, she was sharp. She resented the liberties people took, the demands made. She recoiled as a matter of course from a face about to ask a question. As if she might lose one little bit of Muriel Raphael. Her admiration for herself made it necessary to remain intact.

Nosing round, she said, narrowing her eyes resentfully at Mrs Standish. Finding out for herself.

Because the admiration of Muriel for Muriel inclined her to jump to a conclusion. She resented also her own preoccupation since, when was it, her hand on the telephone, her almost failure to restrain. In her more controlled moments she smiled to herself and said: This is nothing, a few words exchanged at a dinner party, also perhaps the sexual impulse. Muriel recognized physical necessity. She ran her life along these lines. Any sign of unruliness annoyed her. It pleased her when the disappointed told her she had a masculine mind. All the better to eat you with, was the attitude of Muriel Raphael.