Mrs Standish, also narrowing her eyes, at a face, at the Jewess, passed within reach, but without recognition. Fusing in the abstract compositions on the wall, the Jewess became with the guitar, Le Journal, and the segment of a clown, Mrs Standish’s regret. Sideways she was conscious of a voice pointing to a firmer body. The contempt of the bodies of assured younger women.

That’s final, said Muriel Raphael. It’s absurd, she said, discussing with a soon-to-be dismissed young man, who stood holding his awkward elbow, some development that Mrs Standish had failed to tap at its source.

People came and went. Women smelling of gardenias. Young men in camel-hair coats. People flushed by long lunches.

Mrs Standish had not heard, because she wasn’t anxious, she wasn’t intent on words. Out of her eyes she criticized the broad shoulders, the narrow hips of the Jewess, with a terrible regret, like a lost traveller in some spiritual Basutoland.

This is all wrong, she felt, remembering the easy, plugging motion of the bus. To concentrate. This was difficult. Her mind had always been something of a double exposure. She rested with relief on the comparative naturalism of Matisse. She invested a grove of trees with a little story, in which she herself when younger, it was unavoidable, moved up a clay-coloured path towards an unspecified but obvious goal.

Muriel Raphael shook her shoulders, as if to rid them of annoyance. She threw back her head and blew out a trumpet of smoke, a figure in an Assyrian frieze, her clothes, her Bond Street milieu were of secondary importance. The woman with the red hair, the mother, was there as a warning that you disregarded. Underneath the skin was a suspicion that you were no longer making the plans.

Mrs Standish? said Muriel.

She had moved in the silence of a thick carpet. Her voice was reduced for a stranger to the tones of struck copper. Mrs Standish rose to the encounter. The personal element always put her on top of her form.

The Jewess was talking of a meeting, or it was Elyot, the meeting of Elyot and a Jewess, the daughter of Raphael, Muriel Raphael. Mrs Standish smiled. Because it was the next move. Mrs Standish would have smiled if Muriel Raphael had produced a bucket of water and poured it out on the carpet.

At Adelaide’s? she said. Adelaide does gather people. Such energy, she said, implying Adelaide’s lack of discrimination.

People dribbled in and out, through a scent of gardenias. Somebody coughed in the curdled air, a reminder that a silence, that the eyes flickered to reject.

A pretty Matisse, said Mrs Standish, with much savoir-faire. Yes, she said, largely. Quite a pretty bit.

We can show you some others, said Muriel Raphael. If, she added, thoughtfully, if you like Derain.

That the breath drew out just a shade too far, then left isolated in the air. Mrs Standish listened to her own shame. She felt a hotness in her veins. Her voice was singing a song that belonged to phonographs before the War. But brazen, it was brazen, there was no way out.