His hand was hot, decided Mrs Standish. She tried not to look, looked towards Muriel Raphael. Now with all your superiority, your knowledge of yourself and other things, you are exposing yourself in front of me like anyone else, was Mrs Standish’s attitude. Pleasure made headway against regret. She looked at Muriel, as much as to say: You see. It was some consolation in her helplessness.

Hello, Elyot, said Muriel.

She allowed her words to take the initiative, lead her body into a state of affected indifference as she sat.

We’ve been discussing the artist’s mind, she said. Inspiration v. the Tap.

He could see his hands touching sandwiches, taking advantage of tea. Muriel’s presence reduced him to a process of behaviour.

And needless to say, you plumped for the Tap?

To be honest, she said, yes.

Looking at the face, the mouth, the small erection of white lacquer, a garlanding of ineffectual net, he experienced an awful sense of complicity. It made him start talking of the things you talked about in drawing-rooms, making a screen of words to offer to other faces.

Connie Tiarks stifled, her face perpetually intercepting glances. Soon I must go, she said. She tried again to make a virtue of familiarity. The face that Elyot did not notice, accepted, furniture or conscience. She hoped. She waited to receive confirmation of this across his shoulder.

A parting of the ways, only just visible in fur, gave up a scent of violets. It was the strange, ridiculous convention, Elyot felt, that your mind and eyes were able to make obvious comment on the physical fact, this was accepted, though under cover of irrelevant words. The breasts of Muriel Raphael were quite irrelevant to words. Her smile, her eyes, under the shadow of lids and the Tissot hat, openly acknowledged this.

Mrs Standish listening to a chime, heard six o’clock, heard Elyot asking Muriel Raphael for dinner, no, for supper, as if one hadn’t the key to this code, for supper the following week.

12

Sometimes it seemed to Connie Tiarks her life was spent writing letters. It was a series of letters in which very little was said, the transcription of other people’s lives, rain, wind, heat, the set piece on daffodils that appeared the right time of the year. At the back of the house, in the conservatory, an auburn toupet, the head of Mrs Lassiter, crested a horsehair wave, that also had a history, that was the chair in which the Bishop of London sat the day he came to tea. At the front of the house, in the dining-room, the little bird chirped and pecked at his seed, in a smell of seed and watered sand. There were also the houses, the damp pale faces of other houses that peered unnaturally through trees, the wall on which someone had written something about the fascists. But the wall had this singularity, looked back to its moment of importance. She found herself growing to hate the wall. She found herself tearing up envelopes half addressed. To Mrs Tiarks, 6 Brunswick Crescent, Chel— And outside, the wall that had its moment of writing, the quick moment of passion in the dark, the droppings of white paint upon the pavement.