But Harry Allgood continued. He was the voice composing suggestions over telephones. There was the Sunday they went hiking on the Weald, the friends of Harry Allgood, the equally tweedy, more boisterous after beer, till songs came in the train, the German songs in a suburban Sunday twilight, you were touching tweed, and the one in shorts, the one who made the joke about the wagger-pagger, was the one that altogether officially made the jokes. Walking against the wall, they were alone again, she and Harry Allgood, in a flat and breathless Kensington, you could almost touch the yellow light that fell from lamps at the end of the street, in the tactile summer evening. There was the sound of Harry’s pipe, the suck suck, that she mostly wanted to stop, or listening, hoped would miss a beat. The ppuh-ppuh, ppuh-ppuh. Waiting, his voice broke out. It was a proposal from Harry Allgood. It was Harry totting up reasons. When he was in a practice, he said. It was now particularly that Connie Tiarks regretted her lost capacity for gratitude. She was shocked by her own irritation, by her wanting to say: But, Harry, this is absurd. And it was, or essential at least to the hurting of Harry Allgood, that had to happen, it had accumulated over too many Sundays in Mrs Standish’s drawing-room, it had to fall on Harry Allgood in the side street in Kensington. But Harry continued to sit in halls. She made him wait while she mended a holeless glove. Because sometimes she could not face him, not at once, the stream of hospital anecdotes that took no account of her ingratitude, that passed undiverted across her unreceptive face. Harry Allgood apparently was all bone. Glancing at his knuckles, at his cheeks, she was sure of this.

So Connie continued to write letters. Sometimes she slipped out alone, she went to the cinema. Pictures about cripples, pictures with Irene Dunne, always made her cry. All the things she had never said, swelled and almost formed, became a dark gulp in that too encouraging atmosphere.

She went also, less subterranean, on errands for Mrs Lassiter. There was the afternoon she took the books, the Hugh Walpole and the Warwick Deeping, to Miss Lumley-Johnson in Wellington Square, because, said Mrs Lassiter, I know bronchitis, and these will be something to occupy the mind, or else to dull it, there’s nothing like a book for this, poor Ethel is so alive. So you went. You were glad. You were glad of buses. You were glad of silver paper in the King’s Road.

In a way it was a special afternoon, without a reason. It was the white sky. Gulls flew over Chelsea Hospital no paler than the sky, the whiteness, as if your blood had drained back, hands no longer belonged. Connie Tiarks experienced a numb pleasure in her own detachment, the remoteness of things, the tinsel shops, was even able to take out a name. Elyot Standish, the shape and taste of this, throbbed in confusion through the cheese and fruit and the bright faces of the fruiterers. Love in the King’s Road had a definite shape, unlike the abstract desolation that consumed in cinemas, but an expression, almost a hopefulness. Connie Tiarks made a decision. She wanted to give some something, to express by some proxy for words, that failed her always, became a blush. She wanted to give a shape to, and perhaps exorcize as well, her miserable abstraction. Without the excuse of a birthday or a Christmas, she had to do this for herself, for Elyot Standish.