You mean it expresses something for you, she said. The music.

His face wrinkled above the jaw. She was dealing with a child. It says something for you, she explained gently, something that you have to say.

Yes, he said.

He gulped, as if he had just survived a difficult and dangerous operation. Nursing in his down moments a fear of his original shoddiness, he was suddenly full of gratitude. He wanted to, what she had said, express, while still failing, while realizing the difficulty of this, his gratitude. Normally you spent a bit on flowers or scent. It was a sure fire with women. And they liked your hands. They liked to be touched. It was plain sailing if a man could use his hands. But it wasn’t like this. He’d been gone on several. But it wasn’t any of these. He measured with his eyes the evidence of bust.

You put it the right way, he said rather hoarsely. A guy like me don’t have the time for conversation. There’s the boys, the orchestra. They’re swell. But they don’t converse. See? And it’s conversation that a man misses. And books. I guess you read a lot of books.

He sat forward earnestly. He felt good. Somehow he felt he was talking like something never before, like something in a book.

Yes, sighed Mrs Standish. That is my chief and most indispensable vice.

She smiled, laughed a little wryly, got up and turned her back, shuffled something from here to there, intent on some of the business of behaving in a room. Or not so intent. Knowing he was behind her, she was pulled back. In ordinary circumstances the want of conversation would have led her to discuss books. But not now. She hated them. Mme de Sévigné, stomach-downward on a table. Across the other side of the room sat, she suspected, her own defeat. Her car grappled with a not so foreign idiom, a whiff of harsh lavender made an unresisted assault, she wished she could sink down into the easy, satisfying coma of the flesh, for which the Catherine Standish, the Kitty Goose, her whole temporal being craved now, as always.

That’s one way to look at it, he said, laughed, eased his collar. What’s vice to the goose is good for the gander, eh?

She even accepted the banality of this. But she wished now that he would go.

In my line you get used to letting up in other ways, the voice trailed.

He was struggling out of his depth. There was not the rescue of touch. His breath came thick inside his shirt. Turned to him again, she was different, he saw, the face older, but it still got him sort of mixed up. He could have sat and told, not what he couldn’t tell, but still had, if it wasn’t for the bloody handicap of tied hands.

Someone came in just about then.

This is Mr Collins, Elyot, she was saying. Found a parcel. The King’s Road.