She was explaining in a voice he didn’t know, like the voice was dolled up again. He felt the incongruity of his own clothes.

He’s from America, Mrs Standish still explained, making the excuse that was expected of her by another face. He plays a saxophone. Isn’t that nice? In a band.

Her voice tumbled like a kitten. Some old kitten.

There’s some call it an orchestra, said Wally Collins.

He would go from where he was not wanted by an inquiring face, he knew, even while looking at the carpet, could feel the cold, closed face of the rooted upper class. His diffidence returned, with the red bus looming out of Holborn, beyond the squat brown streets of Bethnal Green the world was a destination for buses.

Elyot Standish held in his hand the parcel, the warm, electric sensation of the crumpled paper, as if it had been smoothed by many hands, as if it had received from each of these a measure of its own fever and preoccupations.

Don’t go, he said, trying to hide his interest in the parcel.

The man in the mauve suit looked uneasy inside his clothes« He was not taken in by the convention of a voice.

I got to go, Mrs Standish. It’s been swell, he said. If ever you come to the Cafe – he pronounced it to rhyme with chafe – if ever you come to the Cafe, you’ll find me on the saxophone.

Some last expression of regret, in the eyes, in the relaxed rouge, the way her face settled back again, and she seemed to understand with her face, made him add glancingly:

Ask for Wally Collins.

Elyot Standish, only just hearing his mother on the stairs, was not concerned with any departure, the man who became a banging of the front door. The man was a man who found the parcel. His significance was attached to this. As a man, the What’s-his-name, the Collins was too remote to reckon with. But out of a suspicion of its origin, the parcel lay, a warm-cold excitement, in the palm of the hand.

Mrs Standish had returned.

I had to ask him in, she explained. Bringing the parcel, it was only right.

Because she thought she read the criticism in Elyot’s face. It rose to reproach, with the resurrected form of Wally Collins, filling the whole room.

Yes, said Elyot vaguely. Yes.

He was unwrapping the parcel.

But he was nice, protested Mrs Standish. A simple creature. And I enjoy, well, getting other people’s angles, she said.

Her charity was forced. She despised it. Back turned, she closed her eyes, and Elyot anyway was non-existent, she was making excuses to the air, she was denying herself to the room, in the face of her own contempt. She was denying her own mind, that was still preoccupied, not so much with Wally Collins, the saxophonist in the mauve suit, as with her own intimate desires, for warmth, for the long-drawn note of contentment that her own body could become.