It was this that puzzled her now, the behaviour of other people, that made her lie awake at night, an angry turning in a hot bed. She could not breathe for darkness and the pressure of her own problem. Sometimes she got up and opened the window. She stood on the lino, on her flat feet, and felt the cold swill against her legs. She was both hot and cold, angry and desolate at once. I dunno, Julia said. She didn’t. If she could speak her mind. She moved about the dark room, brushed against the handles on the chest of drawers, heard the board creak beneath her feet. She would say, Joe, she would say, now, Joe, I mean to talk straight. She would unravel it beautifully, like a bunch of knots from a piece of string that she afterwards put away in a drawer. If she could speak her mind. But something had occurred that was beyond the things she knew. She drifted helplessly. Her mind was a flickering of pictures, most real and objective, which in fact was the cause of her despair. She could not reduce the pictures according to her own satisfaction. They remained detached and provocative. Eden in her pram by water, Joe brushing his best suit with a would-be careless hand. It was like this. It was like the past and present, and a coming together of past and present, that Julia Fallon couldn’t accept. Apart from the distance between Ebury Street and Clerkenwell, she could not forget Eden in her pram, connect her figure with the brushed coat.

I dunno, Julia sighed.

She was tormented by the night. The bed groaned. She pushed back her heavy hair.

But mornings also were without their clarity. Only the body touched the familiar outline, only the eye accepted the evidence of clocks. The afternoons were like lying in a sick-bed, the great stretch of time that meals would come to punctuate. Or bells.

Julia’s natural curiosity always rose to meet a bell.

Hello, Julia Fallon, he said.

She looked out stupidly, scenting the next phase in her perverse collapse of reason. She looked out sullenly to say:

And what may you be doin’ here?

Coming to pay a decent call on a relative who don’t appreciate it.

Joe Barnett smiled at Julia, at her disapproval, undisturbed. This was a day, an outing, the days you came up West, in the thump and rumble of Crick’s van, to deliver or to fix. The job itself didn’t much matter. It was not a job. All of this gave way to the unfamiliar streets, the day no longer round, it lay in broken pieces, you kicked the pieces carelessly, and knocked off in your own time, like any private individual.

Well, said Julia. Seeing as you’re here.

Her face opened grudgingly. It was Julia Fallon making the best.

If it’s sufferance only, it isn’t me.

Don’t be a clown, Joe Barnett, she said.

At least there was a cup of tea. To sit with a cup of tea. Tea filled in the silences, softened the reproach. If only you could pour out words with the ease and warmth of cups of tea.