It’s time I went upstairs, said Julia. It’s time I took Mr Elyot his tea.

She emphasized the Mr Elyot. Joe looked at her slowly. He began to assemble her remark. The evening at Crick’s took shape, Elyot Standish sitting on a trestle, the moment also of understanding. Elyot Standish sat upstairs. Julia had begun to take him tea. Elyot Standish was a closed door. The real, the man-made doubts rose in Joe Barnett with the closing of a door.

Upstairs Elyot sat. He was forcing shape into the shapelessness of notes. It was a deliberate process, which the mind at the same time struggled to resist, the crust of old ideas, followed the live sounds, the flowers in the street, voices rising from the house. You held your fists against your ears. But there still remained the problem of the eyes, the fragmentary blur of sky through glass, the milky object on the mantelpiece. Added to the room, the box had immediately belonged, to the room itself, to the details of behaviour in Elyot’s room. His fists against his ears, he sat with all the visible aspects of his own existence, quite static, self-contained. Only on a distant shore, on which the hands pressed, the wave of sound swept, the voices that he wanted to trace, to walk out, to follow some thread of sound in the street on which no one could impose a limit.

Julia was bringing tea, he saw, Julia angry in the face.

Visitors? he asked.

Yes, an’ no, Julia said.

She could not toss her head enough. Her whole body protested, to the floor, the furniture.

Visitors if you like, she said.

Who?

It was unimportant. It was the kind of remark you made to the people you had known too long, too well.

It’s not what you might call a proper visit. It’s our Joe, Julia said.

Now she was anxious to go, to protect, as if from some indiscretion. There was always someone for Julia to protect.

It’s nothing as concerns you, she said.

And why ever not?

Because, because it’s like that.

Ask him to come up, Julia, he said.

He wanted, was afraid to rediscover in this room, if only as a contradiction to the finite statement of Muriel Raphael, the different moment on a distant shore. He remembered the darkness melting a chocolate tower, the evening in Clerkenwell. If possible, he wanted to experience once more the antithesis of Muriel.

Julia slammed the door.

Waiting, the noises in the street were sharp, each thread a nerve that the ear picked out.

Hello, Joe Barnett, he said.

It sounded forced, came out too apropos, like a spring wound up, for the purpose of release at a given sign. This was at the entry of Joe Barnett. The hand that knocked was foreign to the custom of knocking, the feet to carpet. He stood, looking strangely isolated in his working clothes, in the smell of carpenter’s glue and sawn wood.

So this is where you live, he said, looking round him doubtfully.