You’ll be gettin’ off home to your supper. You’ll be off in double quick time. If you ask me when, when the stairs is empty, she said.

Obedience was a natural reaction to Julia’s voice. It was the natural reaction of Eden Standish, her pause outside the door, her silence on the landing. Even now, there was something oracular for Eden in Julia’s voice, in Julia herself, her presence in the kitchen, she was rooted firmly in the past, out of her the past still flowed, through her many branches of activity, she was still a face above the bed at dusk, a hand offering a slice of cake, or a soft scent of baking that soothed the more jagged grievances in a kitchen corner. So that you accepted the warning now.

Eden Standish would go upstairs. She was tired. The evening released her, the full bus, with its smell and crackle of evening papers. Evenings she sat in the bus. She no longer resented her own exhaustion. This, and occasionally the voice of Julia, was a grievance from the past. Joe Barnett is in here, the voice of Julia warned. Joe Barnett, and more than Joe Barnett, the visible Joe Barnett to other people, there were also many other aspects, moments, the private ones, the meetings at corners under lamplight, the hand encountered by chance, the path across the common, cutting the grey face of Saturday afternoon. The extraneous disappeared. Geography was indeterminate, the grey streak of common, with gasworks ballooning out of fog, the two greyhounds in a little wind, a flashing of their pink, stretched thighs as they snapped and whined for imaginary game. The relevant details in an otherwise insignificant landscape were Eden Standish and Joe Barnett. There was no actual point in time. Because Saturday was a release from time, from all the preoccupations of behaviour.

On the Saturday common, Joe was talking politics. She heard his voice under the movement of their feet, as feet slurred through the dead grass. Joe discussing revolution in the winter-coloured landscape. She felt very tranquil inside his words.

I might as well save breath, he said. I’m talkin’ to someone that isn’t here.

No, she said, smiled, touching her own warmth, a hand.

She took his hand. They walked across the common in their own silence, in more than words.

There’s something you’ll never understand, Eden. Either you or yours.

What? she asked.

Drastic measures. You wrap your good intentions in blankets. It ain’t your fault. You’re born to blankets.

And Joe Barnett to revolution!

He was putting her at a distance. It came often enough without deliberate effort, she knew. When she wanted, in her own exaggerated eagerness, to strip away any remnant of superfluous prejudice. But this returned in the warning of his voice. The voice alone turned her in a moment to a snobbish schoolgirl, sitting at the end of a dormitory, discussing the habits of servants. This made her bite her lip. Because there was more than this, there was the mere warmth of being, of being with Joe Barnett, in the shape and texture of a hand. She clung desperately to a hand.