Sometimes, she said, you mean to underline the difference.

The wind was too cold to hot eyes, the horizon a burning sepia.

It’s a good job as some of us are realists, Eden Standish. In more than politics.

Politics! she said. I’m sick to death of politics!

Because now that she had let this fall, out of a full conscience, it was true. So much dead grass that the feet slurred through. There was a big drumming and throbbing that became her ears. The two brooding gasometers that her eyes distorted, these were waiting to burst.

I guessed that, he said. I guessed that right from the first moments. Some folks take to crossword puzzles.

The whole horizon tipped up, with its fringe of little jagged houses. It was whirling. It was wheeling. Her stomach clung to the small of her back, for want of intermediary substance. But out of this physical collapse, she had to rescue the truth, which was more than a small personal truth, she had her positive conviction, she had played the game of words, she had sat in many halls on the cold, collapsible chairs to the limits of self-persuasion, but underneath the act remained a certainty.

Yes, she said. Sick. Sick. Of politics. The political lie.

Her voice reeled. She could feel her own cold sweat. She was becoming something of which she was afraid.

I believe, Joe, but not in the parties of politics, the exchange of one party for another, which isn’t any exchange at all. Oh, I can believe, as sure as I can breathe, feel, in the necessity for change. But it’s a change from wrong to right, which is nothing to do with category. I can believe in right as passionately as I have it in me to live. This is what I have to express, with you, anyone, with everyone who has the same conviction. But passionately, Joe. We were not born to indifference. Indifference denies all the evidence of life. This is what I want to believe. I want to unite those who have the capacity for living, in any circumstance, and make it the one circumstance. I want to oppose them to the destroyers, to the dealers in words, to the diseased, to the most fatally diseased – the indifferent. That can be the only order. Without ideological labels. Labels set a limit at once. And there is no limit to man.

She fell back into the exhaustion that follows extreme effort. They were walking, she knew. Somewhere houses built a skyward pattern. At the foot of the gasometers a lamp, just lit, flashed across a rockery built round the steel roots, the little, spiky, sturdy leaves of ice-plant struggling in a smell of gas. Soon it would be quite dark. The legs ached.

Joe Barnett was silent. He carried her hand, that she let him carry, after the quick spasm of passion that came with her words, it lay dead. But he felt warm touching her hand. There was a rightness in this. There was a little zone of peace and rightness through which they trod in the shadow of the gasworks. It was outside him and part of him, in a way he did not trouble to explain. It sat on the relaxed face. He could feel it in the stomach. It was asking to be acknowledged, shared.