In the shadow of the gasworks, mouth on mouth, a tired but certain shudder ran along the line of wall. Somewhere a cold dog yelping in the silence. Becoming her mouth, he was in possession of the universe. He could not hold her too firmly, her body, confused by more than the sense of touch. They were in agreement. There was an essential unity, in their bodies, in the almost darkened world, over which the shapes of the gasometers brooded still.

Joe Barnett, standing in Julia Fallon’s kitchen, felt beyond the door the moment of silence. It was like a continued reassurance. Soon she would go upstairs. Soon he would walk along the street homeward. He looked at Julia. He could have kissed her. There was nothing he could do with his hands to express this great contentment. It was part of him, and all around him, as he listened to the answering silence on the stairs.

14

You went down out of the street through a glass tunnel. Your head, your body, so many identical heads on so many identical bodies blossomed in recurrent bouquets, around, above. The faces wore an expression of surprise, even the habitual faces, there was always this about the glass faces that descended with the tunnel into the Café Vendôme. Rejected by glass, grouped in the little silver foyer with its smaller bar, the faces resented their transitory surprise. After all, it was chic, and the Vendôme, and the emotion of surprise was not chic, it presupposed the unexpected, there was nothing unexpected in the foyer at the Vendôme. The man who gnawed his fingers at the cloaks, smelt the kippers he had eaten at six. It was usual to eat kippers at six. It was usual to glance through the TO LET and PERSONAL columns before taking the bus to the Vendôme. By supper-time, which was the supper-time of clients, outside the peelings of their overcoats, the kippers had lapsed, except the smell, which was also usual, like the faces you bowed in. The man at the cloaks yawned. Ice jostled vaguely on the fringes of his mind. He knew, without turning, enough about the movements of glass, or the tight, crouching behinds that topped a row of stools. People gathered in the foyer with an air of pretending they were not gathering at all. The hand on tie. The cold, composed, women’s voices rising from behind the strands of pearls. They knew all the answers, the women’s voices. These, like their handbags, could meet any emergency.

Farther in, the balcony contained the light, that was also music, the light interpreted the music, tuned with a cunning consistence, you looked down from the comparative darkness of the balcony into the saucer of light that contained also the sluggish figures of the dance, arbitrary in detail, but singularly similar in purpose. You pressed your belly, you felt the retaliating pressure of the thighs. Somewhere in the bones the music flowed, turgid, only just liquid, seeped along the slack muscles, flowed in a warm wave over the naked back. Towards midnight the dance at the Vendôme only just repudiated the erotic act, only momentarily, in a forest of almost visible harmonies. Through these the dancers moved. The voice glanced along the cheek. The debutantes surrendered their bodies with a willing shudder into the arms of the Wild Boars, sensed the approach of a moustache. And the music pressed, pressed, the sad and gummy tendrils of the saxophones a rattle of sultry thunder in the drums, great clusters of orchidaceous light stirred in the tonal undergrowth that rustled round the legs, that struck an answering note from sequin or from tulle, or the taut black cloth covering the expectant calves.