He swayed. He moved from a pivot on his seat. Out of this grew the purpose of his being, the nightly blossoming of Wally Collins. Governed by the leader’s hand, this set no definite limit to his own existence, as the music glugged out, he lifted his feet, only just, in a sweet, sticky fluid, the drawn-out, sticky strings of music elongated from his fingers and the stops. He was a little drunk without wine, sexually satisfied without sex, he had that warm throbbing in the belly, in his genitals a kind of numb urgency. This made him sit forward on his chair. His mouth was round, moist. The veins in relief upon his neck, the fixed eyes, could not give too much in concentration to some supreme, orgasmic moment in the music. He floated, like the lavender he used, like the images on movie screens, all these that were the dissolved components of a Wally Collins, and the unmade bed at Godiva Mansions, and evenings in Manhattan taxi-cabs, the hand beneath a skirt.

Mrs Standish tried to focus this head. It blurred. Its distance, its unconsciousness, brought it closer in her own mind to her own uneasiness. Because it would remain distant, with all those dim, unformulated desires, which one never did succeed in focusing. She returned quickly to Aubrey Silk. Awful if Aubrey were to guess.

Disgusting really, she said.

What?

It came with an effort, back to the present, in a puff of smoke.

Why, all this, said Mrs Standish. The caricature of – of oneself.

She was safe again behind the language she had learnt to speak on her afternoons.

If one knew, Aubrey said. But I’ve never made up my mind, Catherine, which of your turns is not a turn.

My dear, don’t! You make me feel like a seal.

Beating the little cymbals, she had seen in a circus, or wearing the little bonnet, anything but itself, the essential seal. Still, she was safe, safe, from her own conscience, or from Aubrey Silk, she could look sideways again, it was time, casually enough, to focus a head.

In this operation Mrs Standish encountered Elyot on the distant stairs. She looked at her son with a chilly feeling of annoyance. She shook her bare shoulders, as if someone would try to spoil, the way one’s children could spoil, with too direct a remark or glance. She looked at Elyot descending into light, discreetly black, he was made for black, and with him Muriel Raphael.

Muriel has a handsome figure, said Mrs Standish, in a tone of voice that suggested she was just about to take back what she had given. If only, she added, someone would teach her where it begins.

Muriel moved in the oblivion of a woman getting to her table, of the chic woman, in a non-existent situation, in an almost non-existent room. Browner against her dress, she had she knew, that amusing cachet, she had paid for it at Schiaparelli’s, she was ready for the commentary of eyes. But prepared, she also failed to notice, she might have worn sackcloth, not the scarlet nipple embroidered on her left breast, not the little dagger at her waist made of glass and shells. Shells were also in her hair, almost an encrusted bowler hat. She sat and began to arrange her face, holding a small mirror in which to preen a great macaw, smoothing the mauve lids, grooming the plumage with a scarlet claw. Other people, and her mirror, often disparaged this face, but you wondered sometimes if Muriel chose to give them deliberate cause.