Shoulder to shoulder, Elyot and Muriel sat over cold quail. The voice drew itself out in a long, aching ribbon of banality, that was still a comment on its own doing.

No more love,
It happens to be the fashun,
No more love,
I’ve shot my bolt on pashun.
Burn up the roses,
Blo-how the noses,
Look in the ice-box, baby.
No one supposes
That fella Moses
Was such a bulrush, baby.
No more love,
No more memoree.
So take a chance on gin,
A substitute for sin,
With meee – –

The singer’s words translated themselves into the breathing, the occasional laughter of Muriel Raphael. Sideways, at close quarters, the withdrawn light had stripped her face to the bones against which he sat. And Muriel’s laughter stripping the song to its last layer of banality. It was the knowingness that began to appal. You began to long for the opaque condition of what Muriel would call the moron, the steamy atmosphere of the high teas at Lyons, banter among the cabbages, the fumbling rather than the direct approach. To feel bewildered without knowing why. But Muriel knew, her eyes paraded in a world of implied knowledge, quite apart from, behind the words she used.

She was whispering something now, he heard, something about Ersatz love that he inclined his ear to receive. No doubt funny. You laughed without effort, without bothering to piece a fragmentary remark. The purpose of the Café Vendôme was not verbal lucidity, but the contracted thigh. Under the table Muriel’s leg lay along his own. His hand brushed the little scabbard of glass and shells.

Shall we stay or go, Muriel? he asked, in the silence after songs.

You could feel her hesitate, deliberate some refinement in attack.

Look, she said, there’s Brenda Askew. Everything but the girdle of chastity.

Switched like this in words, her body still gave him the ultimate attention.

Wally Collins felt dry. Upstairs, the bar reflected the foreheads that almost touched in early morning intimacy, as the voices launched after old sorrows, as the mind raked the muck for another sally. The bar reflected Wally upside down, his hand tipping an inverted glass, and the black, inverted tulip of a torso with its protruding pistil of a head. Jesus, but it felt good, the shock of liquor on the dry throat. And the second. You began to settle into things. You put a hand upon a shoulder. A foreign eye swam up and promised friendship. Wally Collins could make friends. There was nothing he wouldn’t promise in the name of friendship, in a world of friends. Wally, they said, was a good chap, or a swell egg, according to where he was. Do you remember how, in September, Wally hummed. His jaw shone like an afternoon shave. The eyes of women from the LADIES undressed politely in so many glances, passed, leaving him to pick up the clothes. He was very light on the balls of his feet. He felt all rib and muscle. In the dough, he could have gone out and bought up something for someone, something in a velvet case.