In a second room, their two bodies took the shapes of passion. In a darkness that he felt unnecessary. It was still the same object, the same room, in spite of the illusion that forced itself, the illusion of change, and loss, and discovery, in spite of the little secret cries, it was a bitter mouth. Somewhere at the end of this dark perspective there was the light that removed itself, just out of reach, the face remembered from a dream. It began to sicken him. The sweat of his own body. The shape of his ribs. He lay passive, withdrawn, the whole core remote. He touched her and she was remote too, as impersonal as an accomplished act.

There, she said, in the light. You can give me a cigarette.

Muriel Raphael lay on the bed, making no secret of her body. The brown skin was almost without shadows. It was time he went, they both agreed, in silence. She had slipped back amongst her own possessions.

Give me a ring, Elyot, she said, as if she were establishing a prerogative.

Out of his own distaste returned the probability that he would. Because there was this understanding, the common ground of rational sensuality. The skin that he touched in leaving acknowledged this. It was without surprise or comment. Ash had fallen between her breasts.

Outside, an early wind came up through railings and hit him in the stomach. The empty pavilion in Berkeley Square was emptier in silence, it led the unconvincing life of the early morning shapes, the abandoned houses, the black streets. He began to move along these streets. He was his own shadow, the surfeited cat pushing through the area railing. It was some other person, some other time, in the German street, the white oxen in the vegetable carts, some other sky touching a renaissance gable. Unfair to resurrect this now, but it came in the face of a February wind, the promise against the fulfilment. Getting up early in the lowing of white oxen, his hands trembled for a something, for a mystery behind the wall, that was still untouched. The days were full of objects that hinted at a correspondence. You held your breath a minute before opening a door. The drop shuddered on the geranium leaf. Now he was sick of his bones, and the stubble on bones that he touched, he half suspected two hollows in his skull.

A sight for a sore conscience, he thought, and the woman in the striped dress, was it, her no more passion, no more memoree, only the touch of sheets in a shallow present, the little saucer in the brown thigh. No more love, he sang, softened to his own vicinity and his own annoyance, because what was love, and a song, if not an equation for a voice and two bodies ? He wanted it out of his head. Because it was both facile and abstruse. Eden, he had forgotten, how she looked, to remember feature by feature Eden’s face, Eden’s life, that went on still behind closed doors, with sudden indications in a glance. Eden, he said. There was a sickness, a sadness in the distance, in his own bones. Or how did Mother, humming a tune, know, with Aubrey Silk, each in a sort of champagne desperation, each in their own way, fulfil the stinking moral of a little song. Feet passed, the ragged feet, the face without questions. Burn up the roses. He hated that song. He hated it because it was both meaningless and pointed. Like the thin sky that began to bind the roofs of houses. It stretched there almost transparent, thin, with some withdrawn purpose, lighting the thin, withdrawn face of the beggar on ragged feet. He wanted to put up his hands, to split the thin membrane of the sky, supposing, supposing there were some clue.