A door banged in Grosvenor Gardens. The sound shook the wet trees.

Muriel Raphael. His memory rattled like a dice box. He had forgotten to speak, to thank her for the glass box.

15

They were finishing the bread and cheese slowly, after walking. She watched him gather up the crumbs on the ends of his fingers, the fingers pressed together, stamping on the crumbs, very matter-of-fact. Outside this, the clang of the fruit machine, the collision of silver balls on the pin-game table. All the activity of the saloon bar lapped them round. Peppermint and rum stood beyond the haze, the woman in the toupet drawing an endless, thoughtful towel out of the pint glass. All their Saturday afternoons were like this. They were part of them, and yet not. Just as you were part of a relationship you made, the many little contacts, and the phrases of conversation, without penetrating really beyond the outer skins of the personality. She looked at Joe. She was as far distant again as the sound of the pin-balls from her own conscious ear.

Outside, fog had released the building from any dependence on the land. It floated foundationless in the sea mist, where birds cried, and the sudden apparition of a gull skimmed the vestige of a mudbank. You took the evidence of a finite world on trust, from newspapers read in public houses, the apparent fact of Spain or China. Fog and the floating banks of mud denied such evidence. And the woman at the bar, unwinding her thoughtful skein of mist out of the pint glass.

Joe Barnett cleared his throat.

He could put out his hand and touch just so much certainty, the intimate, personal world they made. He loved Eden Standish, not in so many words, he never stopped to formulate this, it was sure enough, like meeting again, you expected this, Saturday afternoon and Sunday, you couldn’t cut out the end of the week. He believed in rightness, she said, giving him this, she had given it to him with her own voice, he believed in the living as opposed to the dead. This was also what made him ache sometimes in the pit of his stomach. He read the newspapers and felt sick. The certainty of your own life, the day to day in Crick’s workshop, the Saturdays with Eden, were no guarantee against the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. This became the sad, sick, stinking world. He was responsible in a way. But his hands were helpless, could not cope.

He finished up the last of a scattering of crumbs. On the face of the table the newspaper map, with the names you couldn’t pronounce, the Spanish names. This was a dagos’ war, they said, the voices in bars, disclaiming any responsibility before the next bitter. The pin-balls scurried for shelter in the familiar warren. But there was no getting round the queer, drawn-out Spanish names and the black line that was no river.