Let’s get out of this, he said.

His hand produced a few cold pennies that turned hot in his hand.

Here’s a contribution, she said, making it casual, very casual, as if she had picked up a half-crown from the floor, anybody’s half-crown.

He often felt this, Eden trying to ignore a situation.

The fog’ll lift perhaps, said the woman at the bar.

It expected no answer, addressed to no one in the room.

Yes, she sighed. It’s terrible.

They went outside to where frost had stiffened the mud holes on the sea wall. The coast was a wavering edge of frost, above the mud, above the saltmarshes. And the voice was too clear, too stiff with frost and purpose. Eden’s voice attempting a conventional gaiety to gloss over a difficult situation. Just because a half-crown had pushed her back on an island of privilege and prejudice.

I hate that half-crown, she said, with a kind of light grimness. It’s going to make me bourgeois for the rest of the afternoon.

He laughed and touched her face with his hand.

You’re all right that way, he laughed.

But he settled back, she could feel, whether it was the incident or not, into a shell of resistance. She listened to their feet. She listened to a cold bird. The physical fact of their being on the sea wall, the common warmth of their bodies, on her cheek still the roughness of his fingers, these were a source of tranquillity that let her close her eyes in safety. But the worlds that stood apart, the less material worlds, infinitely separate, these were what frightened her, these were what she wanted to possess.

I’d like to get lost, she said.

In all this frost?

Oh, we might find something, she said. A house.

With H. and C. in the bedroom. You’re that sort of an escapist, Eden Standish.

She laughed. Perhaps. But to escape with Joe Barnett to some remote acre, to remove anything that might account for the apartness of those infinitely separate worlds. Oh Lord, she sighed, but I am happy, is there no virtue in pure happiness, always this desire to over-reach it?

Oh, look out, Joe, she said. How, how disgusting!

It was the body of a dog that his foot kicked as they came along the path, a little, indeterminate terrier bitch, who had staked herself in the marshes. The guts hung out through the belly fur. The nose was wrinkled in a last shudder of pain. His foot made a dull thumping noise on the frozen body of the dog. He stood there prodding it with his foot.

Don’t, said Eden.

She’s done for all right, he said.

Eden began to go on.

Leave her, Joe, she called.

Done for. The festoon of helpless guts torn out like the last existing privacy. The dog disgusted him, but he had to look, as if it had a bearing on himself, the sickness in his own stomach. He made himself look. But he spat on the ground. His mother went to chapel. She expected death. To lie on the ground with your guts hanging out. Man was born to this, no other dignity, announced the map of Spain, or the voice of his mother retailing a laying out. But there was a dignity he was jealous of, his own body, his privacy of thought. This was what made him tremble when he read of the killings in Spain or saw the body of the dead dog.