Eden was calling. He went on.

Nice little bitch, he said.

I’m beginning to think you’re morbid.

Only a scientific interest. Used to be a bit of a fancier myself.

But his voice couldn’t get used to the words.

The fog shifted on the miles they walked, it split open like a paper bag, spilling a powdered field, a hillside with an oast house, the little feathery branches of a Japanese orchard. But near the sea the land continued sour, the saltmarshes with a crust of ice that lifted sometimes round the roots of reeds, a lid of silver opened on the black mud. They came to a house, a thin, pale house, like the last slice of a house left standing in a field. The house was called Mon Repos. There was a Hovis sign, and a plaster pixie in the parlour window.

It seems the obvious thing to go in, said Eden.

That’s for you to decide, he shrugged.

He turned his back on Mon Repos. She sensed the recurrence of a theme, the inevitable half-crown.

Then I think we shall, she said, touching his arm. There’s no denying the bourgeois appetite.

They sat in the neat horsehair parlour, that smelt of horsehair and mahogany, it had the surprised expression of many family groups, and the hushed air of a vault. Because it was less a room than a repository, for the valued, the inherited, like the plaster pixie, the dome full of coloured sand and the view of Shanklin, the certificate for bell pulling, and the cut-glass cruet in which the salt had caked. At first you talked in a lower voice in deference to the parlour.

I think I’ll take off my boots, whispered Joe.

Yes, she said, doubtfully, looking at the door, the hearth.

So he sat with his feet smoking in the hearth. She filled her mouth with bread and jam. And then the lid was off. It was all up with the parlour.

Why? she said, her voice positively shouted, and full of bread and butter. Why is it never Hovis? she said.

Why should it be Hovis?

But the sign outside. And there never is.

Do you mind? he asked.

No. But I like to know. If a sign.

I expect they just don’t keep it, he said.

That’s one explanation, she said. But it isn’t satisfying.

She looked at him. She could have swallowed him up in one gulp of the bread that wasn’t Hovis. His face was brick-red by firelight, above the paler throat. Her relationship with Joe Barnett gave her life a form, a substance, she could touch it, touch herself, in a way that she never could with Maynard or any of the others, she could not have said this is Eden Standish with any degree of certainty. Of all the faces in the street, how many are there which are not directionless? she wondered. Firelight, and a knowledge of the sterile years, made her compassionate. She walked down Theobalds Road to find a shop with baths. She steadied herself against a railing. Or she lay on her back at Mrs Angelotti’s, watching the pale trumpet of a daffodil stir in a suburban breeze. It was all logical enough, and Mrs Angelotti’s room, part of her own abortive efforts at living, that the sterile years threw back, with the dead child.