She went and sat beside him, to be closer. She sat on the floor against his legs.

Presently the woman came to clear away the things. She began to talk. She had a long, horselike face, discreet and polished as her own parlour furniture. It was very lonely, she said. Her husband was a carrier. There was only the pictures in Rochester, that was six miles, and few buses. You could hear the sea in stormy weather. It boomed against the sea wall, and she wasn’t half afraid, she was from Surrey, she was used to brighter country. Then she gave a last suck to her teeth, and went away.

I want to stay here, Eden said. If she’ll let us.

What? he said. All night?

Yes. All night.

She could feel his hand moving in her hair.

Because, Joe, she said, for once I want to feel we’ve been left behind. I want to feel we’re outside everything, the people we know, the things that are happening. Sometimes I’m afraid circumstances are going to be too much for us. So I want to take this. Just this moment.

She was touching a raw spot, the belly of the dead dog, it came back, the guts lying on the frost. Circumstances, the things that are happening might be too much, she said. But this was certainty, good, to sleep with your girl, to hear the sea the other side of the wall. His hand moved over her scalp. You forgot what was happening outside, outside what you could touch, as the voice suggested over beer. Tonight he would put aside his conscience, she said, he was the world, and all was right and knowable inside this world. He stretched back his arms so that the chair cracked. He bit the mouthpiece of his pipe.

Yes, he smiled, looking down at her. You’re right.

The woman was doubtful. Her mournful horse face scented immorality. She would ask her husband, she said. You heard the footsteps, the words, the silence in the kitchen. It wasn’t usual, she said, but for once, and a cold night, and a long walk, well, she would make the bed.

So it happened that way. Their teeth chattered in the colder room, the brass bedstead shaking with cold, and the washbasin on the rickety stand. And he wanted to touch her. He could not touch her enough. There were too many phrases of tenderness that he wanted to express, could only be expressed by the touching of hands. And darkness. Her face was for a moment clarified and transparent as she put it up to the lamp glass to blow. Then the darkness, that became their bodies, out of the first contact in the cold bed. He smoothed away with his hands, with his arms, in great sweeps. He was like a swimmer surmounting infinite waves, there was no end to the extent of his achievement, he had broken the last bar to possibility.