There was a silence of frost in the room. Beyond it a dull motion of the sea. She lay and listened to it some time, through his exhausted breathing, he was asleep now, she knew, she could feel his body lie heavy against her. Eden Standish closed her eyes. She could not, did not want to sleep. She was too febrile, discomposed, this throbbing of tenderness that she had become, and to which there was no end. She had repudiated anything of her that remained in memory. She was content to be this creature the moment had made, to live in a world of immediate sensation. Out of the darkness, out of his breathing came the dull answer of the sea. But in undertone. As if she had flooded the world with her own importance, with her own love. To flood the world, she sighed, her face against his warm skin, to draw back warmth into the body of the world, to chafe its limbs with love. Oh dear, she sighed sleepily, I am impotent, quite impotent, but in love, in love, this has happened, and this, and this, then why not. She drifted in a bell-tone that came from seaward. Then there was just the sound of frost.

Somebody rattled on the door with a can of water.

It was a long way back, a long way into the now white room, it was the light off frost, or snow. She pushed sleep back from her face, found she was there still. She watched a sleeping face. It was very close. In sleep it allowed itself to be possessed, a no longer separate world that she touched in thought, protected with her own solicitude. Outside their own immediate warmth it was cold. She got out of bed into the cold of the room, still naked, felt it on her skin without recoiling, she was a pillar of warmth from which the cold receded, and the landscape, the stretch of barren marsh on which a little snow had fallen, and the black line of a canal, these trembled through the window frame in a glow of Eden Standish, in the face of her pervasive, irrepressible warmth.

From the bed he asked her what she was doing.

Nothing, she said. Looking. And most probably catching cold.

She came back into the bed so that he could touch her again. She wanted to communicate her own contentment and warmth.

Waking into morning Joe Barnett blinked his eyes. It was the glare off snow. It was also surprise at a lapse in habit. Going downstairs now, he would have made a cup of tea in his shirtsleeves, bought and looked at the Sunday paper, caught on to the thread of things. Sleeping with Eden Standish had broken this. He loved her. Did he sleep with his girl, asked the boy Mo, not in so many words, but insinuating like, because what were girls if not. The boy Mo made him feel inexperienced, uneasy. The darkness was filled with a hot panting, laughter stifled against walls. A puzzling business altogether. So he didn’t encourage the boy Mo, said it was none of his business, or something like that. But sleeping with Eden Standish, it happened natural enough, like meeting again. Sunday lay becalmed in a pool of frozen light. She had done this. She had smoothed out any ripple with her hand. To lie like this, the mouth on mouth. To bring yourself closer. Outside this there was no business that was any business of yours.