Outside a gull blew, flapping coldly, its sea cry. It brought you back out of a half-doze.

We ought to get up, he said.

There’s no ought, she sighed.

A gull, blown inland over the marshes, cried against the window. It seemed close.

Sunday morning you went out and bought the paper. You returned to things. Suddenly he didn’t want to touch her. He wanted to be left alone. There was no longer anything mutual, there was Eden Standish and Joe Barnett. There was no real change had happened over night, except the lapse of conscience, of habit. There was still a sick world mewing at the window-pane, lying with its guts frozen on the sea wall.

Yes, he said, jumping out of bed and putting on his trousers. Can’t let everything slip.

She watched him shake his shoulders. He had receded in so many gestures. His eyes were dark.

Why? she said. Surely this is our day?

Yes, he said. But. I wonder if she’ll have a paper, old Horse Face down there.

She watched his darkened eyes, that did not admit her into a separate world, she had never been there perhaps, except on some night journey into imagined territory. Accept this, she said, accept, there is nothing to be done. And there are always the crumbs of affection, the few glances, the few words. But her throat stifled.

He came and sat on the bed, dressed. He put his hand on her throat.

You can’t tell in this place, he said, what people are about.

He stroked her throat. She could feel a kind of absent tenderness in the hand. He could feel her softer skin, that was like a lapse of conscience. I love Eden, he said, but what can this do for the world, the sick, stinking world that sits in the stomach like a conscience? He was helpless. He was always helpless, unless it was something he could do with his two hands. He could love with his hands, he could shape things out of wood, but the wind slipped through his fingers, the dark, disturbing wind of abstract forces and ideas, the things you sensed and could not deal with. You sat and stared at your hands, that could give no answer but their own emptiness.

No, he said softly, more to himself.

He looked down at her and found she was crying. It made him a bit afraid. He did not know her very well, the other Eden, what she was really like.

16

When her hand shook as she did her hair, when the clock had apparently stopped, when she found on her tongue a fragment of Swinburne dredged from some half-silted and long forgotten emotional well, Mrs Standish supposed she was in love. Even though her rational moments roused her fastidiousness and told her that Wally was normally a sleek and nauseating young man, she was still uneasily prepared for all the furies of love to set upon her and tear her to pieces. Just this once, she said. It made it seem not quite so bad, her own ridiculousness, as she sat facing her reflexion in the glass, as she sat waiting for Wally Collins in the restaurants where no one else would come. Wally was usually late. People are mostly unpunctual, Mrs Standish decided. She had spent her whole life walking round the block and waiting at tables for people who didn’t come. She sat at tables and assessed her own weakness. It was this, above all, that made unpunctuality a crime. It reduced the character of Mrs Standish to so many little pellets of bread.