In between, the hours and days when she resumed her own life, these were an ashy colour. Her head gaped open at eleven o’clock. She felt pains in her body. If only, she said, the telephone, but anyway, he said five.

It’s the doctor you want, Julia said.

Julia watching from doorways made you turn away, as if Julia’s eye.

Go away, Julia, you said.

You couldn’t cope with the watchful eye.

I tell you what, said Julia. I’ll make you a cup of tea.

But you wanted to be left alone, not Julia insisting on bodily ills, as if these were more than a symptom. Julia’s face was your own conscience, pointing towards a more orderly past, scrubbed, and tangible, and clean. And it was too much, the effort of justification, of self-defence.

I shall have to cultivate patience, said Mrs Standish. This decision translated itself to her face in an expression that was too sweet, quite unreal, because deliberately chosen. Like some twentieth-century martyr waiting hopefully for a stake. She sat with her expression, she sat in the afternoon, often in the deserted balcony of the Café Vendôme, only half listened to the numbers they were running through, her mind picked at the gluey debris left by the saxophones. Faces glanced. But she did not respond. It was understood, her relationship to the Boys, without the elaborations of introduction. They looked at her. They accepted. She was as explicit as a bit of private life can be. Wally’s bit. Wally’s old girl.

So she continued to sit on the edge. She sat at one of the little bare tables that no tablecloth disguised, the chipped gilt, the stains. Night receded from the Café Vendôme leaving a rime of nostalgic desolation. Waiters brushed past, or the shadows of waiters, their dirty singlets, their pale skins. There was no flourish to the gestures of the daylight waiters. It made you feel cast up, together with the pale waiters, the empty tables, a flotsam of dead sensation from the night before. Or from many nights, or days and nights, the Catherine Standish of the Louis XV bergère, the Kitty Goose of the imitation furs. Willy, they said, was dead. Willy and Wally. It was like a vaudeville act. If she had been drinking, she might have laughed. But not by day, by the ash-coloured light of the Vendôme. Thought had a grey tinge. It was the face of the mother-in-law, and the Gothic smile, that confirmed its first judgement out of a tomb. Old Mrs Standish, Willy, the frightfulness of death, had made her shudder when younger. Her hands hesitated in opening the letters that might announce a death. There was something terrifying about involuntary extinction. Before you realized that destruction self-imposed and chosen, in the ash-coloured afternoons at the Vendôme, on the unmade bed at Godiva Mansions, was the ultimate negation.

Mrs Standish burnt her fingers on what remained of her cigarette.

You look kind of down, Wally said.

The notes were extinguished. The music dispersed on its several ways.