You can buy me a drink, she said.

She was grateful for his presence, the mere animal presence. She was relieved by the suggestion of physical habit that the presence of Wally Collins implied. To cling to this was essential, to avoid the shadowy ways of introspection.

It’s the light, she said, shaking off a mood.

She squeezed his hand. For the moment she was genuine in gratitude.

Wally, like Julia, diagnosed in physical terms.

We’ll take a weekend, he said. We’ll go down to Brighton.

Her stomach quailed, her eyes dazzled already by the brassy comet of Wally’s Brighton.

Yes, she said. If it weren’t for the business of getting there.

What? he said. Sitting in the train? You got to snap out of yourself.

So it was Wally’s Brighton, the Sunday glaze along the Front, with the reality of a picture postcard over the breakfast table. To breathe the air, it was good, they said, you must do this, as if it were justification for being in Brighton. They stepped out along the asphalt through the satin Jewesses. They walked on asphalt, or the thick carpet smelling of old cigars. In the bedroom, opened by the page, she met the smell of someone else’s powder, someone who had been there before her. It was disgusting, she would have said normally, her face half wrinkled to speak, with Wally behind her prodding the bed, only now the intention lapsed, the comment on other people’s powder, the comment on someone who was not there, because this was the condition of Catherine Standish. Lapsed somewhere, the gestures continued from habit and convention.

Want to go bye-bye? asked Wally. You look done up.

No, she said. Let’s do something. Go somewhere. After all, it’s Brighton.

With an attempt at raucous gaiety which went with the brass bedposts, and what Wally expected. She could not be this enough. The goodness, the kindness of Wally Collins surged forward in heavy waves, the hopeful glance, the hand arranging the collar of her coat. It was still in the convention that the mechanism of Catherine Standish should play its part.

They sat in the bar. They sat among the blondes, these were either ripe or acidulated, and their smooth, glossy men in tweeds.

I came here, said Mrs Standish, I came here before the War. Before Elyot was born.

Or long before that, in some prehistoric age, to which spiritually she still belonged, and her clothes, which she had liked to think timeless, an expression of herself, that now drew the sideways glance.

That’s Harry Simmons, said Wally.

Out of the present, he fidgeted. Or anyway, in the shapeless stream of someone else’s past.

Who ? she asked, as a matter of course.

As if a dark face could make much headway against yesterday afternoon, the soft, withdrawn, pregnant body sitting by an open window, listening to the compliments of Aubrey Silk.

Harry Simmons. Orchestra, he said. There’s a leader for you. Harry’s going places, or I’m not Collins.