Like an echo, was what you felt. Elyot Standish hung up a smile. He had become the echo of Muriel Raphael. Or more tangibly, a possession. Out of indifference, you didn’t object, except in moments of exasperation, when you had hoped to penetrate a little deeper, to discover a suspected core, you found that you were touching glass. The just opaque Bristol box remained on the mantelpiece, a constant reminder of Muriel. This both irritated and roused, to take it in the hands. It was, of course, absurd. Muriel made no promise that she didn’t carry out. But sometimes, in frustration, he could have broken more than the passive elegance of glass, he wanted to press with his hands, rouse an element of fear or surprise, some sign of the spontaneous. Then it became too easy to counter this with a confession: This is what I have chosen, this is what I have encouraged.

This was Elyot Standish at thirty. But his face didn’t betray him. The kind of people who say rashly, oh yes, Elyot Standish, we know him well, without stopping to think what this means, accepted the face as beginning and end. It was also perhaps more comfortable. Second glances are thin ice. It was safer, easier, to make the kind of general conversation that you make at parties, and this Elyot could make very well when he liked, pleasant, and cultivated, and forgotten with the dry martinis. Elyot Standish could be an asset to a party. Except when he grew silent. This happened. He found himself standing alone in the corner of the room.

There’s a point where you freeze people off, Muriel said.

It was the moment after people had gone, when the room had not yet recovered, there were glasses and broken sausage sticks. He watched her calculating hand. As if she were testing on a bracelet just how much she could say, one two three, and then no farther. She was as calculating as a cat.

There’s a point, he said, where there’s no more virtue in words. The only alternative is silence. But silence, of course, is immoral. A kind of private vice.

The room contracted in a yawn. He watched the arc her arms made. He was too well acquainted, he decided, with all Muriel’s gestures. She bored him, not that this rankled, not half as much as to realize he bored her in return.

Quite, she said. But we mustn’t indulge our vices in public.

A hand reached out to patronize.

Don’t think for a moment, she sighed – it came as a reassuring afterthought, perched on the tail of a yawn – don’t think I don’t understand, Elyot, because of course, darling, I do.

She opened her eyes in emphasis. He could feel the thin bones of her hand, claiming an intimacy of mind and body that no doubt existed, even down to the last flicker of boredom experienced by two people that habit kept united.

But to the general public, she said, silence can be opaque.