They were eating dinner, in a silence, in the shreds of insignificant conversation that fell plateward. Elyot was glad of this banality of conversation, just as there are moments for the carpet slippers and an easy chair. Now particularly. To relax after the glassy tension of intimacy with Muriel. So you allowed the rub of unimportant words that polished the undistinguished table, which was one of those timeless pieces his mother collected indiscriminately, or these became timeless in the jumble of a house, whether French rococo or amorphous Morris. How much these depended on his mother herself, he did not know. He looked at the offering of a face across the table, or the little that this disclosed, the cardboard face on which somebody had chalked with a flamboyant hand. It had undergone several metamorphoses. He could space the periods of his mother’s face, right down to the present, and his own guilt, because it made him guilty, looking at a face, to find it suddenly lodged in the foreground on the lifting of his own indifference. People were so dependent on what you made them, lapsing through lack of attention into a state that was almost non-existence. Out of such a state, with a shock, he received a chalky, cardboard face. It was quite dead, and the words dead that fell from the dry lips, these fluttered in a chalky dust. He noticed the bluish veins in the eyeballs. She put up a hand from habit to touch her hair, that was glued round the forehead in little whorls. The curls made him sense a degree of effort he had never suspected in his mother’s life.

A meeting I went to, Connie was saying. A meeting about Spain.

This passion the English have for sitting in halls, said Mrs Standish.

Because she was uneasy, under Elyot’s eyes, inquiring too far, asking answers to questions that she couldn’t give.

Connie looked too bright, too upright, bristling with cudgels for other people.

We have our sense of responsibility, she said.

When it suits us. Mrs Standish tapped. When it suits us to martyrize ourselves in draughty halls. Then we go to bed with a cold, and feel we’ve contributed something towards a cause.

It was unjust, as intentionally unjust as Mrs Standish could make a remark, that brought a smart to the eyes. Connie Tiarks held her tongue. She was very good at doing this. Circumstances had taught her it was best. She sat smoothing her woollen costume, a costume of an uncomplaining beige.

Elyot laughed. But it was not the laughter of concentration, of approval, he could not concentrate on his mother’s words, these pointed nowhere, he laughed because it was the place to laugh. His mouth closed on this dubious contribution. In repose she looked like an old and rather scurvy clown, that she half recognized herself, in his eyes, they were playing out a scene between them in front of the unconscious audience of Connie Tiarks. You have seen too much, and for the first time, Mrs Standish seemed to say. The train of a gold dress surged in a molten wave across an upper landing. Or she stooped in the garden to pick off the withered heads of flowers, and the bronze skirt opened on the frozen spikes of flowers that gave it the shape and tension of part of an umbrella. Yes, you can look, said Mrs Standish, there is no longer the time, the necessity for deception. There was no longer the glitter, the early morning excitement of frost. The curtains in the dining-room had faded, leaving on a pale background a pattern of small salient sprigs.