Connie sat outside the playing of this scene. She sat and nursed the cause of Loyalist Spain. The universal problem was far distant from the personal, he felt. There was an accusing selflessness in the motion of the stumpy hands.

Mrs Standish coughed. She frowned. She swallowed down a trace of phlegm that had risen into her mouth.

We’ll go into the drawing-room, she said.

Meekly enough, Connie got up and followed, the resentment clamped down, not only the resentment of an evening, but of many, but right down to childhood, her shame that spread hot and moist on Mrs Macarthy’s plush couch. I am weak and despicable, she said, only the weak and despicable would return for fresh humiliation, either from Elyot or Mrs Standish, each stands in a different way for a refinement in the art of humiliating. Mrs Standish touched a switch. She transformed firelight into the familiar outline of a room. You wanted to invent an excuse, a headache or Mrs Lassiter, against the onrush of electric light. Instead you would sit, you would wait for the next twist, or to gather up an unconscious smile that he dropped for anyone to take.

There is a consuming importance about the tenderness you haven’t been asked to give. It becomes the all-important. Try to reduce it to the abstract, a mere state of disinterestedness in the presence of its object, and at once it takes a shape, it becomes a string of words, the things you have formed but never said, the gesture of a hand that could illustrate, if allowed, touch a face into awareness of what it so foolishly, carelessly rejects. My dearest, my darling Elyot, wrote Connie Tiarks mentally, the many letters that mentally she tore up. Or she looked at him. It was not possible not to know, sitting within reach, that an emotional explosion might very easily take place. But looking at him she did know it was just as possible. If the Himalayas stretched between, the distance could not be greater. This brought it on again, with greater intensity, the spasm of obsession. She wondered it didn’t destroy the room, bring it about their heads in a rain of fractured glass and wood.

Mrs Standish sat without composure in the Louis XV bergère. It was like sitting at the end of a telescope. She watched the two intensified figures of Elyot and Connie Tiarks. It was so clear, the activity of other people, right at the end of the telescope. But was it possible, seeing, to reach out and arrange? She thought not, even if she herself hadn’t reached a state of preoccupation and passivity. On the edge of this the clock ticked. You watched the spidery, possessive hands.

When it was time for Connie to go, for her customary announcement, she slid forward awkwardly on her chair, she said she had enjoyed herself, it was kind, it was all pure Connie Tiarks, or what she had been taught to offer of herself. Then she went to put on her hat. It was a kind of beige tam o’ shanter hat, with an apologetic, droopy bow, put there, it seemed, by accident, the whole undeniably found in a sale. You wondered sometimes, or Elyot wondered, how much a Connie Tiarks was conscious of the things she wore. Probably not. A Connie Tiarks with her selfless indignation for the lost causes. You could not imagine a Connie Tiarks dwelling on the personal detail, whether a subjective passion or just a hat. Connie’s hat made him shudder. It was such an outspoken comment on her own life.