He went outside. There were the streets he took, past water, chimney and water, and the little pools of mist that still lay in Battersea, close to earth or water. The world was partly soluble. There were still the faces of Julia and his mother, when the morning hinted at a structure, a form, the great chimneys pointing to their own solid importance, and the gardeners in their shiny gumboots bedding out plants in full bloom. Water wound about the paths. Close to his face a dampness of leaves. A mauve skirt reflected in water had the tone of a remembered voice, the tightly waisted tweed, he plays in a band, she said, isn’t that nice? On a spring morning your own conscience was too brittle. So much was going on that was perhaps pertinent to yourself, as to other people, it was the same striving, the same desire, that linked Joe Barnett and the saxophonist in the night club voice. No more love, she sang. It settled like the mist on water. It became the unconscious comment of a conscience. It ran in syncopated undertone, behind the personal aspiration, beneath the unrelated events in evening papers, slaughter in Guernica, or the clerk hanging by his braces from a peg. And under a spring sky, the chimneys pointed at an illusion of their own solidity and greatness, gardeners pressed the earth round the roots of flowers, as if you could transform with so many heads of bloom what was a sour, sick earth.

Beyond the park were streets of houses. He preferred these to the decorated corpse, rather the closed, unseeing eyes of houses. There was a smell of cooking, of cabbage, of midday activity in the close streets. A huddle of identical houses. Like their tenants, these chose the uniform in which to ignore discrepancy. The women ladling cabbage in their kitchens were almost interchangeable, behind the skin the identical wishes, the pale hopes, the thin desires, spoke from the closed eyes of houses. On a level both different and similar lived Muriel Raphael. He shuddered over this, or more especially the part of himself identified in Muriel. He had to recognize his effigy. Mrs Mounsey is so aware, said Adelaide Blenkinsop. It was one of the expressions with which she seasoned what intellectual conversation she had acquired. But Adelaide herself was singularly unaware, spoke with the mouth of death. Conversation with the Spaniard returned to him, the evening in the street after the party at Adelaide’s, and his own retreat from what had been too pertinent. As if the Spaniard were presenting the choice of the two ways, of the living or the dead. You wanted instinctively to close the eyes, like Adelaide and Gerald, like Muriel, or the ranks of red suburban houses, smothered in a plush complacency. Because the alternative, to recognize the pulse beyond the membrane, the sick heartbeat, or the gangrenous growth, this was too much, even at the risk of sacrificing awareness, and the other moments, the drunken, disorderly passions of existence, that created but at the same time consumed.