This morning it was as clear as glass, if the choice no less bewildering. To recognize the sickness and accept the ecstasy. He could not walk far enough, hold the miles between himself and what he saw. Standing still, the muscles quivered, not altogether with the distance.

At home it was a sober afternoon to which the key returned him. Except that the voices, the voices he heard from the kitchen, rose, then stopped, waited. He found himself waiting outside on the landing, knew there was something that had to be faced. Now, he said. He was tired, almost indifferent.

Julia came out, her face still red, but open. He could see now, there was no denial, that Julia had been crying.

It’s Joe, she said.

It might have moved at the back of his mind, her saying. Joe Barnett pitched forward, with sudden relevance, either to a dream dreamt but unremembered, or to the whole conscious morning, Joe Barnett as undertone.

He wants to see you, said Julia. He’s come.

Her voice snapped.

Yes, he said. All right, Julia.

Beyond her Joe Barnett in the kitchen dressed unfamiliarly in Sunday clothes.

Come on, Joe, he said. We’ll go in here.

It was almost as if all this had been expected, and you found your hand on the nearest door, the drawing-room door, by appointment. Either it was this, the prearranged, or else you were tired. It was the indifference of physical exhaustion. But he thought not.

Joe Barnett sat on an awkward chair, one of the gilt chairs that groaned, or the cloth of the Sunday suit, stretched tight, firmly, across his thighs. Joe Barnett sat holding his cap between his legs, like some peace offering for intrusion. The hands offered this before words. You could watch a rallying of words beyond the face, before they had quite assembled. But on this afternoon, unlike the other afternoon, in the room upstairs, which perhaps was why you had chosen the drawing-room now, there was no specific barrier, the tight inner constriction that comes with the wrong moment. Because there are the moments when there is no channel of communication. Nothing will open this. You are faced with the shuttered eyes, the closed skull. But not now, you felt. In repose, in silence, it was only a matter of time, and silence itself soothed, both Elyot Standish and Joe Barnett. They were closely united. The distance of the carpet was cancelled out

I’m goin’ away, Elyot, said Joe.

For the first time the name, that you did not question, it seemed natural enough. In the present state there was nothing that was not direct, expected. Unless a suspicion, the way a fear starts up, that you wanted to delay. Elyot Standish resented an intimacy that proposed at once to destroy itself.

I been thinkin’. I got to go.

The voice was heavy, as if still in the process of decision, but unguarded, it offered itself quite humbly in its process of still deliberating thought.