So it boiled down to this, the folded hands, the ultimate simplicity in the silence of a room.

I got to go, said Joe. I got to catch my train.

This was no leave-taking. They might have just met. Time plays no part in intimacy. Elyot recognized Joe Barnett in a moment, in the fumbled word, and more than Joe, the many inarticulate moments of many faces, not excluding his own. A world of Joe Barnetts laid itself bare. You forgot the individual in the presence of this. After the groping behind the dry symbols of words, you experienced a sudden revelation in a shabby, insignificant room.

They sat a minute longer by agreement. They sat in silence. Then Elyot Standish was offering advice, the advice to people going abroad, the Channel and the trains. Joe Barnett fiddled with his cap. He was awkward now. He was conscious of the flow of unusual events. But his attitude was surprised, as if this were happening to someone else. At home, on coming in from work, he bent above the tin basin and washed his face. He couldn’t connect himself with the other, this suspension of what he knew.

Good-bye, Joe, Elyot said.

Forms translated themselves into the more acute statement of sound. There were the voices, the doors that closed and opened, the resignation of feet, Julia in slippers returning up the stairs, the plump plump, the protest of loosely fitting slippers. All this went on beyond the room. He has gone now, Elyot said, I am standing here, why, trying to recapture what? It began to be dark. A confusion of shadow in the room. But there is still Eden, he realized. To do this. He experienced a return of exhaustion that was not entirely physical.

He had, he knew, to reach Eden on the telephone. This was imperative. There was something complacent, cynical, in the expression of the little white disc. His purpose there, what he had to say, revolved in the blurred mind, a white enamel circle.

My dear, such shoulders, she said. And the kind of red moustache, the standing-up ginger whiskers that look as if – Hello? That look as if they’re just about to bite.

Two languid female voices soaped at space somewhere on a crossed line.

Thursday, he said, she said. He said a girl. Hello? We’re crossed, Evelyn. Of course it’s safe, darling, and they’ll take us shopping afterwards.

Hello, he said. Is that –? Hello? Eden? he said.

Pitched out into the darkness, he grasped at what was no more than a fluttering, her still impersonal inquiry, fencing with the intervening voices.

Hello, said Eden. Who?

His hands began to sweat in his failure to reach a destination.

Hello, Evelyn, said a voice. Are you there? Of course if you’d rather a cheque. Somebody’s in on this bloody line. I’ll make it clear that a cheque. A lovely, minky cheque. One of them’s Rumanian.

Then it snapped. You heard the ping ping, the glurg. You could pitch your voice, your whole soul, into the cone of darkness, to have it bandied about, a ball of ineffectual down.