Hello?

It came, Eden’s voice, suddenly close inside his ear.

Eden? he said. It’s Elyot. Something’s happened. I’ve got to see –

Already defensive, he could sense, gathering, before making her reply.

I’m going out to dinner, she said.

Yes, but something. I’ve got to see. Just for a minute, he asked.

He waited for a silence to break.

All right. For a minute. If you think.

As if she wanted to postpone. He knew. He could see the tightening of Eden’s mouth.

I’ll come straight over, he said.

She was putting on her hat in a room at the back, through the shop, a small cupboard of a room, filled with the bills, the invoices, the slick publishing circulars, and a typewriter’s dominating hulk. She was pulling on one of the rather shapeless, shabby, unfashionable felt hats that occasionally she chose to wear. Looking in the glass, the mouth, against its own inclination, was making this an occasion. He noticed that her mouth was red. She held her face away from him, which the glass returned in spite, the drawn, defensive expression of Eden. More than this he seldom saw, apart from the unguarded moments, the evening for instance in Crick’s workshop, when Eden smouldered into a revealed existence of her own. Now the skin was haggard on her cheek, the ash of many dead emotions that he hadn’t seen.

They walked out into the street. The crowd pushed her against his shoulder, associating their bodies, making a relationship. Otherwise this didn’t exist. They were two unacquainted entities walking on the edge of Bloomsbury in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road.

We must find somewhere, she said, somewhere for the messenger to do his stuff.

The unrelated faces of a crowd were more personal than Eden’s voice. The face of a woman billowed, its pale paper bag, and the mouth greasy from fried fish. You could almost smell the scarlet neon, a hot smell of the synthetic oil, with the gusts of violet from an amusement arcade.

It was always the messenger, she said, who had the best bit of the play.

She turned, thoughtful, to face what she couldn’t avoid.

Where do you want? she asked.

Let’s go somewhere quiet, he said.

They stood in a draught of buses. Their feet planted, they were the one static, deliberating point in an otherwise volatile neighbourhood. If you excepted thought. Her mind, beyond the eyes, he saw, floated with surmise.

Is it that kind of a message? she asked.

Well, he said, played for time. It’s not what you –

Then we’ll go in here, she said quickly. At least we shall find noise.

Which was not so much perversity as Eden taking cover. He followed her, drawn in beyond the door, into the white glare, the aching marble planes of the Tottenham Court Lyons. She walked very straight to the table that she picked out. The orchestra was playing Grieg as if it had never stopped, from the last time, and the time before, this was as permanent as marble, ‘Anitra’s Dance’ in Lyons.