Coffee, she said. Two coffees. Oh, she said. White? Yes. White.

But this was of secondary importance, beside the convention of coffee. Coffee was the price of confession, of confidence, of imparted knowledge. The undrunk, cooling coffee on the tables at Lyons, this poured in torrents down the ages, he felt, generously overwhelming the exchanged remarks.

Now, she said, looking, trying to read in the pale contents of a cup. Now you can fire away.

His fingers moved by strings. A rheumaticky pizzicato that was Grieg.

Joe came to see me, he said in a breath.

Sugar for a moment disturbed her cup. She sat and watched it disappear.

He wanted me to tell you he was leaving for Spain. He dropped in on his way. He wanted me to tell –

It rose at her in a surge, out of the milky pretence of coffee, the paralysing wave of violins. A train went rocketing across a marble field, over the darkened plain of France. It racked her body, the sharp physical spasm she could feel. As if at first the memory of the physical were the most difficult to bear, the body looming again in the shadow of the gasworks, or the white light of frost on a sleeping shoulder. She wanted to protest. Because this must not be taken away. She wanted to resist with her hands. When there was no tangible object to which you could protest, except the dull slabs of distant marble. Falling asleep at night in trains, she felt the world crumble. There was very little substance in the world. A cold star, flat as the star on a Christmas tree. At night the trains whistled into air, and the face jolting southward, under the skin the suspended blood. Walking over dead grass, she talked about right and wrong, glibly, as abstract concepts. But this was the expression of rightness, the southward face, the beginning in an end, rather than the end of a beginning. If you could accept the personal end. She had to, had to cultivate acceptance. There is no Eden Standish, just as there is no Joe Barnett, you said. There is more than this, there is the stock of positive acts and convictions that two people infuse into the dying body of the world, their more than blood. Then she closed her eyes. She could not accept the blood, the torn face of Guernica. Because I am in love, she would have said, I shall die if this is taken away.

Elyot, she said.

She was asking him to take control. Without touching, she gave him her hand.

I was going out to dinner, she said, I’d rather, I think I’d rather we went home.

18

Wally phoned her. He’d been running around. Irons in the fire, he said, you couldn’t afford, and after the Vendôme, it was a racket where you had to think quick, and Harry Simmons, a contract, he hoped that she wasn’t mad.

No, she said. No.