Sunday rang gong-like through the week.

This will be decisive, said Mrs Standish.

She could not do too much. She could never do too much before parties. Even after death, felt Mrs Standish, I shall overdo the preparations for a party, both emotional and otherwise. A party is an orgy of anticipation. And this, this will be the archetype of parties. Something apart from Maida Vale, because, after all, a party is not a matter of environment, it is something that happens in yourself, it is a supreme statement of your capacity for power.

Yes, said Mrs Standish. There was no need to hurry. There was time to feel, to taste, the first contact of the skin with silk, of the old dress with the older body, that somehow became the first time. She wore the red dress, or not altogether red, a kind of rose, anyhow reddish. There were times when she had regretted this dress. It was a jangle, a mistake. But she had to wear the rose, the reddish dress. She had to wear it for Maida Vale, her own discordancy, and the weight of gold, too heavy, sawing at her neck. The spilt powder made the eyes water. Out of a rising cloud, the face. You worked on a face, deeply. You couldn’t penetrate deep enough, the hand, force the colour into a mouth. You wanted to make and to destroy at once. The hair was brittle and expectant in its labyrinth of curls.

A jangle, said Mrs Standish.

It was not criticism. It was a pure objective statement offered to the glass. She felt better. She held herself tense and still under the weight of red and gold. She listened to the notes of her own discordancy.

Wally said she looked, looked, gee, she looked.

Thank you, Wally, she said, to help, her mouth driven by irony inside the warm smooth paste of rouge.

He began to make apologies. He began to repeat himself, the excuses on the telephone, he had been awful busy, Wally said.

We are going to a party, she said, adapting her body to the taxi.

Sure, he said. But –

Then why?

Telling him he ought to let it drop, he was still preoccupied. Because Kate. And getting herself up to kill. Already his eyes made excuses to people. He didn’t want it too close, the accusing nearness of a thigh in the taxi.

She breathed with the excitement that comes before contact with fresh faces, even if Maida Vale, with the anticipation of unfamiliar sounds, and already the opening of a door. The taxi rattled. It had the smell of all taxis she had ever driven in.

Names are Kay and Molly, he was saying. Molly’s a photographic model. Kay’s a pianist. Broadcasts. Gets an occasional date with an orchestra. You’ll like Kay, he said. And Molly, she’s a hot number, but she’s grand. A bit thin perhaps. Kay’s mother’s sick. She lives in Birmingham.

Irrelevant as Wally’s conversation was in itself, it was also without relevance to Mrs Standish. She accepted the incongruous Kay, and the mother, a middle-aged woman with an enamel basin, wedged into a house, in a terrace, in the Midland town. Rocked by the taxi, they spun, round them the nighttime expressions on the shops near Marble Arch. You didn’t move, they unwound, the details of a street, or of conversation, and it was all a kind of special benefit. A nickel urn blossomed in a doorway, in a steam of coffee, and flared out of sight.