Praps I love you, Collins. Wouldn’t that be awful? Molly said. You’re lovely, you’re lovable, she sang.

Only two china elephants on a mantelpiece stayed put. The rest flowed. Wally on the sofa with that girl, the tassel on a paper cap, the sympathetic horoscope. But you could focus on the elephants, their ugliness, they brought you up with a sudden shock.

Come into the kitchen, Kate, said Arthur Chance. Just you an’ me. We’ll have such a fish fry. Oh baby!

The white stove was a glare that the broken nose cut through and the bottle of vinegar or something that he knocked over, she watched it darkening over her dress. She looked down and laughed. Because it was not important.

Nice dress, he said.

The hand touched. She could hear the scrape of his hand on her dress, the rasping against silk, the callus on a hand.

Let’s dance, he said. You an’ me.

She sang. No more love, she sang. Then they fell against the table.

Kate, why haven’t we? he said. Why haven’t –?

He was on the floor, she saw, he lay there, the face bracketed by a nose, pained and at the same time content. She watched him inquisitively. Then she began to tiptoe, softly, softly, as if she must not wake.

Kate, he sighed.

Ssh, she said. You’re asleep.

She couldn’t tiptoe softly enough, as if the whole world were asleep on the kitchen floor. She tiptoed through her own sleep. Before the door made her head spin. She put up her hands, to hold with her hands what, she suspected, was spilling out. Her head split open on a door.

Somebody was laughing in another room. An elephant pointed with his trunk.

I am drunk, said Mrs Standish. This was once dreadful, is now unimportant, whether you peel off just another skin, or tip the table or, vinegar perhaps, it smelt the finger, H.P. or Worcester Sauce, Julia said she would run round the corner to the Internash, it was half an hour to lunch. Julia, Julia’s eye, Julia said was drunk. Julia looked at a glass of gin. You want the doctor, she said. It hurt. But what was Julia, what was the will, it was the pamphlet said the Universal Will, or Cosmos Something, you only half understood. There was no will. There was no Julia really. Julia said: Wash your hands, you dirty boy. It was none of Julia’s business, was never had been, anyway.

I’ve always hated ordering meals, Mrs Standish said.

Confided mostly to her glass, it came back in a bluish echo off its sides.

Boo-hoo, ber-boo-boo, sang Mrs Standish to her glass.

The Paper Cap was telling a dirty story to the girls. It was something about a motor bike.

Mrs Standish closed her eyes. If for a moment sleep. But I am doing this, she said, III, because I have chosen to do this, it is nobody’s business that nobody cares. The song went what? It ran like that nerve that ticked underneath the face, till this was what you became, a last filament in a transparent bulb. Not Catherine Standish. Not this. Tear up the labels, throw them away, look in the ice-box, baby. That little thing, Ruby May, that they all went to see, the people in newspapers, round in a dressing-room afterwards. With their labels on. Because without the labels, they wouldn’t perhaps recognize a face. If it were still recognizable, even to yourself, and beyond this, that you didn’t want to see, the old droop-eared sow that rootled after cabbage stalks.