She nodded very wisely, a smear of mascara and a blaze of rouge.

But that isn’t the worst, she said, the mouth taking control. It’s happening inside. It all happens from the inside out. Now listen, you see I’ve thought about this. Whether it’s an apple or a spinning top. It goes rrrrr. Bbpp! Take it from me. I know. Spinning and spinning and spin –

That the voice broke the thick gelatinous effort to talk or think it was the last shred the red put on for a purpose that was lost that was a purpose you looked to find on the carpet the big booming rose bury your face and hide bury the sick tick.

Take it easy, she heard.

It was not so far to the carpet, kneeward, to lay down a head, and the roaring funnel of a mouth.

Mrs Standish pitched forward, a red and golden meteor that was past directing, even if this had been desired. She wanted only to get on her knees and vomit. She had to throw up on the carpet the last fragments of her dignity. And lie. To find in the moving darkness some solid portion that did not quake. She fell where her body led her, the closed eyes. She lay on her side like a deck chair that the wind has overturned.

Somebody will have to take me home, she said quietly, without opening her eyes.

19

Outside the houses there was spring weather again. In the parks you were conscious of the change, the intent but diffident duck, floating brown and secretive in the lap of water, or moored in the shallows, her breast close against the mud. There was a pressure outward, earth and tree, of shoot and bud, a thawing of frost in the otherwise passive brick of the closed pavilion. It was expected and at the same time unexpected in its happening. It is always like this. It approaches you unawares. A soft, smooth wind venturing through boughs and along the cheek. You put up a hand to a cheek, wonder, the fingers just unable to grasp so subtle a situation.

For Elyot Standish this remained a distant, outer situation. The month on the calendar told him it was a period of change. It was also a regular event. You could leave it to take care of itself, the other side of your own preoccupation. But closer home, there was no such clockwork certainty. There was logical development in the progress of a season, but you could not say the same of human behaviour. Man deliberately shrouded himself, to hide his uncertainty perhaps, anyway, motive appeared obscurely the other side of the gauze, the faces of people you came in contact with, these if anything were most remote, the lives that touched on your own.

He went into his mother’s room.

I’ve wasted so much time reading Saint-Simon, she said. I find he doesn’t please me any more. Sometimes I wonder how much will remain at the end, how much positive time to chalk up against the waste. And does one regret the waste, or is it just a matter of indifference?