A book lay on the sheet. He listened to his mother’s voice, his mother talking like a book. She held out so many phrases in front of the expression on her face, that still spoke of the evening on the stairs. You hadn’t mentioned this. But it remained implicit in the expression of a face, more so now that this had no assistance from the dressing-table. You have seen what you have seen, the face of Mrs Standish seemed to say, accept it as a fact, without asking for an explanation, explanations are tiring and involved. So that you hadn’t spoken in so many words. It remained a garish incident. You remembered how the head lolled, she just wasn’t well, he said, it was the saxophone, and on the stairs, the breath came out harshly, out of the smeared mouth.

This should be understandable, Elyot sometimes felt. If one had been aware. If one had not taken refuge in one’s own private shell.

Now he watched a hand, listless on the cover of a book.

It is too tiring, too involved, implied the hand. Let us abandon this incident, if we can. There is a whole atticful of the sordid mistakes. Let us put it among these.

But he remembered, she remembered the evening on the stairs, how the head lolled, the eyes opened, watched the trailing of a red skirt, the arm brushing the carpet, as if it had no connexion, or at least sawdust-filled. The eyes had watched from a distance, dim in their own surprise. Now they deliberately created a distance, or hung a gauze over what they couldn’t hide.

Mrs Standish had withdrawn since the evening in Maida Vale. She spent much time in bed. She lay there with a book, or just looking at the wall. She could lie there for hours, as if her moral collapse had exhausted physical initiative. Not that she didn’t welcome a withdrawal into the hours of silence. You might say she wanted to come to a conclusion, was engaged in an elaborate and final summing up. At least the face suggested this, unmoved, withdrawn on the pillow, and the slow voice that spoke because expected. No longer painted, the face was no particular age. The bones of a face have in themselves a timelessness, a resignation.

If this could be the last stage, sighed Mrs Standish. Was it too much to ask for, to prolong the state of quiet withdrawal, or was there still another spasm of the body, before the final twitch? On the wall a pale sunlight had reproduced the window frame. She lay in her bed watching the patch of sunlight, its elongated, abstracted form, glass and wood that had turned to light and shadow. Or she moved in retrospect, not through the actual images of memory, this had undergone abstraction too, become the light and shadow, the sensation of an incident. If you could ask for the permanence of this, but you doubted, the fists suddenly defensive on the sheet. Or more, you knew. You remained tied to the body, to its final writhing, you felt the hand groping in the belly, the mouth gaped in an endless scream. There was no exaggeration in the engraving out of Dante that disturbed the childhood Sunday.