Eden had cried. Eden as a child. Now she came into the room. It is Sunday, Eden said, I shall take a train into the country. There were still compartments in time, there was other people’s behaviour. But Eden has lived behind a closed door, right from the beginning, felt Mrs Standish. I shall catch a train, Eden said. You had just a glimpse through the voice, through the crack in the door.

Eden Standish walked quickly. There was great virtue in the anecdotal voice of the slow and easy Sunday trains, in the strip of sky and field outside that flapped across the window-pane. There was the old man with the joints, he had the rheumatism awful bad, he had a potato in his pocket, he wore a skein of scarlet silk. The knitting woman clucked her teeth. Beside her on the seat the pot of jam, with damson purpling the paper top. Her niece was expecting her seventh, she said. The teeth clucked. The needles clicked. You listened to the counterpoint of voices. You let them brush across the edge of the mind, soothing, this faint contact with the lives of other people that asked for no more than momentary attention, in the Convention of train acquaintanceship. You were glad of this. Because you were still unprepared to give very much in return. But the train acquaintance made no demands, was as warm, and yet as passionless, as the wool played out and knitted up by the discursive hands.

Out of this, on a Sunday in spring, Eden Standish got down into a still countryside that the change in season emphasized. She heard her feet too clearly on the asphalt strip, the station-master’s country voice calling from his toy official hutch. She walked up a hill, and the rim of the hill was too sharp, the ribbony song of larks too close that fluttered up, then lost itself in the pale, spring sky. She was walking with her hands empty in a world that was too full. Once, by the side of the road, the abandoned rags, the stamped earth of what had been a tinkers’ camp caught her unawares. She had to hurry. As if someone had lived here too fully. She could sense it still. The throat tightened on recognition of what had once been her own. Farther, a hundred yards or so, she could look dispassionately enough at the drops on brambles. But the uneasy moment experienced, remained. She closed her eyes, stood with her forehead resting on wet bark, listened to the muffled beating of tree or heart.

Out of this world you could feel a purpose forming. Just as she had seen, after refusing, a purpose that formed behind his eyes. It was not a malicious desire to annihilate that cancelled the personal relationship, that bound the earth in its harder seasons. The stripping of the bough was a sacrifice of detail to some ultimate and superior design. To dictate this to the heart, impress it on the mind, is necessary, she felt. Bark was cool on her forehead. I have to accept, to believe this, she said, because it is the only way, I must blot out all memory of touch, or the more intimate moments of silence.