We’ll take this bowl, Julia, said Miss Chadwick. Thank you, yes. And now some water if it’s on the boil. Thet’s it! Just a teeny drop more.

Julia objected to Miss Chadwick, who bounced like a rubber ball, and her superiority, that at the same time attracted, her store of knowledge, her knowledge of illness and death. For Julia, death was a varnished coffin and a pair of white marble hands, but for Miss Chadwick a colourless, airy something that opened quickly, suddenly in a room. Sometimes Julia cried. She cried for the things she began to remember, there was no end to the things she remembered now, her own life seemed to be attached to someone who was about to die.

It’s awful, Julia murmured, plodding in perpetual satin slippers.

There was more than ever a coming and going of people on the stairs, the doctors, their spongy, rubber soles, the stiff swish of Miss Chadwick’s cap, as well as the step of the dispossessed, Elyot and Eden, these had grown insubstantial under the pressure of events. The relations of the dying emerge again only after the actual death. But you welcomed the forced withdrawal, almost an anaesthesia of the conscious, thinking life. There will be time enough, you felt. Meanwhile you sat numbly evenings, almost physically bruised, you sat, and if you thought at all, it was tomorrow’s meal or a bill still unpaid. Elyot watched Eden knitting. She had suddenly taken to knitting, caught from somebody watched in a train. Her hands moved like the hands of the blind, but with determination, afraid of stopping.

On the windowsill, the bulbs that Julia had put there began to flower. For Mrs Standish the suggestion of a crocus, its little golden phallus pressing at the air.

This belonged to a world of physical things, already a far distant mosaic that the memory made. The windowsill was yesterday. Somewhere Willy Standish, the tilted hat, punted down the green scent of water, his arm where the white began, that startled her to see, the whiteness above brown, and hard, it was as hard as blankets pressing down, she could not lift, she could not lift the weight that moistened the forehead, that girl standing on her head who gurgled into pewter, or the red dress she must say to Julia was H.P. or vinegar. Too poignant or too irrelevant the physical world, reduced, like the golden blur on the windowsill. Mrs Standish opened her eyes. Her body drifted in the stream that was not herself, gentle and inevitable. Or it moved in jerks of pain, this was too close, too much the self, as if you were answerable for the act of living, the answer was the racked body. People came and went through this. Sometimes the face passed through, sometimes remained unbearably stereoscopic. And you talked about the things, the flowers that people brought, but already different, confused. The cap above the needle smelt but did not feel of starch. Time became a closing and opening of curtains, a closing and opening of eyes, a closing and a closing, a closing time.