It frightened Julia. The house had dwindled to a single room. You waited for the walls to burst.

It won’t be long, Miss Chadwick said.

You would have thought Miss Chadwick was waiting for the bus.

In shadow Eden’s hands had grown thinner, as she played out the skein of grey wool. Sound become the grey sigh of wool, the slight protest of bone.

Elyot? said Mrs Standish.

The eyes stared now, focusing out of the distance some intention, or point, of very great importance.

Yes? he said. Yes, Mother?

The silk was wet, she held too tight, the banging of a door against his head.

I wonder, she said, is my hair tidy? It ought – on Friday – There are no pins.

Twenty-four hours later Mrs Standish died.

Now, said Miss Chadwick briskly, you should go and get some rest.

Morning was a broom on the stairs, death the relaxed face, no longer mapped with thought or passion. Elyot looked at a face by morning light. It had the simplicity that was still impossible to grasp, the immensity or simplicity, it was all one, in front of which man wavered, did not completely understand. Soon people would begin to say the kind of things they say about death, to wallow in their own sympathy, or shudder at their own repulsion. But death was a silence best left intact. Dying and death, he said. Dying. It did not fit the mouth. In the street a milk delivery rattled on its way. There were things to see to, details to be arranged.

There were the things, the people, the things, the people. Elyot moved stiffly through the unreal aftermath of death. It was a stiffness increased by the formula custom had already fixed, the line of behaviour laid down for relations of the dead. Sometimes you were glad of this, the set phrases, the rather fusty dignity of an undertaker’s voice.

Then Connie Tiarks came. She knocked, and you opened the door. You noticed the gloved fingers dug too tightly into her bag.

Oh, Elyot! Connie said.

She would begin to whimper, it had begun already on her face, the moving forms, the blurred eyes beneath the thick glass. He did not want what Connie was about to give.

To Connie Tiarks the death of Mrs Standish left her without protection, one degree closer to a frightfulness, and all this in spite of the bitter things that Mrs Standish had sometimes said, the things that whipped your cheeks with shame and left you sitting on the chair’s edge. The death of Mrs Standish, reported on the telephone, had plunged Connie into a well of temporary despair. She was moved, but lost, at the same time definitely lost. She stood again in her own childhood, the wind chapping her awkward legs, the twigs stinging as she fell through the leaves of the mulberry tree. Poor, poor Mrs Standish, and the awfulness, the pain, said Connie Tiarks. But she shuddered also for herself. She experienced unconsciously the winter nights in buses, and the leery, sideways looks of the old men in buses, the feet that followed down a dark street. Death, the deaths of people she knew, left her isolated. There were noises the other side of the wall. So that pity in Connie Tiarks now had a twofold significance. It became a very personal matter, her own fear translated into the sympathy she felt for others.