Oh, Harry, she said, pushing Button A. It isn’t? Would you? Yes. Allgood. Yes.

Outside the box the night was less of a problem for Connie Tiarks.

Outside, the evening stream ignored individual stagnation. It is now some time since she left, said Elyot, and I am standing here, it is time to draw the curtains.

But Connie’s face persisted, altered by a sudden storm, and Connie sitting crumpled by the skirting board. Intensity of passion in Connie Tiarks surprised more than it repelled. There was no end to the unsuspected. Connie was a different person. When you had made for yourself the abstract, selfless Connie, all neatly docketed out of your own intellectual conceit. Then the pressure of the eiderdown. He began to walk about the room. He noticed the box, so intimately connected with the two alternatives, Muriel Raphael or Connie Tiarks. Muriel’s voice still rose from time to time out of the telephone, the direct, slaty voice, like a deliberate grey line scored across the black. Muriel offered suggestions, weighed, rational, watertight. Muriel was not the kind of person to let a relationship lapse, even if its failure, she knew, was partly hers. She could still treat it sensibly, cynically enough. The cynicism was antiseptic, besides saving her face. Cynicism could imply the responsibility was someone else’s. All that remained of a relationship had been worked out in a neat geometrical pattern. He accepted this. It was not much less intimate than a more technically intimate Muriel. Because Muriel remained brittle glass, while Connie the possessive eiderdown. Emotional cosiness with Connie Tiarks. He looked reflectively at the box. A padding in slippers, in a snug box, surrounded by the many protective devices boosted in women’s magazines.

But outside there was a cracking, a splitting of the darkness, that dismissed the two alternatives. He still failed to grasp, but beyond the rotting and the death there was some suggestion of growth. He waited for this in a state of expectation. He waited for something that would happen to him, that would happen in time, there was no going to meet it.

In the morning there would be the funeral.

20

It was Mrs Barnett who had the news. She could not see very well. She rummaged to find her spectacles, stuck behind the canister, the nickel frame of spectacles that now sat formally on her nose. The whole attitude of Mrs Barnett reading a letter, because it happened rarely enough, perhaps a line from a friend at Newcastle, or a cousin on holiday at Scarborough, was official, formal, the gestures that she didn’t ordinarily use. She held it out in front of her now, not a letter, but a postcard, that someone had dropped in the mud. She studied, squinted at the information, out of her leathery face, the just deeper-toned skin of the lips moving with the words. The words, in pencil, she could only just see, were from the Irishman Halloran. She could not remember at first, but the pal of Joe’s, the crazy bugger that sat spitting in the fire, and talked of the revolution as was coming. Well, and all, the man Halloran, and why, and why, said Mrs Barnett, why Halloran? It was plain enough, what she didn’t want to see. She stayed looking at the signed name. Then.