It lay in her thin, yellow hand. It had the distinction of a foreign stamp.

Julia’s feet began to plod out of the too persistent stare, the shared emotion of the ring of women that she found herself unable to share. Because emotion in Julia was secret, almost indelicate. It was her own, her private business, that she did not care to offer abroad. Now it began to take her, the almost unbearable, pent physical spasm that rocked her on the stair, against the banister he’d always promised to mend but hadn’t. She went upstairs. She wanted to get away to her room. What had happened was all bound up with the things she didn’t understand, the voices on the wireless that spoke of Abyssinia and Japan, the Government, the paper talk, the politics that Joe. Outside one small box, your head, that was reliable and knowable, there was so much mystery. And death. Joe didn’t ought, her breath said. She felt painfully clumsy sitting on the bed, the pain, the solid lump that hadn’t yet begun to flow, because there was still the mystification, she couldn’t quite see, grasp, either the washstand basin or his face.

Sitting on the bed Julia Fallon could only oppose to the mystery her own too solid flesh, the wheeze that rose from a corset, the thick chugging of the blood through her red and swollen hands. Then it began to move her. It hurt. She began to sway. She swayed with the great weight of what she would be unable to express, only the motion, and the wordless noises that the mouth made, so that the room collapsed, no longer contained a Julia Fallon, she had become a monument to sorrow. Downstairs the women sat. You heard the undertone, the descant of their voices, but little more than the chorus to a tragedy that dwindles round the central figure. This was Julia. She sat with her hands spread upon her knees. She forced her hands upon her knees. There was nothing left for them to do. The knees became a substitute for what you couldn’t grasp.

If there was a meaning, there was the dust and the stairs, and then Joe slipping out, there was a Monday washing and the Sunday joint, as if the butcher wouldn’t come, or Joe, but Joe, on a postcard come from Spain, she said, that Mrs Cotty with her belly, round and full like a bellyful of trouble, you might have swallowed the whole world, was a bitter taste of tears. Julia Fallon bent her head. She felt the weight at the nape of her neck, where the hair had straggled and kept it white. It was white above the elbows where his shirt turned, and where water ran, in the hollow of his neck, or blood, it will be a world to live in, he said, he said too much, you listened, you heard him say, sometimes like a kid, in the belly under her apron, his head rolled against your chest the time the fever, it hurts to die, Julia, he said, it’s you, and that’s right, Joe, it’s me, as little more than a kid, and did it hurt too, the belly that you didn’t, wouldn’t have, Julia’s got a boy, he said, it was that soft Ernie Flack, as if, if you was my boy, Joe, you said, I’d clout you one over the lug, you’re a silly thing, a silly kid. Julia pressed her hands against her stomach. She began to feel empty, tired.