There remained the doing of things. There would always be this. Like a sense of responsibility. Julia held this between herself and the other. There was the bus from Clerkenwell in the sharp spring mornings. There was the morning after. The shops, the houses remained, though you wondered, the eyes gummy from sleep and a kind of sick bewilderment.

In Ebury Street she heard, through her own blunt footfall, the sharper scrubbing of a brush on area stone. Areas opened in the early sunlight. She looked down often to recognize a face. But the brush was a sharp hissing of what was still waiting to be told. Why do swans hiss, Julia? she asked. Come here, hinney, Eden, you said, you don’t want a bite from a dirty swan, owning the place, the swans, contrary creatures swans. The warning neck of a swan stretched across a distant path. Julia walked dully. Leaving her mind empty, she hoped that something would fill it soon, would find what she had to do, done. Because already the house was there, her hand tightening on the handle of her case, tightening the hand upon the throat against what was going to return.

Light began with Julia every morning. She was the motion of the curtain rings.

She stood looking down. People you serve are most helpless on the pillow. Their unprotected eyes. Looking at Eden, her half-sleep, Julia again remembered swans.

Already? said Eden, her gathering voice.

Julia turned. She bent to pick up a pair of shoes. Action hid what she wanted to hide. Because she had wanted instinctively to take advantage of helplessness, the face upon the pillow only half opened, could have stood accusing in a corner, could have said, said. She’s all right, he said. It went on twisting inside her, till the sweat was on her hands. Let the boy breathe, said Mrs Barnett, you’re that jealous, Julia, my girl, why, to see you anyone’d think –

Oh dear, sighed Eden, or the last wave of sleep, as it curved, broke, became the bus she would soon take, the early morning coughs of the business men on buses, and cold, smooth pennies in the hand.

Julia did not speak. She was a sharp breathing in the corner, and a stooped behind. Day returned without compromise in Julia’s form. Losing the softness of sleep, the face on the pillow hardened into bones, the skull of Eden Standish, in which the light revived a flickering of hopes, of fears. The body braced on the elbows, outside the fallen sheet, resisted what might possibly come. Because Julia, you could sense, an outward pressure of what, that Julia could never disguise, her emotions resisted the attempt, they escaped from the body and flowed round the room.

Julia’s eyelids were a heavy red.

You’d better make haste, she said. You haven’t the whole morning.

As if she wanted the wardrobe to hear.

Julia, Eden said.

Well?

She didn’t want to turn, to find, under the thin nightdress the body that already knew too much. The clever ones, Julia said, there’s the ones that don’t know and the ones that give, but the ones that know and the ones that take, these are the clever ones. Her hand tightened on her skirt, feeling for her self-control.