Hatless, she went out later into the street. News was on the placards. Lorries made their early way, possessing the streets with a great, persistent chugging of their wheels. Feet marched along the scooped pavement, over the ploughed field. Place was of very little importance, or individual activity, except as part of a pattern of history or behaviour. She had left her face a blank. In time it would return, she supposed, some positive expression.

Time and habit began to knit across the tear. She did not reckon the so many weeks.

She sat across from Elyot, who tried to make suggestions, always now, that she might have resented once. His hands were nervous in the gesture that went with his voice, as if he were uncertain just how far. She watched the hands across the same table at which they had always sat.

Elyot spoke of selling the house.

Now that we’re alone, he said.

Or was this a clumsiness, he wondered, the little shiver of a shocked glass that accompanied her agreement. His voice, it seemed to him, composed a perpetual monologue. Here and there, only rarely, she reached and broke it. But she wanted it like this, you felt, the lifeline of comment and suggestion. She wanted you to say: Now we shall do this or that. Remotely, inside her, something was still perfecting itself. Intent on this process of gestation, she let herself be led.

He said it was time to turn on the light. He said it was time for dinner. He said, if she put on her hat, they would go to a film.

They sat in the warm, plushy, accommodating cinema atmosphere. You adapted yourself as a matter of course, the relaxed body to plush and, more important, the relaxed mind to the play of predetermined incident. That was the virtue of the cinema. You knew on paying your two-and-six, you knew exactly what would happen. Outside your own uncertainty. On the screen, the moist and stereoscopic lips bent for the expected kiss. You could reach out almost and touch the lips. But returning to the elbow on the chair-arm, your own or Eden’s, a matter of inches, here the unpredictable began, a common zone of uncertainty.

Eden stirred.

Two lovers and a tree faded into a perspective of the Boulevard Raspail. It began to be hot, a dissolving world of sepia and plush. Round about, the rapt women, heavy with mink and their own accepted uselessness. But dissolving irrelevant, the auditorium or screen. Already perhaps the body had begun to undergo its change, the soft, speechless faces of the worms pressing at the chest and loins. But this, you had decided, was unimportant, or only important as a state of becoming, of change. To throw away what is little enough, said Julia. As if it began and ended in the moment. As if it excluded the state of change.

A long way off, with a conviction that began to have a partial relevance, a man in a cap had begun to force a safe.