She sat with her hands held tightly in her lap. Soon it will be over, she said, I have been waiting for this, to know at last with certainty, to find out what is inside.

She came in about the time she usually came in from work. He continued with his paper, heard her moving to do something, to arrange flowers, he could hear the trimming of the stems, smell their sudden pungent smell.

I’ve decided, Elyot, I shall go to Spain, she said, in the casual way Eden dealt with moments of importance.

The voice did not ask for criticism or advice. This was a crisp statement. You heard the breaking of a stem.

When? he asked.

About ten days’ time.

He sat looking at a sheet of news, what the Japanese, what Joe Barnett, a Council of War in Tokyo, or Eden taking trains, it wore the same face, was the same muddle, from which you woke at night to find tied sheets, go to sleep, said Julia, it’s a dream, go to sleep like a good boy, here’s a biscuit for under your pillow, it’s a nightmare, she said, it’s a tangle, that Eden’s face struggled to unravel, very intently in the corner of a room, I shall be an airman, she said, even if I fall in the sea. Even if I fall in the sea, the voice repeated now, against the breaking of the stems. Eden’s voice accepted the sea. You began to feel they had given you a sense too few, the sense of sacrifice. He felt smug sitting in slippers. Or what was sacrifice, a perpetual walking in the same tangle, Joe and Eden, saying soon we shall find it, soon, but where, it became a thin and timeless echo.

Oh, but I’m tired, she said.

He could hear her sitting down. Out of the silence now not even a breathing.

Well, he said.

What?

I should say something. This is the moment where one should.

He watched her sitting, the edges of her face, white round the protecting hands. She was tired, she said, but to protect a face.

No, she sighed.

Eden was as stubborn in an attitude, as unchanging as a picture on the wall, the surprised child or the sulky flapper, was the same Eden in a different frame.

No, she said. Don’t let’s argue.

But, Eden, the futility of this. And Joe.

That at once he wished unsaid.

Yes, she said. The futility of Joe, as Joe. Just another drop. But the many Joe Barnetts, Elyot. It’s the drops that fill the bucket.

Her voice began to sound hollow from behind her hands.

It’s the bucket that’ll make the splash, she said.

The voice spoke from a distance. As if Eden had already undergone some process of physical destruction. She was convinced of the rightness of this, just as you were convinced there was some other way, not so very different perhaps, the means different, if not the end. You were aware of the same end. The arch-enemies were the stultifying, the living dead. The living chose to oppose these, either in Eden’s way, by the protest of self-destruction, or by what, by what, if not an intenser form of living.