Out of the distance he watched her gather up the pieces of stalk she had broken off. He watched her twist them in a sheet of paper.

About ten days’ time, she had said.

The people remembered from a voyage are the people met too late. We have been stupid, proud, insensitive, blind, you say, not that it helps, it is still too late. These are the regrets, standing on a wharf or waiting on a platform for different trains. You can only watch the moment recede down the perspective of the eyes, turn the back on the nostalgic smell of too possessive trains.

Julia snivelled at the last moment.

You ought to take food. It’s a long journey. Though there’s always the buffy, Julia said.

But for Julia, it was too painful, the tragedy of empty hands. Julia stood in a doorway watching goodbye.

Goodbye, goodbye, Eden called.

You watched the waving, wondering, the flutter of a strange black-gloved hand.

Come, we’ll be late, Elyot said.

Upstairs a curtain waved outward from an open window. Waiting, watching from the street, he felt cold. In the pit of his stomach a fluttering that was like the desperation of a curtain waving in the wind.

Eden said there was plenty of time.

She was calm, could afford to be calm, with so much decided. It was only a matter of walking out of the house. But your things, Julia said. Yes, she said, my things, but I shan’t want much, Julia. Looking into a drawer these were just things, altogether superfluous, like many discarded events of your past life. She had listened without a twinge to the closing of a drawer. A door.

They were walking down the street.

Look at the time, Elyot said.

No, she said again. We have plenty of time.

Which was true. Because in a minute, standing on a station platform, you could relive a whole existence. In the station there was a creaking, a groaning, a hissing, an outline in black to the parting faces, and the less defined shapes from the past. They stood in the black smell of trains. Waiting. A basket of unnaturally complexioned apples shone near by on a stall shelf, till distance shrivelled, you smelt the atticful of summer, or under trees the grass played against the legs, the cedar pencils sharpened at eleven, spilled out into the station grime. Eden’s mouth, you looked, was a flicker of recognition. Outside the sighing of an anxious piston, there was still the bay, smooth, almost circular, the glistening of red and periwinkle stones. You went down alone. This was a secret expedition. To lie on the back, the sun glistened on the teeth, a hot sinking of the bones. Eden turned to say, say, the bay, you would have said, remember, as if it were possible that Eden, except at this moment. There are the moments, the moments on railway platforms, when there are no barriers to recognition.

A crying Jewess held a crumpled handkerchief to her face. You listened to the anxious piston, the last words. Eden was removed now. She dealt in solid, detached words. The little Jewess turned her back.