I expect Julia will have gone, said Eden. But I told her to leave some bread and cheese. You’ll find it in the kitchen. Some bread and cheese.

You suspected she was trying to insist on fact. She had to plank down the cheese. One lived, after all, in a world of substance, of fact.

Then it was time, he knew, he was watching the flutter of a gloved hand fail where the darkness swam against the greenish light. He was turning his back on nothing. There was very little indication now that he would ever see Eden again.

21

Already he was drifting in a half-resentful, half-reassured lethargy with the many themes that the house offered, only muted on his first opening the door. The house was a receptacle. They were two receptacles, he felt, the one containing the material possessions of those who had lingered in its rooms, the other the aspirations of those he had come in contact with. Even that emotional life he had not experienced himself, but sensed, seemed somehow to have grown explicit. It was as if this emanated from the walls to find interpretation and shelter in his mind. So that the two receptacles were clearly united now. They were like two Chinese boxes, one inside the other, leading to an infinity of other boxes, to an infinity of purpose. Alone, he was yet not alone, uniting as he did the themes of so many other lives.

He had sat how long, since the station, in the empty house? A queasy drunk still sidled uneasily along the carpet’s edge. You accepted him now. It got to being part of yourself, said Joe, like the disappearing glove, like the face that crumbled under rouge, like Onkel Rudi’s gramophone, as if you can keep it parcelled out, because it’s right here, Elyot, sure as ever there’s right and wrong. Or not so particularly confined, it flowed, it overflowed, a gritty protest of the walls that opened out, rain that passed across the mouth, the wheeze of mortar falling, and of powdered brick. All this has served its purpose, you felt.

Again he walked downstairs. He began again to walk along the street, guided by no intention, taking the direction offered. The house, the shell of the house, pitched its last comment through an open window. The curtain jerked at its rings. It still blew outward in the wind. It moved. It made the landscape move. There was no fixed point, either the long and shiny ribbon of the pavement, or the fiery hub that became Victoria.

The labels on buses expected a choice. He watched the coming and going of the buses, the meeting and flowing. He watched with a disbelief in the final destination of buses, Islington, Homerton, Camberwell. But there was the Chinese box, the infinity of boxes. The toffee-coloured terraces of Islington moved into place beside the frozen derricks of Rotherhithe. The buses became significant enough, the red threads that moved across the darkness, joining its component parts. There was no end to darkness, but there was no end also to its unity, watching the movement of the buses.