Faces peered from behind glass, gone before they had established their expressions, would be shuttled out in all directions, pale and unprotesting. But the faces in the night buses were potentially communicative. They huddled, face on hand. They swayed in the protective atmosphere of herded bodies, the peppermint drop with the steaming macintosh, the mingling of heliotrope and sweat. They touched in a haze from the last pint that merged these ordinarily hostile smells and made them for the moment compatible. But soberly, by daylight, you lived a life of segregation, recovered the instinctive defences, the compartment of a face.

A bus received Elyot Standish. It was any bus. He was bound nowhere in particular. There were no reservations of time or place, no longer even the tyranny of a personal routine. It was enough to feel a darkness, a distance unfurling. There was no end to this in the bus, trundling down its dark tunnel, in which the faces smiled gravely out of sleep, the mouths almost spoke. If only to touch these almost sentient faces into life, to reach across the wastes of sleep and touch into recognition with your hand, to listen to the voices, like the voices of people who wake and find they have come to the end of a journey, saying: Then we are here, we have slept, but we have really got here at last.

He yawned. He felt like someone who had been asleep, and had only just woken.