If she had misgivings at all, these came to Kitty when she was alone. Winter afternoons alone in the house, assuming the character of Mrs Standish, the possessor of an empty house and the intruding kind of nostalgic thoughts that are not unknown on winter afternoons before the curtains have been drawn. It was sometimes difficult then to believe in the substance of things, whether the furniture, or events, the racketing with Maudie Westmacott, the conversation she made with Willy, even their whole relationship. It made her sit with her chin on her hand and wonder. This, she would persuade herself, is only the moment before snow, soon I shall watch it snow in the street, the greyness absorbed in so much lovely obscuring white. Before her marriage, on such occasions, she had read Swinburne in her room. Sometimes now she opened a book, sat with it open in her lap, half attentive to the phrases in a book, trying to fit words to the shape of her own nostalgia. But its shapelessness left her suspended in a sense of frustration, an uneasy suspicion of being alone. At dinner with Willy, she would shrug her shoulders frequently, or warm her hands at the fire and wonder if it had started to snow in the street.

There were moments of reflexion, transient as snow. She was quick to catch up again to her own pace. There was always the telephone. She was as closely dependent on the telephone as the soul on its confessional. Hearing her own voice, timing her own laugh. It was more soothing, this statement of your personality, than words at the other end.

Some time early that summer they drove down to Maidenhead. Willy and Catherine Standish, and Maudie, and a friend of Maudie’s, a young man called Miles or Giles, Catherine never could remember which. It would be an awful rag, thought Maudie, to drive down and have supper on the river, and Miles or Giles, though dull, had a simply ripping car. So they drove down. They took a long time, in the high and temperamental car, in their trailing green gossamers. And Kitty had a little detachable parasol that became detached near Staines. Everyone talked and laughed a lot, everybody but Miles or Giles, he only contrived to laugh. Careering to the end of the world, felt Kitty, determined not to look backward into her mind.

Having dinner on the terrace, it was warm enough for that, the river quickly blotted out, tree and water, the almost stagnant green of summer grass, and the paler water, became a moving, liquid black, with long skeletons of yellow light. The restaurant was an open box with one side open to the darkness, spilling its contents on the terrace, the little, bright tables, the pink lights. All a bit careless and studied at the same time. Like the voices, like the voice of Kitty Standish, that she sometimes made deliberately precious, a kind of brittle monotone that she and Maudie talked.