That summer she went down to Brighton. Willy came to her at weekends. It was pleasant like that. She enjoyed the luxury of her own thoughts, even the most trivial, and then Willy at the weekend, to talk to her at table, and offer her his arm along the front. During the week she even lapsed back to some of her old preoccupation with the intellect. Because she was superior, carrying her child, she wanted to taste all the little attendant pleasures of an intellectual snobbery. That winter, perhaps, she would take lessons in French. She would read French. She had always enjoyed the sight of someone cutting the pages of one of the softbacked French books.

Aubrey Silk came down to see her. To hold her hand, he said, but only metaphorically, because Aubrey never did anything that was considered incorrect. Sometimes she thought him bloodless, passionless. Aubrey did not exist except as a number of intellectual enthusiasms, and even these were carefully damped by order of the conventions into which he had been bred. It irritated her sometimes. He made her feel vulgar, over-physical. He sat there and talked to her gently in the lounge, his foot moving in some more tasteful pattern on the over-patterned carpet, his voice losing itself in a rush of traffic along the front. But ultimately it soothed her to listen to Aubrey Silk. Even when the voice waited for some reply, and she had to go through a bungling strategy, some business to convince that she had listened, which didn’t really convince, she still felt comforted, immeasurably soothed, just by the presence of Aubrey Silk. Just because he was passionless and removed. The Brighton Front dissolved in the voice of Aubrey Silk. She wandered contentedly in her own thoughts, picking her way through the coloured and fragmentary events that might or might not happen. There was no distinct, definite day on the calendar.

Catherine, he said, stopping, he had been talking of Théophile Gautier. Having a child improves you, Aubrey said.

That brought her with a bump of surprise into the existing scene. Because it still surprised her, this process of having a child. And Aubrey, it was strange, Aubrey’s remark, just as a remark made by Aubrey.

Why, Aubrey? she laughed.

It made her put her hand to her hair. It made her compose her mouth as if she was at the photographer’s.

One of these things, Aubrey shrugged, that border on the personal.

But she looked at him for some time afterwards as he talked, recovering his conversation, if not Théophile Gautier, wondering about Aubrey. He was remote also in time. His collars were always too high. Aubrey had been left behind somewhere in the late nineteenth century. And this was satisfying too, because it made you feel modish, nineteen-eight down to the heel.

Good-bye, Catherine, Aubrey said. It’s time I thought about catching my train.

She realized he had come to see her. His dry, cool, bony hands.

Winter was full of fresh delights. Aubrey asked her to go with him to concerts. She could not take herself seriously at concerts, just as many of the books she read were a kind of self-conscious exercise. But there was always the anticipation in settling in your seat, there were always the programme notes, and the tuning of the violins excited. As a girl she had sometimes been to concerts, because this was part of the ritual, the S.A.L., the chamber music in Norwich rooms, and the little concerts organized at home by Eddie de Vere, who played very beautifully on the flute. Sitting forward with her chin upon her fist, she knew that faces watched her. But she closed her eyes. Sometimes this was spontaneous. Listening to a phrase from Purcell, she succumbed to the lulling of flutes. They drowsed under her skin in an uncapturable lethargy. She did not want to seize the flutes. She sat very still with her eyes closed.