I’ve slipped up over an investment, he said. We’ll have something less to live on.

How you lived, on what you lived, never made any great impression on Catherine Standish. She was in the habit of accepting circumstance. This inability to connect herself with an economic problem was replaced in her mind by a simple division of her life into phases when she was with servants, jewels, and furs, and phases when she was without. It was simpler and also more pleasing like this. But this was later. Now she connected Willy’s announcement, whatever the mysterious behaviour of investments, which she did not pretend to understand, she connected it with something more ominous, more deeply personal than the stock market. She listened to a twanging in her ears. She was willing to spill out resentment on an opponent she could easily name.

But this is absurd, she said.

It happens, said Willy.

Yes, she said. I suppose.

She looked at him quietly, very closely.

Well? he asked.

He was annoyed.

Nothing, she said, tapping with her foot.

Call me a fool, he said, thickly.

No. I was wondering. I was just wondering if perhaps – if perhaps there wasn’t – some thing –

Go on, he said. Say it.

They were both sitting too straight, in contrast to the padding of their voices, the careless gesture of a hand. And then she capitulated; she knew she would, as if she were a little afraid to penetrate any deeper, she made herself take the easier road. She preferred her own uncertainty.

What shall we have to do? she asked.

He looked at her. He was breathing slower.

Ease up the pace, he said. Get rid of a maid. I might give up the studio. We’ll have considerably less.

He said all this rather pompously. He had won. He was reinstated. They both sat breathing more freely in the zone of uncertainty, where the shadow of a doubt was nameless.

Later when Mrs Standish discovered details of what she used to call, still later, Willy’s financial debacle, she discovered that she was wrong. Whatever a certain person was to Willy, the present situation was simply due to some mysterious crisis in the City. But she had learnt, at least, to prefer uncertainty. And this is significant. She deliberately chose a cloud, which took possession in middle age, transferred its cloudiness to her, and helped her blur the too emphatic line. The only unpleasantness is what one makes, the maturer Mrs Standish used to say. It was one of the things that used to exasperate her son.

Mrs Standish had her son on a wet night in January. It got itself over somehow, just somehow, she felt. It was like that. In her exhaustion she could not credit herself with much. Recovering, she took a great deal of credit. She had given birth to a child. The event was very distant from any process of natural evolution. She decided to call her son Elyot, her mother-in-law’s maiden name. To see what that will do, she said to Willy. Because the elder Mrs Standish had remained among her tea things, apparently unaware of Willy’s wife.