It’s an acquired taste, said Willy, who had been abroad.

Yes, she said. It must. But it might be good if. In time, she said.

Her whole life was centred in that glass of nauseating yellow green. She had to drink it down to justify her life, with Willy waiting to intercept each indication of nausea.

You’ll get used to it, he said.

He ordered himself another.

If she could say to him, Willy, let us go home, this is unimportant. If she could express half the things she wanted to express on this particular night, and which had lain dormant since their meeting, waiting for expression in damp French streets. But two glasses of yellow-green, quite motionless, imposed themselves, their opalescence. Willy’s face grew cloudy with his second. She was slipping, slipping, away from what she liked to believe was a moment of tangible happiness.

You never begin till your third, said Willy, perpetually knowledgeable, ordering this.

She opened her bag and fiddled about with things inside. She had to put this gesture between herself and her inexpressible disappointment.

You’re not giving in? he said.

No, she said, dipping her mouth.

He began to talk about India. It unfolded like a cloud, drenched with many colours, the forms that intermingled in the formless cloud of narrative. She watched him. You noticed the whites of his eyes when he was drunk. There was too much white to the eye. She remembered the eyes of her china doll, taking out the eyes when the head broke, and laying them on the washstand. The detached eyes, that were like Willy’s after drink.

Let’s go home now, Willy, she said.

Home’s tomorrow, Willy said. It’s too much water. Too far.

Yes, she said. But the hotel. Let’s go back to the hotel.

The hotel? he said. Yes, he said, vaguely.

She looked at what was still her first unfinished drink, that was a kind of justification, that stood on the marble table. The whole day, many days seemed to fall with a malicious plop into the pool of yellow-green. All right, she said, it’s like that. She was tired.

Later when she lay beside his breathing, surrounded by a distant chiming of dark bells, it was difficult not to review her failures. When she had been determined on this particular night to bury failure. There are the moments, the days perhaps, when you are given the inspiration to explain, not in words, which are always only the coded message, the days when your face is a mirror, and your hands illuminate a meaning. It was one of these days for Catherine Standish, realized through her intuition, if otherwise indistinct. And now the waste of any such dispensation, beside what was nothing more than a dark breathing, the passive ridge of a man she had married stretched beside her in the bed. It horrified her now to find that Willy could grow so impersonal. Just a man she had married, out of so many men, or less than this, the inanimate ridge. Switching on the lamp she could not believe that this face would ever grow personal. Just a movement of the too fleshy lips, the in and out of the lips in breathing, a twitching of the nostrils with their shadows of hair. Morning was a distant suggestion in the foreign room. She got out of bed and walked between its shiny furniture. The light from the lamp was too pink. Because it was what you could call a luxury hotel. It was what Willy had chosen from a guide. It was the setting for what should have been this moment of wordless explanation, too intimate, too private for furniture, transcending the vulgarity of French veneer. But possibilities slipped with the chiming of a clock, towards a distant morning and the rain on asphalt. She stood with her hair hanging helpless down her back.