Willy said over coffee he thought it was a miserable place. She wondered a little herself what had decided them to come. There were salty streaks on the windows of the room. They sat all the morning with English papers in their hands. Willy suggested at lunch that they catch the afternoon boat back. Yes, she agreed. Yes.

So Mrs Standish resumed the building of a protective cocoon Inside the reduced body of her house. She believed that, technically, this was now what the agents would have called an Upper Part. But it was a term that did not take into account the subtle layers of its owner’s cocoon, the mornings and the afternoons that wrapped it closer, the business of mere living in a house. She saw very few people now. She had the baby brought downstairs and left on the hearthrug, where she played with him. Soon he was walking across the room. It all happened logically enough, in what had become the smooth, dull, colourless passage of time. She did not expect events, or events themselves, in such environment, became eventless and accepted. It was with no great sense of discovery that she found she was going to have a second child. This was the inevitable outcome of a settled relationship. Whatever the discrepancies in taste, their separate ways, she was Willy’s wife. There were the nights he spent beside her in her bed.

The second child was a girl. She was darker, smaller than the boy. Her small, intense face wrinkled often in emotional storms. You were conscious early of her watching eyes. In a moment of romantic stress, her mother decided on the name of Eden. There was no particular reason for this, which made it embarrassing for ever after when people asked you to explain. It was just that, lying in bed on a peaceful morning, Mrs Standish decided on the name. Behind it perhaps a sense of her own frustration. But she never pinned this down.

At three the little boy was a solemn, sturdy child. He wore knitted suits. And she dressed him also in a white outfit, with a full, stiff, linen skirt, and a pair of white kid boots. He stood in it stiffly, formally, like a biscuit figurine. And soon the girl too had discarded the white robe, the mystical, gothic skirts of the baby’s robe. Emerging from her baby’s abstraction, she began to assume a character with her clothes. And it was all both mysterious and transparent, the children growing, saying unexpected things, looking up at you over milk when you walked into the room. Sometimes you felt it was something you had watched, all this development, the actual process, as you watch the bean unfolding under water, publicly in the glass vase. But more often it was something that you felt was going on secretly, apart from you. To Mrs Standish, her children were already very often their own enclosed entities. Even though she felt their arms round her neck, the brushing of their cheeks, they had ceased to have any close connexion with her own body.