Everything happening so quickly, Mrs Standish hadn’t time to feel surprised. Because surprise is not compatible with collapsing time. She worked at her French lessons. She went to the stores. And in between, she was now and again conscious of events, sometimes the past events, which had cut adrift from her life, their significance, whether Maudie Westmacott, or the loss of the ground floor of her house. Because now there was Mme Adorée’s hat shop on the ground floor, and Mme Adorée herself, sleek and raucous, with a goitre. In the basement her two girls sat trimming and snipping at the hats. And just as in the case of the house, with its superimposed detail of other people’s lives, it was the same with Maudie Westmacott. Any emotional twinge that Mrs Standish might have felt, was complicated, obliterated by the other moments of her life with Willy, the night at Dieppe, the silences, and the difficulties of language. Because Willy’s life was a different tongue. She seldom crossed the border now. She left him to loiter on his own way. His days were a perpetual loitering, now that the indiscretion of paint had been admitted, now that the studio as a possible bolt hole had been removed. He sat a great deal in the Park, in summer beneath a tilted hat. He exchanged drinks with his friends. Sometimes he talked poverty and thought about getting a job.

If their friends were mutual, they were the kind, negative ones who are a bore. Like the Wilcoxes. These came to dinner and you felt yourself becoming the Catherine you were for Willy only when the Wilcoxes came, evenings when you listened to your own voice, and found you sat with a smile on your face after the justification was gone. But the Wilcoxes came regularly, at least about once every three months.

The Wilcoxes came the evening Mme Adorée called Mrs Standish into the shop. It was difficult for her, said Mme Adorée, she did not know, she was agacée, and Mme Standish was always so nice, but it was one of those things, and the warm-blooded young girls in her workshop, they were gentilles, the jeunes filles bien élevées that Mme Adorée employed, mais on ne sait jamais. Yes, Mme Adorée? asked Mrs Standish. It was not nice if Mr Standish come into the workshop with her girls, Mme Adorée said, if he bring bonbons to her girls, and there was the one young girl, bien élevée mais, she was turning her head, it was the age, she was thinking of only these things, and talking of the bonbons of Mr Standish, she was so excitable about men, she was talking of nothing but Mr Standish.

Mrs Standish hated for a moment, not Willy, but the sleek French face of the milliner who had shaken her equilibrium. The face was directly responsible. It was always this way for a moment with Mrs Standish, more the agent than the reported fact. The discreet, powdered face of the Frenchwoman, with the dark eyelids. She wanted to put up her hands against this face, knowing before the announcement, to say: Yes, yes, I know, but not yet. Instead she was visibly calmer, if under her skirts her knees shook. Mon Dieu, les Anglaises! Mme Adorée thought. But Catherine Standish was no longer existent physically. She flickered. Just a flicker of the breath, and the little emotional images that started into the foreground of her mind, Willy and the bag for which she had paid herself, Willy sitting in a cloud at the café in Dieppe.