Later when it was beginning to get dark, and everyone else had gone out of the room, she said that she had something to tell.

Come here, Eden, Mother said.

And Eden went. She had been trying on Mother’s hat. Mother looked over, and you knew that this was, well, something that you knew you did not want to know, to go any closer, when she looked at you, and it was better before when she did not notice than to have her looking like that with her eyes.

Elyot, she said.

Yes, Mother?

Your voice sounded feeble, a kind of bleat, because something was coming you did not want to hear, to stay or walk your legs didn’t know. But you went, all prickly under your clothes, you went and she touched you with her hand.

Children, she said, you don’t know, something very sad, that you don’t realize, has happened, she said.

She was holding your head against, you could feel something going on under her dress, and your own hands that were hot and tight. You were too close to her breath. It came out sharply from down in her dress, it was this you could feel, and in your hair.

You remember your father, Elyot? she asked.

Yes, he said, uncertainly.

He was trying quietly to free his head. His body was stiff, like the night the door flew open on the other room, and the voices in the other room, my poor darling, she said, with footsteps on the stairs. This was Father. It was more Father than the other glimpses, faint now, such as carving beef for Colonel Tiarks. Father was the slammed door. He wanted more than ever to resist.

Well, Father, she said slowly, Father is dead, Father has been killed in France.

That made Eden cry. She could not remember Father, but she cried, it came tumbling out, and Mother cried, as if it was Eden that had started her.

He stood there stiffly. He looked out of the window, at the garden that was growing grey, at the drops that shuddered cold and clear on a rose bush by the window. He could see everything very distinctly. He had never seen anything so clearly, the red, curved thorn on the bush, the pattern of a spider’s web. He had no part in this crying. He could not cry. He had no part in anything. It frightened him a little. He could fed himself tremble. Even when he found himself alone, after Mother had picked up Eden and carried her out, after their voices had left the room, he continued to stand there, shivering, dry. When Julia came to call him to tea he was still standing stiffly in the darkness, in which both room and garden had disappeared.