Giving himself to the past, he wanted to get away, it was suddenly too pungent, like the vase of week-old anemones that shrivelled beside the amethyst box. He listened to Eden break the stalks. She had bought them in the street, she said, off a barrow in Pimlico. Her hands coped with the angles of their stalks. She sat with her face in her hands at dusk. She sat beside anemones. These, still huddled in their brittle frills, were not quite dead. They rustled like a kind of immortelle. They wore the intense, the used-up expression of Eden’s face, persistent in a struggle against conventional procedure.

I have bought some lilies, said Mrs Standish, we must have a party, lilies and people, and what shall we have to eat? The excitement of his mother’s voice, refreshed by an inspiration, as it came in on a September evening. Eden’s groan. He stood on the edge himself, fingering the leaf of an interceding lily, never able to participate with any degree of conviction, in the smoke, in the scent, in the composite voice of his mother’s parties. These had their relics too, if not the substantial ones of bric-à-brac or photograph. His toe touched the patch of créme de menthe spilt by the nervous Connie Tiarks. It lay upon the carpet like a chart of all the anxious moments at all parties.

Outside in the street the sound of traffic pointed to a less familiar present, that the house, that his mother’s voice rose up to deny, her: Elyot, Adelaide is here, or: Do come in for a moment, Elyot, this is Mr Collins, he plays in a band, isn’t that interesting ? Even Eden’s train had rumbled into a lumber room of images, where Joe Barnett sat in a corner, looking at his cap, his hands, his knees, and Muriel Raphael in a Tissot boater leant against the mantelpiece. It was so easy to substitute the dead for the living, to build a cocoon of experience away from the noises in the street. Like the old women in private hotels, the old women in Bayswater, Kensington, and Holland Park. This is what I am doing, he said, deliberately killing the noises in the street. Or the man, the drunk with the grey face scored suddenly with blood.

A face returned, to insist, to make some contact in a foreign world, from which you had purposely excluded it, out of an unwilling mind. It filled the half-lit, fireless room. Very close, he could have touched a face. He waited for the words he would not speak, because these were the words you never spoke, there was never any means of communication with the faces in the street. He continued to sit on the edge. Or he closed his door in the morning, he began to work, there were also the visits to museum and to library, which amounted in time to so many reverent comments on the literary achievements of the dead, and as much correct approval from the Sunday press. The devotion of Mr Standish to letters was the devotion of a single mind, it had been said. A devotion to the dust. My son is a scholar, said Mrs Standish, with the tactlessness that only a mother can be guilty of. And now his mother was so much dust, along with the other objects of this time-absorbing reverence.