She was only telling him, she said. That was all she had come for. He had tortured her enough.

But she sat there waiting, he could feel her waiting, the direction that was Hildegard, oppressive even in the darkness.

Yes, Hildegard, he said, wearily. I’m all of that, if you like. You’re right.

Because beside sleep it was immaterial, and the meandering of flutes, that traced a thin, purposeful line across the face of personal bewilderment. He scarcely listened to her going. He walked down an avenue towards the beckoning of flutes.

7

Après moi le déluge, Mrs Standish was fond of saying, not quite knowing if this had been heard or read, or if it were one of those vague but sometimes pregnant phrases that she found floating in her head. Anyway, it pleased her, its melancholy, prophetic tone, it was something to turn on the tongue, alone on winter afternoons, reviewing all time in what had become a slightly shabby drawing-room. Noticing the dimmer colours, the encrustations of virtu in her once pretty room, Mrs Standish decided the effect was less shabby than interesting. Her mind was nimble with saving phrases. Because this, she had realized, was the only way. If she was no longer pretty, witty Kitty, she was the interesting Mrs Standish, a label that stuck to her with all the dignity of middle age. She moved well. She had explored the ultimate possibility of her own setting. She listened sympathetically to men, and gave them the impression she enjoyed it, the yawn caught somewhere in her handsome throat. It was a technique taught her by economic necessity. She could be very gracious at a supper table. And afterwards. She would accept a cheque, after protest, in which she never went too far.

These principles, like the telephone, stood firmly in the jumble of an otherwise untidy life. She liked to lie late in bed. She liked to spend a cosy afternoon in her Louis XV bergère, half conscious of the novel that she read. She liked to wander casually through her house, or what the agent more brutally referred to as an Upper Part, crumble the petals of a flower upon the landing, open a drawer on its untidiness, or even go to the kitchen and nose vaguely into bins.

Dear me, madam, Julia said, you don’t half clart about.

Because this was Julia, you accepted it. Because Julia had become a liaison officer with a world of meat and vegetables, and other depressing material things. The children grown, and incomes such as they were, she had developed logically into this. Or more. Time and intuitions had formed her into another sense. Julia handled many awkward moments on the doorstep or the telephone. Julia knew how much the children ought to know.

Mrs Standish’s children were her passion, she remarked, in some truth, but more from habit. Darlings, she sighed, complacently, alone, those mornings half asleep in bed. Though sometimes her own voice made her open her eyes and wonder. Her children. Such an abstract concept frightened her a little. Because she didn’t know them. She had never known them. Even the child in the womb, so personal, tangible, in its way, still remained an abstraction. Months, even days after birth, sealed the envelope, wrapped it in the strangeness, the aloofness of a foreign personality, resentful of possession.