Children are essentially resentful, whether of love or of indifference, she decided in more bitter moments. There was Elyot. Or there were several Elyots, the one created out of correspondence, the boy mooning in his own room, the polite, impersonal creature who answered questions on the Cambridge Backs. Elyot was a shadow that fell across the substance of her friends, the men who brought her presents, who filled her drawing-room with conversation and cigar smoke. Elyot standing sideways. His manner was perpetually sideways. Smoothing his hair, she could sense withdrawal. Or they sat in untidy silences. She could feel his disapproval of mentioned names.

If you could pull the veil away from your children’s faces. If you could touch their faces. Or if you could achieve contact through the humble, factual detail. As Julia did. Take off your socks, they’re wet, said Julia. He sat in the kitchen and took off his socks. He talked baldly in bald words, received or not by Julia, it did not matter, the kitchen held an occasion that was somehow or other complete.

It’s no good, Aubrey, said Mrs Standish. I try.

Aubrey Silk remained a changeless detail in the face of change, embalmed in an epoch he had touched on briefly in person, if more frequently in spirit. Dove-grey, she thought of him, or in black, with the pale veins making of the backs of his hands almost identical maps. He looked at her critically above his high collar. His head rested on his collar, or on the tea-plate held to his chin to catch crumbs, then he looked like a St John the Baptist lolling gravely on his charger. The criticism of Aubrey Silk was not too positive to hurt. She believed that Aubrey actually was kind – kind enough, on lifting the flap, to let it fall into place again.

Yes, he said, Catherine, yes, you try. Why not give it a rest ?

Then he asked her to marry him. It was how many times, she counted, the rite of a proposal from Aubrey Silk, that discovered in her no fresh excitement, only the mild, warming pleasure of sentimental retrospect. This was one of the absurdities, felt Mrs Standish, her regular, illogical, highly stupid refusal of Aubrey Silk. Almost as if she relished her own stupidity. She could feel the shape of her refusing smile. She deliberately composed it on her face.

Thank you, Aubrey, said Mrs Standish. I expect I’m really masochistic.

She enjoyed the use of words, the more adventurous ones, of which she only half grasped the significance. These represented a tribute to the intellectual life, on the brink of which she hovered longingly.

Marriage doesn’t dispose of the children. I can’t foist my own children. No, Aubrey, she said.

That made him protest.

No, she said, not unwistfully.

It formed those two nostalgic wrinkles on either side of her mouth, pursed up in just the way that made her acquaintances remark that Catherine Standish was a brave woman.