Mostly, though, she avoided these, the mentally or not so mentally voluptuous moments. She had a kind of austerity that found them suspect. Just as she began to question leisure. Because it had become pointless, her own movements, the cups of tea, the cigarettes, the movies after lunch. She was being seduced by the permanency of leisure, her own infinite time to spend. And this was hard to resist, the voluptuous stroking of empty days. She could feel her mind settle into a state of numb and helpless discontent.

You’ll have the nap off the carpet, Julia said.

Julia went shopping with a string bag. She planted her feet firmly on the ground. You heard her coming up the stairs. You heard the door at seven-thirty, out of the half-sleep, the darkness that she pulled back with the curtains. Her hands were a mottled, bluish red, as cold as the early morning air encountered in the bus from Clerkenwell. She lodged there with her aunt, now that the house was full. She arrived with a ticket in her glove. She left with pieces of stale loaves, or the remnants of a pudding in a basin. Everything she did was logical, aloof, the whole pattern that Julia made, it continued, this life of Julia’s, because of and yet apart from the lives of the others in the house.

I’m altogether futile, Eden felt.

She sat in the kitchen, by the kneading of dough, she sat there watching Julia’s hands.

You’ll yawn your head off, hinny, said Julia.

Yes, she said. I know.

She went upstairs. She read, the books that she half finished, the way her mind skipped from argument to argument, disappointed by the first promise. Or she walked, as a release, long walks that took her into places that had no bearing on herself, the long, listless, eyeless streets, from Camberwell to Bethnal Green. She walked along the Mile End Road, its wide and windy pavement, where she was ignored quietly, nobody looked at her. She was altogether pointless, rootless. She failed to fit into the pattern of the streets, she played no part in the emotional pattern of the groups at windows or standing in doorways. It even seemed as if her own emotional, sentient life had ceased.

I can’t understand you, her mother said. When there’s so much you might do.

It slipped out, thoughtless, through the smoke from her cigarette, forgetful of a letter, I mean to do, that had disturbed the complacency of Mrs Standish, sensing unapproved activities.

I mean, she hurried, you might, for instance, go up to Elyot for the weekend.

Even if it weren’t the season for punts, Mrs Standish approved the air of Cambridge, felt it might settle the mind discreetly.

No, said Eden.

She did not want, could not think, she had forgotten Elyot, except as a vague presence appearing at certain seasons of the year. She did not want to take her own into the presence of an equal vagueness. The thought of silences in Elyot’s room.