Why, he said, why funny, why not for instance inevitable?

Regretting at once, because it was a remark he would not ordinarily make, and these would sometimes fit themselves to his mouth, he was left to face the discrepancy between himself and the remarks he made. Words were so seldom a literal translation.

Connie Tiarks had mottled over.

Well, she said, touching a flower, a large amorphous flower in the pattern of her dress, touching it as if she hadn’t noticed it before. I like to think things are inevitable, Elyot, she said. The nice things, of course.

They listened to the fire. He felt uncomfortable behind the legs. Because Connie was searching for a thought, something pregnant, apposite, he could scent it, that she had probably copied out of a book.

That’s all very well, he said dryly. But does it guard against monotony?

That again was clumsy, and this time cruel. He had no control, it seemed, over his own intentions.

No, she said. No. I want to be comfortable. That’s the main thing.

It came with a kind of desperation that he quite believed, behind it the crumpets and the gas fire in a boarding-house in Cheltenham. And she clung desperately to her assertion. Her face was guarding it.

I want to feel I know, she almost sighed.

Poor Connie, as she became in time, in the voice of Mrs Standish, there was no end to the poverty of certainty in the life of Connie Tiarks, she was inevitably always reaching for her gloves. Looking at her, Elyot detested himself. Or looking at the face of Connie Tiarks many times repeated, in many places, that he did not know how to touch, either in the fumbling of words or the more consoling silences. Elyot is a scholar, his mother said. He retreated into books. A secondhand existence.

Hello, you two, Eden said.

They looked round, as if protecting an unguarded moment. Because Eden did not belong, standing with a cigarette in her mouth, destroying a moment from the doorway, not wishing to inquire, but purely destructive, just her presence.

We’re having a talk, Connie said.

As if it mattered, you felt, to Eden, to her drooping, thoughtful cigarette. Connie remembered she had been afraid of Eden. That is not uncommon in children, she told herself, to reassure. But she remained uneasy now.

Oh, said Eden.

She went away. She could not think, Connie or Elyot, who did not belong, or for that matter Eden herself. She had to go back over and over again, to her voice making promises. She had met him that afternoon in Lyons.

There was a potency about cheap music that wasn’t to be despised, he said.

She heard the sugar cannon off the cup, closer than music, like his hand.

If you wanted to drug yourself, she said.

She explored warily, not the hand, rejecting this ambassador of the face, her eyes wandered over marble. There were also many Jewesses.

And didn’t she, sometime? After all –