Maynard sat, his knees turned in against each other, his hands held back to back between the knees. Pretending not to look, she said that this time she would tell him. There was something about his abjectness that she could not bear.

Eden, he said, sometimes you’re very cruel.

Why? she asked, hoarsely.

She wanted to push away his words. They were something to resist.

Because, he said, you hold yourself back. Half the time you’re holding back.

She heard, looked, with a kind of fascination. He took his hands from between his knees. She watched the knuckles of his hands.

Anyway, it was perhaps impossible, he said, the perfect relationship between a man and a woman without the recognition of sex.

Then he touched her. Physically taut, she still quivered.

Well? she asked.

It was poor defence. In the late light, that she was glad of, it flattened and reduced the unequivocal forms, the spire only just clung to the window, a last moment of corroded elegance. She listened to her heart, that took no account of time, the chiming of clocks in the square outside.

Eden, he said.

She felt him down against her knees. On his neck, she saw the little whorl of hair, against the white neck, very close, and somehow more abject than the whole of Maynard. If she could summon pity. But it was not this.

All right, she said, her other voice, speaking for someone who would walk in perhaps through the closed door.

She took off her clothes. It was stupid to be naïve, she felt. But she trembled, the so many flags of flesh, the uncontrolled flapping of the body. If she could ignore what she felt, in his body the gratitude of Maynard. Even when she closed her eyes on the visible Maynard there was still this, that she must offset with something of her own, something more than the chafing of the flesh, the mouth on mouth. But it froze upon her mouth. She reached out through years, upon her back, through the leaves of trees, and the sound of still, basking water, to the state of physical perfection. Then her hands touched sheets. This then was sex, the rumpled bed, the sense of aching nausea, the dead weight.

Let me, let me go now, Maynard. Please.

She reached towards her clothes, a lighter pool upon the chair.

But she must come again, she mustn’t let him down, he said.

Yes, she said. Yes. Only now, she had to go.

Her feet said, and the pulses in her body, a leaden clapping that was mercifully very far distant from the mind.

She came to him always in the late afternoon. Her life had divided into three distinct and unrelated zones, the sterile but frenzied area of Maynard’s room at dusk, the house in Ebury Street, with its undertones of safe, familiar voices, and the window over Regent’s Park, at which she sat alone, or beside the voice of Aubrey Silk. She had gone to Aubrey in the New Year. She sat there, mornings, the house silent about her, muted by the many attentions of too many servants. Sound was altogether muffled, the passage of a duster, the passing of feet. Your own breathing had an unreal, fragile quality, like the Bavarian music box on the table in the drawing-room. As if it had transferred to you, out of its own gilt throat, a solemn, anachronistic tinkle.