She began to be, ironically, a sort of high priestess to Aubrey Silk’s collections. In a way she was grateful, as you are for the lucid moments. She knew by detail the Monets and the Renoirs. She was learning to judge Chinese jade. At appropriate times she poured tea from Lowestoft, diffidently, her mouth pursed a little at her own gesture, at the unreality of Eden Standish in this connexion, pouring tea or handing cornflour cakes. Five p.m. is perhaps the most unconvincing hour, she felt. More especially because it bridged the distance, through Aubrey’s voice, to the time spent with Maynard About this hour it began to recur.

Thank you, Eden, Aubrey said. That will be all, I think. Let me see. Yes.

His chin drooped above his collar. Sometimes you felt, beyond the detachment of Aubrey, that there was some participation in the lives of other people, but not often, and not long. On the whole, the practice of detachment, like the cultivation of acute sympathy and understanding, puts you in a world of illusory proportions. Aubrey Silk, and probably at the other extremity, Connie Tiarks, she guessed, lived just as far removed from reality.

Good night, Aubrey, Eden said.

Even the voice in Aubrey’s house acquired discreeter tones, dim, dove-grey, a little precious.

Walking from the house in Regent’s Park, there was a rankness in February streets, a cold cluttering of newspapers that blew against the ankles, soon the glare from Tottenham Court Road. She took off her hat. She walked hatless, untidily. She walked this way every evening, there were the shops she knew, and the faces, the Italians and the Indians, that became part of this period of transit, of transformation, of growing foreign to herself, like the dark and just not rational Indian face above the tin of Bombay duck. She would never quite understand this, she felt. It was like a repulsion for a pair of hands. She was still surprised even by the printed MAYNARD above his bell.

He wanted her to go away with him, if only for a little, say for a weekend, so that he would have her completely to himself, he would be very grateful if she gave him this. Because in London, in the furtive hours they spent, you couldn’t, couldn’t lose yourself, he put it. Taking the words from her, unexpressed. To go away with Maynard, to lose yourself, or to find yourself. She found herself suddenly grasping at the possibility of what he said. It will be different, she said, I shall try, there will be no reserves of personal feeling. So she began to want it very much. The place was immaterial. She agreed when he suggested Dieppe.

I am going to Dieppe, Mother, she said, in a pause between stockings, that she glanced at, then rolled casually into their ball. Aubrey’s given me till Tuesday.

Very casual the voice sometimes is, launched on the informative remark. Eden sensed this. It was too casual, transparent, the implication inside, like the hand behind the stocking web. The brushes made a little click.