But, Eden, dear, you didn’t tell me, said Mrs Standish.

She stood in another morning, the recurrence of place was enough, to send back her mind on more than a geographical errand. In fact, Mrs Standish quailed. The long trailers of her sleeves settled helplessly.

There was nothing to tell, Eden said.

She resented the movement of criticism. This was one of the moments when you heard, beyond a person’s critical silence, the noises in the street. She rejected busily her mother’s face. Because it was too much. Hands clamped the brushes together again.

But it’s, it’s all right, Eden? said Mrs Standish.

She was not herself. Crises often made Mrs Standish lose the faith she had in herself. They tumbled her laborious façade. She became a face waking in the night, afraid of itself, the essential face, without the apologies of powder and rouge.

Why shouldn’t it be? asked Eden.

I don’t know, her mother said.

But it was there still, the implication, like the flashback in a play in which she doubled, and Willy’s face that doubled also for a shadow.

Now I must go to bed, said Eden, I’ll be up early. You needn’t bother.

Then they were offering cheeks.

It will rain, said Mrs Standish. In Dieppe it always rains.

As if this were material, her voice offering a fatuous bleat, on which the door closed. Eden closing the door. They stood either side of a closed door.

Mrs Standish went to bed. Sometimes she counted when she was alone. She found it happening inside her head. Tonight she was counting it out aloud. It came more dispassionately than thought. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, counted Mrs Standish, before she stopped, listened. It would be too bad if, through a wall anyone had heard. After all Eden was old enough, she said. But this only made her miserable. She drifted in a glare of French woodwork and the flavour of macaroons.

Dieppe became, for Eden too, so many sensations, more this than forms, and the voice of Maynard that dissolved substance in its neighbourhood, its self-absorption did not take into account the independent existence. They took a room somewhere near water. It was a backwater, or a river into which boats came, the small, hardy boats that penetrate and become landscape, their funnels and their sails. From the window, when he had gone down, when for a moment she was free, she watched the head of smoke upon a blackened funnel. From her window she tried to feel the special nature of their expedition. She would force herself this time into the romantic attitude of two people taking trains. In the train he had held her hand. But little of the journey remained, stood the test of time. At the moment it was secondary, she knew, beside the quincaillerie with the two men doing business, the man in the cap, its shiny peak, the man with the grey paper package. Voices hurtled over cobbles. There was also the door in the side of the Hôtel du Nord that opened on a square of lemon-coloured light, less northern than tropical, the wooden shutter swinging on the colour of a fever.