Maynard said that all his life he had longed to travel, but like most aims, this was squashed by his bad luck, whether the scholarship he missed, or the poverty of parsons’ sons, or, afterwards, his wife’s tastes. Her name, he said, was Edith. He had grown to hate her, certain things about her, habits, the way she licked the corner of an envelope and applied the stamp, or things she wore, like a string of artificial pearls, and the luminous dial of a wristwatch seen at night. Edith was also a symbol of gentility, of poverty. He was acutely ashamed of this, the second-best, the makeshifts at Cambridge, the calculations over meals and fares, the humiliation of summer weeks in English watering places. Edith preferred Bournemouth, it was less vulgar than Brighton, she said. After the break it would be different, he had felt. But he didn’t bargain for his luck, the jobs just missed, the professional jealousies. This was something no one understood if they hadn’t experienced it.

There was much like that. There was not much room for disagreement. Out of the monologue grew foreign sounds to which Eden tuned her ear, the collapsing phrase on the accordion, the Arab selling peanuts. She clung to these. She wanted not to criticize, not to destroy. So that she forced herself to accept, whether it was words or the sexual act. She became a kind of dog-like silence. There was much of the dog’s attitude in the relationship of women with men, she decided. The acceptance, the waiting for the next move. For this reason you lay waiting on the beds of cheap hotels. You waited for a sign. You held the weight of an exhausted body stretched upon your own, with your hands you comforted the skin of a withdrawn and scarcely sentient being. This was the right attitude perhaps, that ignored personal distaste. Regrets were the footsteps that retreated down hotel corridors at night, but, there, recognizable.

She had to recognize the failure of Dieppe, that her mother also took for granted, with the glance that understood. She began to avoid her mother. In the evening she went to friends. There was a girl called Valerie Stevenson, whose sister she had known at school. Or she merely walked, or sat alone on benches, to escape the half-expressed solicitude. You’re a distant creature, Maynard said. She failed to comment. Whether or not, she failed to know. To know yourself. That ludicrous presumption before entering the maze. Later on, events forced her to resume inquiry desperately enough.

Later on, it was in the spring, Maynard left for the United States. A job with commercial architects that took him to New York.

This is what I’ve waited for, he said. This is the beginning. This is a new life. I was meant to launch out. I was never insular. You don’t understand, Eden. New York. And then there’s California.

She tried to concentrate on something, some object, the butt of a dead cigarette, the worn heel of a shoe, to escape from the disgusting, the nauseating aspect of the human ego. But I asked for this, she said, knowing that it lacked consolation. Man was vulgar enough, as an individual, only in the mass there was a kind of abstract nobility. If this were not also illusion, the illusion induced by words, by books, by the sentimental dictatorship of heart and stomach in contact with the streets.