‘But why?’ she had asked. ‘Why must she come and live with you? I thought it was all over, months ago.’

‘So did I.’

‘But Annelies doesn’t. Is that it?’

‘She is so wretched,’ he had said. ‘So desperately, incompetently wretched. I can’t let her go on suffering like this.’

While they spoke, she continued spreading the blue 3paint, brushing it into the knots and cajoling it round the door-knocker. Dreamily, under the shock of these tidings, there had persisted a small, steady dissatisfaction because the paint was not the right shade of blue.

The flat of now seemed lighter than the flat of then. This was partly because her pieces of rosewood furniture were now so much paler in tone; twelve years in a country house, with windows open and sun shining in and not enough furniture polish, had bleached the rosewood to a tint of feuille-morte. Outside there was a difference, too—more air, more light, welling like fountains from the bombed sites. The room was full of light, as full of light as it was full of silence. In the centre stood the rosewood table, and as she bent over it, it reflected her with the whole length of its uncluttered surface, darkened here and there with old ink-stains like sea-leopard skin.

‘I shall leave you the rosewood table,’ she had said to Willie. ‘It’s the only one that is the right height for you, and large enough to hold all your traps.’

‘No, don’t,’ he had said. ‘I shall take over the big kitchen table. It’s the same height. I’ve measured it.’

‘Very well. But you’ll keep the wardrobe?’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Nonsense! You must have something to keep your clothes in. Or to keep the moths in, for I suppose you’ll never remember to shut the doors.’

‘That’s all right. Annelies has one of these compactum things. It belonged to her husband.’

‘I see. How convenient.’4

‘My God, how I hate these practical conversations! Why must we have them? They always end like this.’

Planning ahead, Barbara had resolved that the furniture should not be arranged in the flat of now as in the flat of then. But London rooms impose a formula. Now, as then, the desk stood in the recess on the left side of the fireplace, and the bookcase in the recess on the right; the sofa had its back to the window; and, on the wall opposite the fireplace, the Chippendale mirror hung above the bureau. Later on, she thought, readjusting the sofa cushions (for Mrs Darbyshire, like Mrs Shelley, had a passion for putting square objects cornerwise)—later on, people too will regroup themselves in this room. Mary Mackenzie’s hand will dangle from the arm of the Regency chair as though its rings were too many and too heavy for it, and Julian will project his long legs obliquely from the stool, and Clive Thompson will stand with his back to the room, puffing at the bookcase. They will not have kept their outlines as unyieldingly as the furniture has, but their voices will be the same, and after the first constraint we shall find a great deal to talk about. It will be best, her thoughts went on, planning, foreseeing and planning as they had done during the breathless, interminable weeks before her departure from Pond House—it will be best to get them all here together one evening, when any awkwardness can be tided over by making them a trifle drunk. But that could be later on. It was still only her third day in the flat of now, and one must have a small decency-bit of time in which to lick one’s wounds and wring the sea-water of shipwreck out of one’s 5hair. Such privilege belongs to women … One of the advantages of a solitary life is that it allows one time to verify quotations instead of trailing them about all day, hanging them on gooseberry bushes, leaving them, like rings, above the sink. Such privilege … Hermione, in The Winter’s Tale, said it.