‘Tell her I wish she were at work in a soap factory,’ he commanded, and later in the day signed unprotestingly a note of polite acknowledgment. In the interval he had begun to read the unfinished novel—his first child by his feathered love, begotten before he had put even a rush ring round her finger or tied an apron before her sex. Oh dear, thought Loveday Patterson, there he is with a manuscript—so unsettling! For while in a state of being in manuscript, Mr Bateman was always quite unlike his usual self: only an attempt at dictation had been worse. This was a manuscript out of the past, and unpacking it, and noticing that it had come back from the exhibition with its pages a trifle jostled, she had felt as calmly about it as if it were a shirt come back from the laundry with a ravelled cuff: she would set it to rights and put it away. But he had taken it, and now it had taken him. There he sat, straining his eyesight over the waning ink, his cheeks flushed, his lips moving, his hand with the veins standing out on it trembling with impatience as he turned over two flimsy pages for one. She stood with the signed letter to Mrs White in her hand, looking down on him, and it was as if she saw the rash coming out. If only he would let her type it!—for that is why a properly established writer keeps a secretary—to wash and clothe and cradle these reeking fragments of creation. There was not much of it, she could rattle it off in no time. But it wouldn’t do to say so now.

He became conscious of her, and glanced up. His expression was brilliantly serene, a glance from another world; 127as if he were a boy going fishing. ‘Is that you, Loveday,’ he said. ‘Off to bed? That’s right, that’s right.’ She went to her sitting-room, took the cover off her machine, and sat down to write to her married sister in Canada. ‘You will be surprised at my new address,’ she wrote, half-knowing that Phoebe would omit to notice it, ‘but it does not mean what you might think, for I am still with Mr Bateman.’ Canada was a long way off, but the man on the yonder side of the wall was further away than Canada.

Before going to bed that night, Matthew strolled out among the horse-radish. It was the first time since the arrival at High Hope that he had felt an interest in the weather. The wind was blowing from the south-west, the air was soft, the sky overcast. It smelt of rain. He went to bed deeply satisfied, knowing that the following day would be wet and stormy, the most propitious weather for his purpose, which was to write. This time, he would really write: freely, dashingly, leaving out all the stuffing and nonsense, observing nothing but his own intentions, going where he pleased, even if it meant going where he had notoriously gone before, unharnessed to any purpose except to please himself, as he had written when he lived in the harsh Arcadia of youth. He would take up the unfinished story, and finish it, and nothing of his doubtful later self should get into it, except the technical skill of the practised hand. Not for nothing had his middle years vanished in smoke. This negligible little box he now inhabited was, in fact, the perfect container for the deed he proposed. As for Loveday, he would put her under hatches. She could be sent off on excursions of pleasure.128