It was a summer evening; the sun was setting; the sky was blue still, but tinged with gold, as if a thin veil of gauze hung over it, and here and there in the gold-blue amplitude an island of cloud lay suspended. In the fields the trees stood majestically caparisoned, with their innumerable leaves gilt. Sheep and cows, pearl white and parti-coloured, lay recumbent or munched their way through the half transparent grass. An edge of light surrounded everything. A red-gold fume rose from the dust on the roads. Even the little red brick villas on the high roads had become porous, incandescent with light, and the flowers in cottage gardens, lilac and pink like cotton dresses, shone veined as if lit from within. Faces of people standing at cottage doors or padding along pavements showed the same red glow as they fronted the slowly sinking sun.

Eleanor came out of her flat and shut the door. Her face was lit up by the glow of the sun as it sank over London, and for a moment she was dazzled and looked out over the roofs and spires that lay beneath. There were people talking inside her room, and she wanted to have a word with her nephew alone. North, her brother Morris’s son, had just come back from Africa, and she had scarcely seen him alone. So many people had dropped in that evening — Miriam Parrish; Ralph Pickersgill; Antony Wedd; her niece Peggy, and on top of them all, that very talkative man, her friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky, whom they called Brown for short. She had scarcely had a word with North alone. For a moment they stood in the bright square of sunshine that fell on the stone floor of the passage. Voices were still talking within. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“It’s so nice to see you,” she said. “And you haven’t changed . . . ” She looked at him. She still saw traces of the brown-eyed cricketing boy in the massive man, who was so burnt, and a little grey too over the ears. “We sha’n’t let you go back,” she continued, beginning to walk downstairs with him, “to that horrid farm.”

He smiled. “And you haven’t changed either,” he said.

She looked very vigorous. She had been in India. Her face was tanned with the sun. With her white hair and her brown cheeks she scarcely looked her age, but she must be well over seventy, he was thinking. They walked downstairs arm-in-arm. There were six flights of stone steps to descend, but she insisted upon coming all the way down with him, to see him off.

“And North,” she said, when they reached the hall, “you will be careful. . . . ” She stopped on the doorstep. “Driving in London,” she said, “isn’t the same as driving in Africa.”

There was his little sports car outside; a man was going past the door in the evening sunlight crying “Old chairs and baskets to mend.”

He shook his head; his voice was drowned by the voice of the man crying. He glanced at a board that hung in the hall with names on it. Who was in and who was out was signified with a care that amused him slightly, after Africa. The voice of the man crying “Old chairs and baskets to mend,” slowly died away.

“Well, good-bye, Eleanor,” he said turning. “We shall meet later.” He got into his car.

“Oh, but North —” she cried, suddenly remembering something she wanted to say to him. But he had turned on the engine; he did not hear her voice. He waved his hand to her — there she stood at the top of the steps with her hair blowing in the wind. The car started off with a jerk. She gave another wave of her hand to him as he turned the corner.

Eleanor is just the same, he thought: more erratic perhaps. With a room full of people — her little room had been crowded — she had insisted upon showing him her new shower-bath. “You press that knob,” she had said, “and look —” Innumerable needles of water shot down. He laughed aloud. They had sat on the edge of the bath together.

But the cars behind him hooted persistently; they hooted and hooted. What at? he asked. Suddenly he realised that they were hooting at him. The light had changed; it was green now, he had been blocking the way. He started off with a violent jerk. He had not mastered the art of driving in London.

The noise of London still seemed to him deafening, and the speed at which people drove was terrifying. But it was exciting after Africa. The shops even, he thought, as he shot past rows of plate- glass windows, were marvellous. Along the kerb, too, there were barrows of fruit and flowers. Everywhere there was profusion; plenty. . . . Again the red light shone out; he pulled up.

He looked about him. He was somewhere in Oxford Street; the pavement was crowded with people; jostling each other; swarming round the plate-glass windows which were still lit up. The gaiety, the colour, the variety, were amazing after Africa. All these years, he thought to himself, looking at a floating banner of transparent silk, he had been used to raw goods; hides and fleeces; here was the finished article. A dressing-case, of yellow leather fitted with silver bottles, caught his eye. But the light was green again. On he jerked.

He had only been back ten days, and his mind was a jumble of odds and ends. It seemed to him that he had never stopped talking: shaking hands; saying How-d’you-do? People sprang up everywhere; his father; his sister; old men got up from armchairs and said, You don’t remember me? Children he had left in the nursery were grown- up men at college; girls with pigtails were now married women. He was still confused by it all; they talked so fast; they must think him very slow, he thought. He had to withdraw into the window and say, “What, what, what do they mean by it?”

For instance, this evening at Eleanor’s there was a man there with a foreign accent who squeezed lemon into his tea. Who might he be, he wondered? “One of Nell’s dentists,” said his sister Peggy, wrinkling her lip. For they all had lines cut; phrases ready-made. But that was the silent man on the sofa. It was the other one he meant — squeezing lemon in his tea. “We call him Brown,” she murmured. Why Brown if he’s a foreigner, he wondered. Anyhow they all romanticized solitude and savagery —“I wish I’d done what you did,” said a little man called Pickersgill — except this man Brown, who had said something that interested him. “If we do not know ourselves, how can we know other people?” he had said. They had been discussing dictators; Napoleon; the psychology of great men. But there was the green light —“go”. He shot on again. And then the lady with the ear-rings gushed about the beauties of Nature. He glanced at the name of the street on the left. He was going to dine with Sara but he had not much notion how to get there. He had only heard her voice on the telephone saying, “Come and dine with me — Milton Street, fifty-two, my name’s on the door.” It was near the Prison Tower. But this man Brown — it was difficult to place him at once. He talked, spreading his fingers out with the volubility of a man who will in the end become a bore. And Eleanor wandered about, holding a cup, telling people about her shower- bath. He wished they would stick to the point. Talk interested him. Serious talk on abstract subjects. “Was solitude good; was society bad?” That was interesting; but they hopped from thing to thing. When the large man said, “Solitary confinement is the greatest torture we inflict,” the meagre old woman with the wispy hair at once piped up, laying her hand on her heart, “It ought to be abolished!” She visited prisons, it seemed.

“Where the dickens am I now?” he asked, peering at the name on the street corner. Somebody had chalked a circle on the wall with a jagged line in it. He looked down the long vista. Door after door, window after window, repeated the same pattern. There was a red-yellow glow over it all, for the sun was sinking through the London dust. Everything was tinged with a warm yellow haze. Barrows full of fruit and flowers were drawn up at the kerb. The sun gilded the fruit; the flowers had a blurred brilliance; there were roses, carnations and lilies too. He had half a mind to stop and buy a bunch to take to Sally. But the cars were hooting behind him. He went on. A bunch of flowers, he thought, held in the hand would soften the awkwardness of meeting and the usual things that had to be said. “How nice to see you — you’ve filled out,” and so on. He had only heard her voice on the telephone, and people changed after all these years. Whether this was the right street or not, he could not be sure; he filtered slowly round the corner. Then stopped; then went on again. This was Milton Street, a dusky street, with old houses, now let out as lodgings; but they had seen better days.

“The odds on that side; the evens on this,” he said. The street was blocked with vans. He hooted. He stopped. He hooted again. A man went to the horse’s head, for it was a coal-cart, and the horse slowly plodded on. Fifty-two was just along the row. He dribbled up to the door. He stopped.

A voice pealed out across the street, the voice of a woman singing scales.

“What a dirty,” he said, as he sat still in the car for a moment — here a woman crossed the street with a jug under her arm —“sordid,” he added, “low-down street to live in.” He cut off his engine; got out, and examined the names on the door. Names mounted one above another; here on a visiting-card, here engraved on brass — Foster; Abrahamson; Roberts; S. Pargiter was near the top, punched on a strip of aluminium. He rang one of the many bells. No one came. The woman went on singing scales, mounting slowly. The mood comes, the mood goes, he thought. He used to write poetry; now the mood had come again as he stood there waiting. He pressed the bell two or three times sharply. But no one answered. Then he gave the door a push; it was open. There was a curious smell in the hall; of vegetables cooking; and the oily brown paper made it dark. He went up the stairs of what had once been a gentleman’s residence. The banisters were carved; but they had been daubed over with some cheap yellow varnish. He mounted slowly and stood on the landing, uncertain which door to knock at. He was always finding himself now outside the doors of strange houses. He had a feeling that he was no one and nowhere in particular. From across the road came the voice of the singer deliberately ascending the scale, as if the notes were stairs; and here she stopped indolently, languidly, flinging out the voice that was nothing but pure sound. Then he heard somebody inside, laughing.

That’s her voice, he said. But there is somebody with her. He was annoyed. He had hoped to find her alone. The voice was speaking and did not answer when he knocked. Very cautiously he opened the door and went in.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Sara was saying. She was kneeling at the telephone talking; but there was nobody there. She raised her hand when she saw him and smiled at him; but she kept her hand raised as if the noise he had made caused her to lose what she was trying to hear.

“What?” she said, speaking into the telephone. “What?” He stood silent, looking at the silhouettes of his grandparents on the mantelpiece. There were no flowers, he observed. He wished he had brought her some. He listened to what she was saying; he tried to piece it together.

“Yes, now I can hear. . . . Yes, you’re right. Someone has come in. . . . Who? North. My cousin from Africa. . . . ”

That’s me, North thought. “My cousin from Africa.” That’s my label.

“You’ve met him?” she was saying. There was a pause. “D’you think so?” she said. She turned and looked at him. They must be discussing him, he thought. He felt uncomfortable.

“Good-bye,” she said, and put down the telephone.

“He says he met you tonight,” she said, going up to him and taking his hand. “And liked you,” she added, smiling.

“Who was that?” he asked, feeling awkward; but he had no flowers to give her.

“A man you met at Eleanor’s,” she said.

“A foreigner?” he asked.

“Yes. Called Brown,” she said, pushing up a chair for him.

He sat down on the chair she had pushed out for him, and she curled up opposite with her foot under her. He remembered the attitude; she came back in sections; first the voice; then the attitude; but something remained unknown.

“You’ve not changed,” he said — the face he meant. A plain face scarcely changed; whereas beautiful faces wither. She looked neither young nor old; but shabby; and the room, with the pampas grass in a pot in the corner, was untidy. A lodging-house room tidied in a hurry he guessed.

“And you —” she said, looking at him. It was as if she were trying to put two different versions of him together; the one on the telephone perhaps and the one on the chair. Or was there some other? This half knowing people, this half being known, this feeling of the eye on the flesh, like a fly crawling — how uncomfortable it was, he thought; but inevitable, after all these years. The tables were littered; he hesitated, holding his hat in his hand. She smiled at him, as he sat there, holding his hat uncertainly.

“Who’s the young Frenchman,” she said, “with the top hat in the picture?”

“What picture?” he asked.

“The one who sits looking puzzled with his hat in his hand,” she said. He put his hat on the table, but awkwardly. A book fell to the floor.

“Sorry,” he said. She meant, presumably, when she compared him to the puzzled man in the picture, that he was clumsy; he always had been.

“This isn’t the room where I came last time?” he asked.

He recognised a chair — a chair with gilt claws; there was the usual piano.

“No — that was on the other side of the river,” she said, “when you came to say good-bye.”

He remembered. He had come to her the evening before he left for the war; and he had hung his cap on the bust of their grandfather — that had vanished. And she had mocked him.

“How many lumps of sugar does a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Royal Regiment of Rat-catchers require?” she had sneered. He could see her now dropping lumps of sugar into his tea. And they had quarrelled. And he had left her. It was the night of the raid, he remembered. He remembered the dark night; the searchlights that slowly swept over the sky; here and there they stopped to ponder a fleecy patch; little pellets of shot fell; and people scudded along the empty blue shrouded streets. He had been going to Kensington to dine with his family; he had said good-bye to his mother; he had never seen her again.

The voice of the singer interrupted. “Ah — h-h, oh-h-h, ah — h-h, oh — h-h,” she sang, languidly climbing up and down the scale on the other side of the street.

“Does she go on like that every night?” he asked. Sara nodded. The notes coming through the humming evening air sounded slow and sensuous. The singer seemed to have endless leisure; she could rest on every stair.

And there was no sign of dinner, he observed; only a dish of fruit on the cheap lodging-house tablecloth, already yellowed with some gravy stain.

“Why d’you always choose slums —” he was beginning, for children were screaming in the street below, when the door opened and a girl came in carrying a bunch of knives and forks. The regular lodging- house skivvy, North thought; with red hands, and one of those jaunty white caps that girls in lodging-houses clap on top of their hair when the lodger has a party. In her presence they had to make conversation. “I’ve been seeing Eleanor,” he said. “That was where I met your friend Brown.. ..”

The girl made a clatter laying the table with the knives and forks she held in a bunch.

“Oh, Eleanor,” said Sara. “Eleanor —” But she watched the girl going clumsily round the table; she breathed rather hard as she laid it.

“She’s just back from India,” he said. He too watched the girl laying the table. Now she stood a bottle of wine among the cheap lodging-house crockery.

“Gallivanting round the world,” Sara murmured.

“And entertaining the oddest set of old fogies,” he added. He thought of the little man with the fierce blue eyes who wished he had been in Africa; and the wispy woman with beads who visited prisons it seemed.

“ . . . and that man, your friend —” he began. Here the girl went out of the room, but she left the door open, a sign that she was about to come back.

“Nicholas,” said Sara, finishing his sentence. “The man you call Brown.”

There was a pause. “And what did you talk about?” she asked.

He tried to remember.

“Napoleon; the psychology of great men; if we don’t know ourselves how can we know other people . . . ” He stopped. It was difficult to remember accurately what had been said even one hour ago.

“And then,” she said, holding out one hand and touching a finger exactly as Brown had done, “— how can we make laws, religions, that fit, that fit, when we don’t know ourselves?”

“Yes! Yes!” he exclaimed. She had caught his manner exactly; the slight foreign accent; the repetition of the little word “fit”, as if he were not quite sure of the shorter words in English.

“And Eleanor,” Sara continued, “says . . . ‘Can we improve — can we improve ourselves?’ sitting on the edge of the sofa?”

“Of the bath,” he laughed, correcting her.

“You’ve had that talk before,” he said. That was precisely what he was feeling. They had talked before. “And then,” he continued, “we discussed. . . . ”

But here the girl burst in again. She had plates in her hand this time; blue-ringed plates, cheap lodging-house plates: “— society or solitude; which is best,” he finished his sentence.

Sara kept looking at the table. “And which,” she asked, in the distracted way of someone who with their surface senses watches what is being done, but at the same time thinks of something else “— which did you say? You who’ve been alone all these years,” she said. The girl left the room again. “— among your sheep, North.” She broke off; for now a trombone player had struck up in the street below, and as the voice of the woman practising her scales continued, they sounded like two people trying to express completely different views of the world in general at one and the same time. The voice ascended; the trombone wailed. They laughed.

“ . . . Sitting on the verandah,” she resumed, “looking at the stars.”

He looked up: was she quoting something? He remembered he had written to her when he first went out. “Yes, looking at the stars,” he said.

“Sitting on the verandah in the silence,” she added. A van went past the window. All sounds were for the moment obliterated.

“And then . . . ” she said as the van rattled away — she paused as if she were referring to something else that he had written.

“— then you saddled a horse,” she said, “and rode away!”

She jumped up, and for the first time he saw her face in the full light. There was a smudge on the side of her nose.

“D’you know,” he said, looking at her, “that you’ve a smudge on your face?”

She touched the wrong cheek.

“Not that side — the other,” he said.

She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sara Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow.

He strolled to the window. The sun must be setting, for the brick of the house at the corner blushed a yellowish pink. One or two high windows were burnished gold. The girl was in the room, and she distracted him; also the noise of London still bothered him. Against the dull background of traffic noises, of wheels turning and brakes squeaking, there rose near at hand the cry of a woman suddenly alarmed for her child; the monotonous cry of a man selling vegetables; and far away a barrel organ was playing. It stopped; it began again. I used to write to her, he thought, late at night, when I felt lonely, when I was young. He looked at himself in the glass. He saw his sunburnt face with the broad cheek bones and the little brown eyes.

The girl had been sucked down into the lower portion of the house. The door stood open. Nothing seemed to be happening. He waited. He felt an outsider. After all these years, he thought, everyone was paired off; settled down; busy with their own affairs. You found them telephoning, remembering other conversations; they went out of the room; they left one alone. He took up a book and read a sentence.

“A shadow like an angel with bright hair . . . ”

Next moment she came in. But there seemed to be some hitch in the proceedings. The door was open; the table laid; but nothing happened. They stood together, waiting, with their backs to the fireplace.

“How strange it must be,” she resumed, “coming back after all these years — as if you’d dropped from the clouds in an aeroplane,” she pointed to the table as if that were the field in which he had landed.

“On to an unknown land,” said North. He leant forward and touched a knife on the table.

“— and finding people talking,” she added.

“— talking, talking,” he said, “about money and politics,” he added, giving the fender behind him a vicious little kick with his heel.

Here the girl came in. She wore an air of importance derived apparently from the dish she carried, for it was covered with a great metal cover. She raised the cover with a certain flourish. There was a leg of mutton underneath. “Let’s dine,” said Sara.

“I’m hungry,” he added.

They sat down and she took the carving-knife and made a long incision. A thin trickle of red juice ran out; it was underdone. She looked at it.

“Mutton oughtn’t to be like that,” she said. “Beef — but not mutton.”

They watched the red juice running down into the well of the dish.

“Shall we send it back,” she said, “or eat it as it is?”

“Eat it,” he said. “I’ve eaten far worse joints than this,” he added.

“In Africa . . . ” she said, lifting the lids of the vegetable dishes. There was a slabbed-down mass of cabbage in one oozing green water; in the other, yellow potatoes that looked hard.

“ . . . in Africa, in the wilds of Africa,” she resumed, helping him to cabbage, “in that farm you were on, where no one came for months at a time, and you sat on the verandah listening —”

“To sheep,” he said. He was cutting his mutton into strips. It was tough.

“And there was nothing to break the silence,” she went on, helping herself to potatoes, “but a tree falling, or a rock breaking from the side of a distant mountain —” She looked at him as if to verify the sentences that she was quoting from his letters.

“Yes,” he said. “It was very silent.”

“And hot,” she added. “Blazing hot at midday: an old tramp tapped on your door . . .?”

He nodded. He saw himself again, a young man, and very lonely.

“And then —” she began again. But a great lorry came crashing down the street. Something rattled on the table. The walls and the floor seemed to tremble. She parted two glasses that were jingling together. The lorry passed; they heard it rumbling away in the distance.

“And the birds,” she went on. “The nightingales, singing in the moonlight?”

He felt uncomfortable at the vision she called up. “I must have written you a lot of nonsense!” he exclaimed. “I wish you’d torn them up — those letters!”

“No! They were beautiful letters! Wonderful letters!” she exclaimed, raising her glass. A thimbleful of wine always made her tipsy, he remembered. Her eyes shone; her cheeks glowed.

“And then you had a day off,” she went on, “and jolted along a rough white road in a springless cart to the next town —”

“Sixty miles away,” he said.

“And went to a bar; and met a man from the next — ranch?” She hesitated as if the word might be the wrong one.

“Ranch, yes, ranch,” he confirmed her. “I went to the town and had a drink at the bar —”

“And then?” she said. He laughed. There were some things he had not told her. He was silent.

“Then you stopped writing,” she said. She put her glass down.

“When I forgot what you were like,” he said, looking at her.

“You gave up writing too,” he said.

“Yes, I too,” she said.

The trombone had moved his station and was wailing lugubriously under the window. The doleful sound, as if a dog had thrown back its head and were baying the moon, floated up to them. She waved her fork in time to it.

“Our hearts full of tears, our lips full of laughter, we passed on the stairs”— she dragged her words out to fit the wail of the trombone —“we passed on the stair-r-r-r-s”— but here the trombone changed its measure to a jig. “He to sorrow, I to bliss,” she jigged with it, “he to bliss and I to sorrow, we passed on the stair-r-r-s.”

She set her glass down.

“Another cut off the joint?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” he said, looking at the rather stringy disagreeable object which was still bleeding into the well. The willow-pattern plate was daubed with gory streaks. She stretched her hand out and rang the bell. She rang; she rang a second time. No one came.

“Your bells don’t ring,” he said.

“No,” she smiled. “The bells don’t ring, and the taps don’t run.” She thumped on the floor. They waited. No one came. The trombone wailed outside.

“But there was one letter you wrote me,” he continued as they waited. “An angry letter; a cruel letter.”

He looked at her. She had lifted her lip like a horse that is going to bite. That, too, he remembered.

“Yes?” she said.

“The night you came in from the Strand,” he reminded her.

Here the girl came in with the pudding. It was an ornate pudding, semi-transparent, pink, ornamented with blobs of cream.

“I remember,” said Sara, sticking her spoon into the quivering jelly, “a still autumn night; the lights lit; and people padding along the pavement with wreaths in their hands?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “That was it.”

“And I said to myself,” she paused, “this is Hell. We are the damned?” He nodded.

She helped him to pudding.

“And I,” he said, as he took his plate, “was among the damned.” He stuck his spoon into the quivering mass that she had given him.

“Coward; hypocrite, with your switch in your hand; and your cap on your head —” He seemed to quote from a letter that she had written him. He paused. She smiled at him.

“But what was the word — the word I used?” she asked, as if she were trying to remember.

“Poppycock!” he reminded her. She nodded.

“And then I went over the bridge,” she resumed, raising her spoon half-way to her mouth, “and stopped in one of those little alcoves, bays, what d’you call ’em? — scooped out over the water, and looked down —” She looked down at her plate.

“When you lived on the other side of the river,” he prompted her.

“Stood and looked down,” she said, looking at her glass which she held in front of her, “and thought; Running water, flowing water, water that crinkles up the lights; moonlight; starlight —” She drank and was silent.

“Then the car came,” he prompted her.

“Yes; the Rolls-Royce. It stopped in the lamplight and there they sat —”

“Two people,” he reminded her.

“Two people. Yes,” she said. “He was smoking a cigar. An upper- class Englishman with a big nose, in a dress suit. And she, sitting beside him, in a fur-trimmed cloak, took advantage of the pause under the lamplight to raise her hand”— she raised her hand — “and polish that spade, her mouth.”

She swallowed her mouthful.

“And the peroration?” he prompted her.

She shook her head.

They were silent. North had finished his pudding. He took out his cigarette-case. Save for a dish of rather fly-blown fruit, apples and bananas, there was no more to eat apparently.

“We were very foolish when we were young, Sal,” he said, as he lit his cigarette, “writing purple passages . . . ”

“At dawn with the sparrows chirping,” she said, pulling the plate of fruit towards her. She began peeling a banana, as if she were unsheathing some soft glove. He took an apple and peeled it. The curl of apple-skin lay on his plate, coiled up like a snake’s skin, he thought; and the banana-skin was like the finger of a glove that had been ripped open.

The street was now quiet. The woman had stopped singing. The trombone-player had moved off. The rush hour was over and nothing went down the street. He looked at her, biting little bits off her banana.

When she came to the fourth of June, he remembered, she wore her skirt the wrong way round. She was crooked in those days too; and they had laughed at her — he and Peggy. She had never married; he wondered why not. He swept up the broken coils of apple-peel on his plate.

“What does he do,” he said suddenly, “— that man who throws his hands out?”

“Like this?” she said. She threw her hands out.

“Yes,” he nodded. That was the man — one of those voluble foreigners with a theory about everything. Yet he had liked him — he gave off an aroma; a whirr; his flexible supple face worked amusingly; he had a round forehead; good eyes; and was bald.

“What does he do?” he repeated.

“Talks,” she replied, “about the soul.” She smiled. Again he felt an outsider; so many talks there must have been between them; such intimacy.

“About the soul,” she continued, taking a cigarette. “Lectures,” she added, lighting it. “Ten and six for a seat in the front row,” she puffed her smoke out. “There’s standing room at half a crown; but then,” she puffed, “you don’t hear so well. You only catch half the lesson of the Teacher, the Master,” she laughed.

She was sneering at him now; she conveyed the impression that he was a charlatan. Yet Peggy had said that they were very intimate — she and this foreigner. The vision of the man at Eleanor’s changed slightly like an air ball blown aside.

“I thought he was a friend of yours,” he said aloud.

“Nicholas?” she exclaimed. “I love him!”

Her eyes certainly glowed. They fixed themselves upon a salt cellar with a look of rapture that made North feel once more puzzled.

“You love him . . . ” he began. But here the telephone rang.

“There he is!” she exclaimed. “That’s him! That’s Nicholas!”

She spoke with extreme irritation.

The telephone rang again. “I’m not here!” she said. The telephone rang again. “Not here! Not here! Not here!” she repeated in time to the bell. She made no attempt to answer it. He could stand the stab of her voice and the bell no longer. He went over to the telephone. There was a pause as he stood with the receiver in his hand.

“Tell him I’m not here!” she said.

“Hullo,” he said, answering the telephone. But there was a pause. He looked at her sitting on the edge of her chair, swinging her foot up and down. Then a voice spoke.

“I’m North,” he answered the telephone. “I’m dining with Sara. . . . Yes, I’ll tell her. . . . ” He looked at her again. “She is sitting on the edge of her chair,” he said, “with a smudge on her face, swinging her foot up and down.”

Eleanor stood holding the telephone. She smiled, and for a moment after she had put the receiver back stood there, still smiling, before she turned to her niece Peggy who had been dining with her.

“North is dining with Sara,” she said, smiling at the little telephone picture of two people at the other end of London, one of whom was sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her face.

“He’s dining with Sara,” she said again. But her niece did not smile, for she had not seen the picture, and she was slightly irritated because, in the middle of what they were saying, Eleanor suddenly got up and said, “I’ll just remind Sara.”

“Oh, is he?” she said casually.

Eleanor came and sat down.

“We were saying —” she began.

“You’ve had it cleaned,” said Peggy simultaneously. While Eleanor telephoned, she had been looking at the picture of her grandmother over the writing-table.

“Yes,” Eleanor glanced back over her shoulder. “Yes. And do you see there’s a flower fallen on the grass?” she said. She turned and looked at the picture. The face, the dress, the basket of flowers all shone softly melting into each other, as if the paint were one smooth coat of enamel. There was a flower — a little sprig of blue — lying in the grass.

“It was hidden by the dirt,” said Eleanor. “But I can just remember it, when I was a child. That reminds me, if you want a good man to clean pictures —”

“But was it like her?” Peggy interrupted.

Somebody had told her that she was like her grandmother: and she did not want to be like her. She wanted to be dark and aquiline: but in fact she was blue-eyed and round-faced — like her grandmother.

“I’ve got the address somewhere,” Eleanor went on.

“Don’t bother — don’t bother,” said Peggy, irritated by her aunt’s habit of adding unnecessary details. It was age coming on, she supposed: age that loosened screws and made the whole apparatus of the mind rattle and jingle.

“Was it like her?” she asked again.

“Not as I remember her,” said Eleanor, glancing once more at the picture. “When I was a child perhaps — no, I don’t think even as a child. What’s so interesting,” she continued, “is that what they thought ugly — red hair for instance — we think pretty; so that I often ask myself,” she paused, puffing at her cheroot, “‘What is pretty?’”

“Yes,” said Peggy. “That’s what we were saying.”

For when Eleanor suddenly took it into her head that she must remind Sara of the party, they had been talking about Eleanor’s childhood — how things had changed; one thing seemed good to one generation, another to another. She liked getting Eleanor to talk about her past; it seemed to her so peaceful and so safe.

“Is there any standard, d’you think?” she said, wishing to bring her back to what they were saying.

“I wonder,” said Eleanor absentmindedly. She was thinking of something else.

“How annoying!” she exclaimed suddenly. “I had it on the tip of my tongue — something I want to ask you. Then I thought of Delia’s party: then North made me laugh — Sally sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her nose; and that’s put it out of my head.” She shook her head.

“D’you know the feeling when one’s been on the point of saying something, and been interrupted; how it seems to stick here,” she tapped her forehead, “so that it stops everything else? Not that it was anything of importance,” she added. She wandered about the room for a moment. “No, I give it up; I give it up,” she said, shaking her head.

“I shall go and get ready now, if you’ll call a cab.”

She went into the bedroom. Soon there was the sound of running water.

Peggy lit another cigarette. If Eleanor were going to wash, as seemed likely from the sounds in the bedroom, there was no need to hurry about the cab. She glanced at the letters on the mantelpiece. An address stuck out on the top of one of them —“Mon Repos, Wimbledon.” One of Eleanor’s dentists, Peggy thought to herself. The man she went botanising with on Wimbledon Common perhaps. A charming man. Eleanor had described him. “He says every tooth is quite unlike every other tooth. And he knows all about plants. . . . ” It was difficult to get her to stick to her childhood.

She crossed to the telephone; she gave the number. There was a pause. As she waited she looked at her hands holding the telephone. Efficient, shell-like, polished but not painted, they’re a compromise, she thought, looking at her finger-nails, between science and . . . But here a voice said “Number, please,” and she gave it.

Again she waited. As she sat where Eleanor had sat she saw the telephone picture that Eleanor had seen — Sally sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her face. What a fool, she thought bitterly, and a thrill ran down her thigh. Why was she bitter? For she prided herself upon being honest — she was a doctor — and that thrill she knew meant bitterness. Did she envy her because she was happy, or was it the croak of some ancestral prudery — did she disapprove of these friendships with men who did not love women? She looked at the picture of her grandmother as if to ask her opinion. But she had assumed the immunity of a work of art; she seemed as she sat there, smiling at her roses, to be indifferent to our right and wrong.

“Hullo,” said a gruff voice, which suggested sawdust and a shelter, and she gave the address and put down the telephone just as Eleanor came in — she was wearing a red-gold Arab cloak with a silver veil over her hair.

“One of these days d’you think you’ll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?” Peggy said, getting up. Eleanor’s hair was her beauty, she thought; and her silver-washed dark eyes — a fine old prophetess, a queer old bird, venerable and funny at one and the same time. She was burnt from her travels so that her hair looked whiter than ever.

“What’s that?” said Eleanor, for she had not caught her remark about the telephone. Peggy did not repeat it. They stood at the window waiting for the cab. They stood there side by side, silent, looking out, because there was a pause to fill up, and the view from the window, which was so high over the roofs, over the squares and angles of back gardens to the blue line of hills in the distance served, like another voice speaking, to fill up the pause. The sun was setting; one cloud lay curled like a red feather in the blue. She looked down. It was queer to see cabs turning corners, going round this street and down the other, and not to hear the sound they made. It was like a map of London; a section laid beneath them. The summer day was fading; lights were being lit, primrose lights, still separate, for the glow of the sunset was still in the air. Eleanor pointed at the sky.

“That’s where I saw my first aeroplane — there between those chimneys,” she said. There were high chimneys, factory chimneys, in the distance; and a great building — Westminster Cathedral was it? — over there riding above the roofs.

“I was standing here, looking out,” Eleanor went on. “It must have been just after I’d got into the flat, a summer’s day, and I saw a black spot in the sky, and I said to whoever it was — Miriam Parrish, I think, yes, for she came to help me to get into the flat — I hope Delia, by the way, remembered to ask her —” . . . that’s old age, Peggy noted, bringing in one thing after another.

“You said to Miriam —” she prompted her.

“I said to Miriam, ‘Is it a bird? No, I don’t think it can be a bird. It’s too big. Yet it moves.’ And suddenly it came over me, that’s an aeroplane! And it was! You know they’d flown the Channel not so very long before. I was staying with you in Dorset at the time: and I remember reading it out in the paper, and someone — your father, I think — said: ‘The world will never be the same again!”

“Oh, well —” Peggy laughed. She was about to say that aeroplanes hadn’t made all that difference, for it was her line to disabuse her elders of their belief in science, partly because their credulity amused her, partly because she was daily impressed by the ignorance of doctors — when Eleanor sighed.

“Oh dear,” she murmured.

She turned away from the window.

Old age again, Peggy thought. Some gust blew open a door: one of the many millions in Eleanor’s seventy-odd years; out came a painful thought; which she at once concealed — she had gone to her writing-table and was fidgeting with papers — with the humble generosity, the painful humility of the old.

“What, Nell —?” Peggy began.

“Nothing, nothing,” said Eleanor. She had seen the sky; and that sky was laid with pictures — she had seen it so often; any one of which might come uppermost when she looked at it. Now, because she had been talking to North, it brought back the war; how she had stood there one night, watching the searchlights. She had come home, after a raid; she had been dining in Westminster with Renny and Maggie. They had sat in a cellar; and Nicholas — it was the first time she had met him — had said that the war was of no importance. “We are children playing with fireworks in the back garden” . . . she remembered his phrase; and how, sitting round a wooden packing-case, they had drunk to a new world. “A new world — a new world!” Sally had cried, drumming with her spoon on top of the packing-case. She turned to her writing-table, tore up a letter and threw it away.

“Yes,” she said, fumbling among her papers, looking for something. “Yes — I don’t know about aeroplanes, I’ve never been up in one; but motor cars — I could do without motor cars. I was almost knocked down by one, did I tell you? In the Brompton Road. All my own fault — I wasn’t looking. . . . And wireless — that’s a nuisance — the people downstairs turn it on after breakfast; but on the other hand — hot water; electric light; and those new —” She paused. “Ah, there it is!” she exclaimed. She pounced upon some paper that she had been hunting for. “If Edward’s there tonight, do remind me — I’ll tie a knot in my handkerchief. . . . ”

She opened her bag, took out a silk handkerchief, and proceeded solemnly to tie it into a knot . . . “to ask him about Runcorn’s boy.”

The bell rang.

“The taxi,” she said.

She glanced about to make sure that she had forgotten nothing. She stopped suddenly. Her eye had been caught by the evening paper, which lay on the floor with its broad bar of print and its blurred photograph. She picked it up.

“What a face!” she exclaimed, flattening it out on the table.

As far as Peggy could see, but she was short-sighted, it was the usual evening paper’s blurred picture of a fat man gesticulating.

“Damned —” Eleanor shot out suddenly, “bully!” She tore the paper across with one sweep of her hand and flung it on the floor. Peggy was shocked. A little shiver ran over her skin as the paper tore. The word “damned” on her aunt’s lips had shocked her.

Next moment she was amused; but still she had been shocked. For when Eleanor, who used English so reticently, said “damned” and then “bully,” it meant much more than the words she and her friends used. And her gesture, tearing the paper. .. What a queer set they are, she thought, as she followed Eleanor down the stairs. Her red-gold cloak trailed from step to step. So she had seen her father crumple The Times and sit trembling with rage because somebody had said something in a newspaper. How odd!

And the way she tore it! she thought, half laughing, and she flung out her hand as Eleanor had flung hers. Eleanor’s figure still seemed erect with indignation. It would be simple, she thought, it would be satisfactory, she thought, following her down flight after flight of stone steps, to be like that. The little knob on her cloak tapped on the stairs. They descended rather slowly.

“Take my aunt,” she said to herself, beginning to arrange the scene into an argument she had been having with a man at the hospital, “take my aunt, living alone in a sort of workman’s flat at the top of six flights of stairs . . . ” Eleanor stopped.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, “that I left the letter upstairs — Runcorn’s letter that I want to show Edward, about the boy?” She opened her bag. “No: here it is.” There it was in her bag. They went on downstairs.

Eleanor gave the address to the cabman and sat down with a jerk in her corner. Peggy glanced at her out of the corner of her eye.

It was the force that she had put into the words that impressed her, not the words. It was as if she still believed with passion — she, old Eleanor — in the things that man had destroyed. A wonderful generation, she thought, as they drove off. Believers . . .

“You see,” Eleanor interrupted, as if she wanted to explain her words, “it means the end of everything we cared for.”

“Freedom?” said Peggy perfunctorily.

“Yes,” said Eleanor. “Freedom and justice.”

The cab drove off down the mild respectable little streets where every house had its bow window, its strip of garden, its private name. As they drove on, into the big main street, the scene in the flat composed itself in Peggy’s mind as she would tell it to the man in the hospital. “Suddenly she lost her temper,” she said, “took the paper and tore it across — my aunt, who’s over seventy.” She glanced at Eleanor to verify the details. Her aunt interrupted her.

“That’s where we used to live,” she said. She waved her hand towards a long lamp-starred street on the left. Peggy, looking out, could just see the imposing unbroken avenue with its succession of pale pillars and steps. The repeated columns, the orderly architecture, had even a pale pompous beauty as one stucco column repeated another stucco column all down the street.

“Abercorn Terrace,” said Eleanor; “ . . . the pillar-box,” she murmured as they drove past. Why the pillar-box? Peggy asked herself. Another door had been opened. Old age must have endless avenues, stretching away and away down its darkness, she supposed, and now one door opened and then another.

“Aren’t people —” Eleanor began. Then she stopped. As usual, she had begun in the wrong place.

“Yes?” said Peggy. She was irritated by this inconsequence.

“I was going to say — the pillar-box made me think,” Eleanor began; then she laughed. She gave up the attempt to account for the order in which her thoughts came to her. There was an order, doubtless; but it took so long to find it, and this rambling, she knew, annoyed Peggy, for young people’s minds worked so quickly.

“That’s where we used to dine,” she broke off, nodding at a big house at the corner of a square. “Your father and I. The man he used to read with. What was his name? He became a Judge. . . . We used to dine there, the three of us. Morris, my father and I. . . . They had very large parties in those days. Always legal people. And he collected old oak. Mostly shams,” she added with a little chuckle.

“You used to dine . . . ” Peggy began. She wished to get her back to her past. It was so interesting; so safe; so unreal — that past of the ‘eighties; and to her, so beautiful in its unreality.

“Tell me about your youth . . . ” she began.

“But your lives are much more interesting than ours were,” said Eleanor. Peggy was silent.

They were driving along a bright crowded street; here stained ruby with the light from picture palaces; here yellow from shop windows gay with summer dresses, for the shops, though shut, were still lit up, and people were still looking at dresses, at flights of hats on little rods, at jewels.

When my Aunt Delia comes to town, Peggy continued the story of Eleanor that she was telling her friend at the hospital, she says, We must have a party. Then they all flock together. They love it. As for herself, she hated it. She would far rather have stayed at home or gone to the pictures. It’s the sense of the family, she added, glancing at Eleanor as if to collect another little fact about her to add to her portrait of a Victorian spinster. Eleanor was looking out of the window. Then she turned.

“And the experiment with the guinea-pig — how did that go off?” she asked. Peggy was puzzled.

Then she remembered and told her.

“I see. So it proved nothing. So you’ve got to begin all over again. That’s very interesting. Now I wish you’d explain to me . . . ” There was another problem that puzzled her.

The things she wants explained, Peggy said to her friend at the Hospital, are either as simple as two and two make four, or so difficult that nobody in the world knows the answer. And if you say to her, “What’s eight times eight?”— she smiled at the profile of her aunt against the window — she taps her forehead and says . . . but again Eleanor interrupted her.

“It’s so good of you to come,” she said, giving her a little pat on the knee. (But did I show her, Peggy thought, that I hate coming?)

“It’s a way of seeing people,” Eleanor continued. “And now that we’re all getting on — not you, us — one doesn’t like to miss chances.”

They drove on. And how does one get that right? Peggy thought, trying to add another touch to the portrait. “Sentimental” was it? Or, on the contrary, was it good to feel like that . . . natural . . . right? She shook her head. I’m no use at describing people, she said to her friend at the Hospital. They’re too difficult. . . . She’s not like that — not like that at all, she said, making a little dash with her hand as if to rub out an outline that she had drawn wrongly. As she did so, her friend at the Hospital vanished.

She was alone with Eleanor in the cab. And they were passing houses. Where does she begin, and where do I end? she thought. . . . On they drove. They were two living people, driving across London; two sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies; and those sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies are at this moment, she thought, driving past a picture palace. But what is this moment; and what are we? The puzzle was too difficult for her to solve it. She sighed.

“You’re too young to feel that,” said Eleanor.

“What?” Peggy asked with a little start.

“About meeting people. About not missing chances of seeing them.”

“Young?” said Peggy. “I shall never be as young as you are!” She patted her Aunt’s knee in her turn. “Gallivanting off to India . . . ” she laughed.

“Oh, India. India’s nothing nowadays,” said Eleanor. “Travel’s so easy. You just take a ticket; just get on board ship.. .. But what I want to see before I die,” she continued, “is something different. . . . ” She waved her hand out of the window. They were passing public buildings; offices of some sort. “ . . . another kind of civilisation. Tibet, for instance. I was reading a book by a man called — now what was he called?”

She paused, distracted by the sights in the street. “Don’t people wear pretty clothes nowadays?” she said, pointing to a girl with fair hair and a young man in evening dress.

“Yes,” said Peggy perfunctorily, looking at the painted face and the bright shawl; at the white waistcoat and the smoothed back hair. Anything distracts Eleanor, everything interests her, she thought.

“Was it that you were suppressed when you were young?” she said aloud, recalling vaguely some childish memory; her grandfather with the shiny stumps instead of fingers; and a long dark drawing-room. Eleanor turned. She was surprised.

“Suppressed?” she repeated. She so seldom thought about herself now that she was surprised.

“Oh, I see what you mean,” she added after a moment. A picture — another picture — had swum to the surface. There was Delia standing in the middle of the room; Oh my God! Oh my God! she was saying; a hansom cab had stopped at the house next door; and she herself was watching Morris — was it Morris? — going down the street to post a letter. . . . She was silent. I do not want to go back into my past, she was thinking. I want the present.

“Where’s he taking us?” she said, looking out. They had reached the public part of London; the illuminated. The light fell on broad pavements; on white brilliantly lit-up public offices; on a pallid, hoary-looking church. Advertisements popped in and out. Here was a bottle of beer: it poured: then stopped: then poured again. They had reached the theatre quarter. There was the usual garish confusion. Men and women in evening dress were walking in the middle of the road. Cabs were wheeling and stopping. Their own taxi was held up. It stopped dead under a statue: the lights shone on its cadaverous pallor.

“Always reminds me of an advertisement of sanitary towels,” said Peggy, glancing at the figure of a woman in nurse’s uniform holding out her hand.

Eleanor was shocked for a moment. A knife seemed to slice her skin, leaving a ripple of unpleasant sensation; but what was solid in her body it did not touch, she realised after a moment. That she said because of Charles, she thought, feeling the bitterness in her tone — her brother, a nice dull boy who had been killed.

“The only fine thing that was said in the war,” she said aloud, reading the words cut on the pedestal.

“It didn’t come to much,” said Peggy sharply.

The cab remained fixed in the block.

The pause seemed to hold them in the light of some thought that they both wished to put away.

“Don’t people wear pretty clothes nowadays?” said Eleanor, pointing to another girl with fair hair in a long bright cloak and another young man in evening dress.

“Yes,” said Peggy briefly.

But why don’t you enjoy yourself more? Eleanor said to herself. Her brother’s death had been very sad, but she had always found North much the more interesting of the two. The cab threaded its way through the traffic and passed into a back street. He was stopped now by a red light. “It’s nice, having North back again,” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” said Peggy. “He says we talk of nothing but money and politics,” she added. She finds fault with him because he was not the one to be killed; but that’s wrong, Eleanor thought.

“Does he?” she said. “But then . . . ” A newspaper placard, with large black letters, seemed to finish her sentence for her. They were approaching the square in which Delia lived. She began to fumble with her purse. She looked at the metre which had mounted rather high. The man was going the long way round.

“He’ll find his way in time,” she said. They were gliding slowly round the square. She waited patiently, holding her purse in her hand. She saw a breadth of dark sky over the roofs. The sun had sunk. For a moment the sky had the quiet look of the sky that lies above fields and woods in the country.

“He’ll have to turn, that’s all,” she said. “I’m not despondent,” she added, as the taxi turned. “Travelling, you see: when one has to mix up with all sorts of other people on board ship, or in one of those little places where one has to stay — off the beaten track —” The taxi was sliding tentatively past house after house —“You ought to go there, Peggy,” she broke off; “you ought to travel: the natives are so beautiful you know; half naked: going down to the river in the moonlight; — that’s the house over there —” She tapped on the window — the taxi slowed down. “What was I saying? I’m not despondent, no, because people are so kind, so good at heart. . . . So that if only ordinary people, ordinary people like ourselves.. .”

The cab drew up at a house whose windows were lit up. Peggy leant forward and opened the door. She jumped out and paid the driver. Eleanor bundled out after her. “No, no, no, Peggy,” she began.

“It’s my cab. It’s my cab,” Peggy protested.

“But I insist on paying my share,” said Eleanor, opening her purse.

“That’s Eleanor,” said North. He left the telephone and turned to Sara. She was still swinging her foot up and down.

“She told me to tell you to come to Delia’s party,” he said.

“To Delia’s party? Why to Delia’s party?” she asked.

“Because they’re old and want you to come,” he said, standing over her.

“Old Eleanor; wandering Eleanor; Eleanor with the wild eyes . . . ” she mused. “Shall I, shan’t I, shall I, shan’t I?” she hummed, looking up at him. “No,” she said, putting her feet to the ground, “I shan’t.”

“You must,” he said. For her manner irritated him — Eleanor’s voice was still in his ears.

“I must, must I?” she said, making the coffee.

“Then,” she said, giving him his cup and picking up the book at the same time, “read until we must go.”

She curled herself up again, holding her cup in her hand.

It was still early, it was true. But why, he thought as he opened the book again and turned over the pages, won’t she come? Is she afraid? he wondered. He looked at her crumpled in her chair. Her dress was shabby. He looked at the book again, but he could hardly see to read. She had not lit the lamp.

“I can’t see to read without a light,” he said. It grew dark soon in this street; the houses were so close. Now a car passed and a light slid across the ceiling.

“Shall I turn on the light?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ll try to remember something.” He began to say aloud the only poem he knew by heart. As he spoke the words out into the semi-darkness they sounded extremely beautiful, he thought, because they could not see each other, perhaps.

He paused at the end of the verse.

“Go on,” she said.

He began again. The words going out into the room seemed like actual presences, hard and independent; yet as she was listening they were changed by their contact with her. But as he reached the end of the second verse —

Society is all but rude —

To this delicious solitude . . .

he heard a sound. Was it in the poem or outside of it, he wondered? Inside, he thought, and was about to go on, when she raised her hand. He stopped. He heard heavy footsteps outside the door. Was someone coming in? Her eyes were on the door.

“The Jew,” she murmured.

“The Jew?” he said. They listened. He could hear quite distinctly now. Somebody was turning on taps; somebody was having a bath in the room opposite.

“The Jew having a bath,” she said.

“The Jew having a bath?” he repeated.

“And tomorrow there’ll be a line of grease round the bath,” she said.

“Damn the Jew!” he exclaimed. The thought of a line of grease from a strange man’s body on the bath next door disgusted him.

“Go on —” said Sara: “Society is all but rude,” she repeated the last lines, “to this delicious solitude.”

“No,” he said.

They listened to the water running. The man was coughing and clearing his throat as he sponged.

“Who is this Jew?” he asked.

“Abrahamson, in the tallow trade,” she said.

They listened.

“Engaged to a pretty girl in a tailor’s shop,” she added.

They could hear the sounds through the thin walls very distinctly.

He was snorting as he sponged himself.

“But he leaves hairs in the bath,” she concluded.

North felt a shiver run through him. Hairs in food, hairs on basins, other people’s hairs made him feel physically sick.

“D’you share a bath with him?” he asked.

She nodded.

He made a noise like “Pah!”

“‘Pah.’ That’s what I said,” she laughed. “‘Pah!’— when I went into the bathroom on a cold winter’s morning —‘Pah!’— she threw her hand out —”‘Pah!’” She paused.

“And then —?” he asked.

“And then,” she said, sipping her coffee, “I came back into the sitting-room. And breakfast was waiting. Fried eggs and a bit of toast. Lydia with her blouse torn and her hair down. The unemployed singing hymns under the window. And I said to myself —” she flung her hand out, “‘Polluted city, unbelieving city, city of dead fish and worn-out frying-pans’— thinking of a river’s bank, when the tide’s out,” she explained.

“Go on,” he nodded.

“So I put on my hat and coat and rushed out in a rage,” she continued, “and stood on the bridge, and said, ‘Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?’”

“Yes?” he prompted her.

“And there were people passing; the strutting; the tiptoeing; the pasty; the ferret-eyed; the bowler-hatted, servile innumerable army of workers. And I said, ‘Must I join your conspiracy? Stain the hand, the unstained hand,’”— he could see her hand gleam as she waved it in the half-light of the sitting-room, “’— and sign on, and serve a master; all because of a Jew in my bath, all because of a Jew?’”

She sat up and laughed, excited by the sound of her own voice which had run in to a jog-trot rhythm.

“Go on, go on,” he said.

“But I had a talisman, a glowing gem, a lucent emerald”— she picked up an envelope that lay on the floor —“a letter of introduction. And I said to the flunkey in peach-blossom trousers, ‘Admit me, sirrah,’ and he led me along corridors piled with purple till I came to a door, a mahogany door, and knocked; and a voice said, ‘Enter.’ And what did I find?” She paused. “A stout man with red cheeks. On his table three orchids in a vase. Pressed into your hand, I thought, as the car crunches the gravel by your wife at parting. And over the fireplace the usual picture —”

“Stop!” North interrupted her. “You have come to an office,” he tapped the table. “You are presenting a letter of introduction — but to whom?”

“Oh, to whom?” she laughed. “To a man in sponge-bag trousers. ‘I knew your father at Oxford,’ he said, toying with the blotting- paper, ornamented in one corner with a cartwheel. But what do you find insoluble, I asked him, looking at the mahogany man, the clean-shaven, rosy-gilled, mutton-fed man —”

“The man in a newspaper office,” North checked her, “who knew your father. And then?”

“There was a humming and a grinding. The great machines went round; and little boys popped in with elongated sheets; black sheets; smudged; damp with printer’s ink. ‘Pardon me a moment,’ he said, and made a note in the margin. But the Jew’s in my bath, I said — the Jew . . . the Jew —” She stopped suddenly and emptied her glass.

Yes, he thought, there’s the voice; there’s the attitude; and the reflection in other people’s faces; but then there’s something true — in the silence perhaps. But it was not silent. They could hear the Jew thudding in the bathroom; he seemed to stagger from foot to foot as he dried himself. Now he unlocked the door, and they heard him go upstairs. The pipes began to give forth hollow gurgling sounds.

“How much of that was true?” he asked her. But she had lapsed into silence. The actual words he supposed — the actual words floated together and formed a sentence in his mind — meant that she was poor; that she must earn her living, but the excitement with which she had spoken, due to wine perhaps, had created yet another person; another semblance, which one must solidify into one whole.

The house was quiet now, save for the sound of the bath water running away. A watery pattern fluctuated on the ceiling. The street lamps jiggering up and down outside made the houses opposite a curious pale red. The uproar of the day had died away; no carts were rattling down the street. The vegetable-sellers, the organ- grinders, the woman practising her scales, the man playing the trombone, had all trundled away their barrows, pulled down their shutters, and closed the lids of their pianos. It was so still that for a moment North thought he was in Africa, sitting on the verandah in the moonlight; but he roused himself. “What about this party?” he said. He got up and threw away his cigarette. He stretched himself and looked at his watch. “It’s time to go,” he said. “Go and get ready,” he urged her. For if one went to a party, he thought, it was absurd to go just as people were leaving. And the party must have begun.

“What were you saying — what were you saying, Nell?” said Peggy, in order to distract Eleanor from paying her share of the cab, as they stood on the doorstep. “Ordinary people — ordinary people ought to do what?” she asked.

Eleanor was still fumbling with her purse and did not answer.

“No, I can’t allow that,” she said. “Here, take this —”

But Peggy brushed aside the hand, and the coins rolled on the doorstep. They both stooped simultaneously and their heads collided.

“Don’t bother,” said Eleanor as a coin rolled away. “It was all my fault.” The maid was holding the door open.

“And where do we take our cloaks off?” she said. “In here?”

They went into a room on the ground floor which, though an office, had been arranged so that it could be used as a cloak-room. There was a looking-glass on the table: and in front of it trays of pins and combs and brushes. She went up to the glass and gave herself one brief glance.

“What a gipsy I look!” she said, and ran a comb through her hair. “Burnt as brown as a nigger!” Then she gave way to Peggy and waited.

“I wonder if this was the room . . . ” she said.

“What room?” said Peggy abstractedly: she was attending to her face.

“ . . . where we used to meet,” said Eleanor. She looked about her. It was still used as an office apparently; but now there were house-agents’ placards on the wall.

“I wonder if Kitty’ll come tonight,” she mused.

Peggy was gazing into the glass and did not answer.

“She doesn’t often come to town now. Only for weddings and christenings and so on,” Eleanor continued.

Peggy was drawing a line with a tube of some sort round her lips.

“Suddenly you meet a young man six-foot-two and you realise this is the baby,” Eleanor went on.

Peggy was still absorbed in her face.

“D’you have to do that fresh every time?” said Eleanor.

“I should look a fright if I didn’t,” said Peggy. The tightness round her lips and eyes seemed to her visible. She had never felt less in the mood for a party.

“Oh, how kind of you . . . ” Eleanor broke off. The maid had brought in a sixpence.

“Now, Peggy,” said she, proffering the coin, “let me pay my share.”

“Don’t be an ass,” said Peggy, brushing away her hand.

“But it was my cab,” Eleanor insisted. Peggy walked on. “Because I hate going to parties,” Eleanor continued, following her, still holding out the coin, “on the cheap. You don’t remember your grandfather? He always said, ‘Don’t spoil a good ship for a ha’porth of tar.’ If you went shopping with him,” she went on as they began mounting the stairs, “‘Show me the very best thing you’ve got,’ he’d say.”

“I remember him,” said Peggy.

“Do you?” said Eleanor. She was pleased that anyone should remember her father. “They’ve lent these rooms, I suppose,” she added as they walked upstairs. Doors were open. “That’s a solicitor’s,” she said, looking at some deed-boxes with white names painted on them.

“Yes, I see what you mean about painting — making-up,” she continued, glancing at her niece. “You do look nice. You look lit-up. I like it on young people. Not for myself. I should feel bedizened — bedizzened? — how d’you pronounce it? And what am I to do with these coppers if you won’t take them? I ought to have left them in my bag downstairs.” They mounted higher and higher. “I suppose they’ve opened all these rooms,” she continued — they had now reached a strip of red carpet —“so that if Delia’s little room gets too full — but of course the party’s hardly begun yet. We’re early. Everybody’s upstairs. I hear them talking. Come along. Shall I go first?”

A babble of voices sounded behind a door. A maid intercepted them.

“Miss Pargiter,” said Eleanor.

“Miss Pargiter!” the maid called out, opening the door.

“Go and get ready,” said North. He crossed the room and fumbled with the switch.

He touched the switch, and the electric light in the middle of the room came on. The shade had been taken off, and a cone of greenish paper had been twisted round it.

“Go and get ready,” he repeated. Sara did not answer. She had pulled a book towards her and pretended to read it.

“He’s killed the king,” she said. “So what’ll he do next?” She held her finger between the pages of the book and looked up at him; a device, he knew, to put off the moment of action. He did not want to go either. Still, if Eleanor wanted them to go — he hesitated, looking at his watch.

“What’ll he do next?” she repeated.

“Comedy,” he said briefly, “Contrast,” he said, remembering something he had read. “The only form of continuity,” he added at a venture.

“Well, go on reading,” she said, handing him the book.

He opened it at random.

“The scene is a rocky island in the middle of the sea,” he said. He paused.

Always before reading he had to arrange the scene; to let this sink; that come forward. A rocky island in the middle of the sea, he said to himself — there were green pools, tufts of silver grass, sand, and far away the soft sigh of waves breaking. He opened his mouth to read. Then there was a sound behind him; a presence — in the play or in the room? He looked up.

“Maggie!” Sara exclaimed. There she was standing at the open door in evening dress.

“Were you asleep?” she said, coming into the room. “We’ve been ringing and ringing.”

She stood smiling at them, amused, as if she had wakened sleepers.

“Why d’you trouble to have a bell when it’s always broken?” said a man who stood behind her.

North rose. At first he scarcely remembered them. The surface sight was strange on top of his memory of them, as he had seen them years ago.

“The bells don’t ring, and the taps don’t run,” he said, awkwardly. “Or they don’t stop running,” he added, for the bath water was still gurgling in the pipes.

“Luckily the door was open,” said Maggie. She stood at the table looking at the broken apple peel and the dish of fly-blown fruit. Some beauty, North thought, withers; some, he looked at her, grows more beautiful with age. Her hair was grey; her children must be grown up now, he supposed. But why do women purse their lips up when they look in the glass? he wondered. She was looking in the glass. She was pursing her lips. Then she crossed the room, and sat down in the chair by the fireplace.

“And why has Renny been crying?” said Sara. North looked at him. There were wet marks on either side of his large nose.

“Because we’ve been to a very bad play,” he said, “and should like something to drink,” he added.

Sara went to the cupboard and began clinking glasses. “Were you reading?” said Renny, looking at the book which had fallen on the floor.

“We were on a rocky island in the middle of the sea,” said Sara, putting the glasses on the table. Renny began to pour out whisky.

Now I remember him, North thought. Last time they had met was before he went to the war. It was in a little house in Westminster. They had sat in front of the fire. And a child had played with a spotted horse. And he had envied them their happiness. And they had talked about science. And Renny had said, “I help them to make shells,” and a mask had come down over his face. A man who made shells; a man who loved peace; a man of science; a man who cried. . . .

“Stop!” cried Renny. “Stop!” Sara had spurted the soda water over the table.

“When did you get back?” Renny asked him, taking his glass and looking at him with eyes still wet with tears.

“About a week ago,” he said.

“You’ve sold your farm?” said Renny. He sat down with his glass in his hand.

“Yes, sold it,” said North. “Whether I shall stay, or go back,” he said, taking his glass and raising it to his lips, “I don’t know.”

“Where was your farm?” said Renny, bending towards him. And they talked about Africa.

Maggie looked at them drinking and talking. The twisted cone of paper over the electric light was oddly stained. The mottled light made their faces look greenish. The two grooves on each side of Renny’s nose were still wet. His face was all peaks and hollows; North’s face was round and snub-nosed and rather blueish about the lips. She gave her chair a little push so that she got the two heads in relation side by side. They were very different. And as they talked about Africa their faces changed, as if some twitch had been given to the fine network under the skin and the weights fell into different sockets. A thrill ran through her as if the weights in her own body had changed too. But there was something about the light that puzzled her. She looked round. A lamp must be flaring in the street outside. Its light, flickering up and down, mixed with the electric light under the greenish cone of mottled paper. It was that which. . . . She started; a voice had reached her.

“To Africa?” she said, looking at North.

“To Delia’s party,” he said. “I asked if you were coming. . . . ” She had not been listening.

“One moment . . . ” Renny interrupted. He held up his hand like a policeman stopping traffic. And again they went on, talking about Africa.

Maggie lay back in her chair. Behind their heads rose the curve of the mahogany chair back. And behind the curve of the chair back was a crinkled glass with a red lip; then there was the straight line of the mantelpiece with little black-and-white squares on it; and then three rods ending in soft yellow plumes. She ran her eye from thing to thing. In and out it went, collecting, gathering, summing up into one whole, when, just as she was about to complete the pattern, Renny exclaimed:

“We must — we must!”

He had got up. He had pushed away his glass of whisky. He stood there like somebody commanding a troop, North thought; so emphatic was his voice, so commanding his gesture. Yet it was only a question of going round to an old woman’s party. Or was there always, he thought, as he too rose and looked for his hat, something that came to the surface, inappropriately, unexpectedly, from the depths of people, and made ordinary actions, ordinary words, expressive of the whole being, so that he felt, as he turned to follow Renny to Delia’s party, as if he were riding to the relief of a besieged garrison across a desert?

He stopped with his hand on the door. Sara had come in from the bedroom. She had changed; she was in evening dress; there was something odd about her — perhaps it was the effect of the evening dress estranging her?

“I am ready,” she said, looking at them.

She stooped and picked up the book that North had let fall.

“We must go —” she said, turning to her sister.

She put the book on the table; she gave it a sad little pat as she shut it.

“We must go,” she repeated, and followed them down the stairs.

Maggie rose. She gave one more look at the cheap lodging-house room. There was the pampas grass in its terra-cotta pot; the green vase with the crinkled lip; and the mahogany chair. On the dinner table lay the dish of fruit; the heavy sensual apples lay side by side with the yellow spotted bananas. It was an odd combination — the round and the tapering, the rosy and the yellow. She switched off the light. The room now was almost dark, save for a watery pattern fluctuating on the ceiling. In this phantom evanescent light only the outlines showed; ghostly apples, ghostly bananas, and the spectre of a chair. Colour was slowly returning, as her eyes grew used to the darkness, and substance. . . . She stood there for a moment looking. Then a voice shouted:

“Maggie! Maggie!”

“I’m coming!” she cried, and followed them down the stairs.

“And your name, miss?” said the maid to Peggy as she hung back behind Eleanor.

“Miss Margaret Pargiter,” said Peggy.

“Miss Margaret Pargiter!” the maid called out into the room.

There was a babble of voices; lights opened brightly in front of her, and Delia came forward. “Oh, Peggy!” she exclaimed. “How nice of you to come!”

She went in; but she felt plated, coated over with some cold skin. They had come too early — the room was almost empty. Only a few people stood about, talking too loudly, as if to fill the room. Making believe, Peggy thought to herself as she shook hands with Delia and passed on, that something pleasant is about to happen. She saw with extreme clearness the Persian rug and the carved fireplace, but there was an empty space in the middle of the room.

What is the tip for this particular situation? she asked herself, as if she were prescribing for a patient. Take notes, she added. Do them up in a bottle with a glossy green cover, she thought. Take notes and the pain goes. Take notes and the pain goes, she repeated to herself as she stood there alone. Delia hurried past her. She was talking, but talking at random.

“It’s all very well for you people who live in London —” she was saying. But the nuisance of taking notes of what people say, Peggy went on as Delia passed her, is that they talk such nonsense . . . such complete nonsense, she thought, drawing herself back against the wall. Here her father came in. He paused at the door; put his head up as if he were looking for someone, and advanced with his hand out.

And what’s this? she asked, for the sight of her father in his rather worn shoes had given her a direct spontaneous feeling. This sudden warm spurt? she asked, examining it. She watched him cross the room. His shoes always affected her strangely. Part sex; part pity, she thought. Can one call it “love”? But she forced herself to move. Now that I have drugged myself into a state of comparative insensibility, she said to herself, I will walk across the room boldly; I will go to Uncle Patrick, who is standing by the sofa picking his teeth, and I will say to him — what shall I say?

A sentence suggested itself for no rhyme or reason as she crossed the room: “How’s the man who cut his toes off with the hatchet?”

“How’s the man who cut his toes off with the hatchet?” she said, speaking the words exactly as she thought them. The handsome old Irishman bent down, for he was very tall, and hollowed his hand, for he was hard of hearing.

“Hacket? Hacket?” he repeated. She smiled. The steps from brain to brain must be cut very shallow, if thought is to mount them, she noted.

“Cut his toes off with the hatchet when I was staying with you,” she said. She remembered how when she last stayed with them in Ireland the gardener had cut his foot with a hatchet.

“Hacket? Hacket?” he repeated. He looked puzzled. Then understanding dawned.

“Oh, the Hackets!” he said. “Dear old Peter Hacket — yes.” It seemed that there were Hackets in Galway, and the mistake, which she did not trouble to explain, was all to the good, for it set him off, and he told her stories about the Hackets as they sat side by side on the sofa.

A grown woman, she thought, crosses London to talk to a deaf old man about the Hackets, whom she’s never heard of, when she meant to ask after the gardener who cut his toe off with a hatchet. But does it matter? Hackets or hatchets? She laughed, happily in time with a joke, so that it seemed appropriate. But one wants somebody to laugh with, she thought. Pleasure is increased by sharing it. Does the same hold good of pain? she mused. Is that the reason why we all talk so much of ill-health — because sharing things lessens things? Give pain, give pleasure an outer body, and by increasing the surface diminish them. . . . But the thought slipped. He was off telling his old stories. Gently, methodically, like a man setting in motion some still serviceable but rather weary nag, he was off remembering old days, old dogs, old memories that slowly shaped themselves, as he warmed, into little figures of country house life. She fancied as she half listened that she was looking at a faded snapshot of cricketers; of shooting parties on the many steps of some country mansion.

How many people, she wondered, listen? This “sharing,” then, is a bit of a farce. She made herself attend.

“Ah yes, those were fine old days!” he was saying. The light came into his faded eyes.

She looked once more at the snapshot of the men in gaiters, and the women in flowing skirts on the broad white steps with the dogs curled up at their feet. But he was off again.

“Did you ever hear from your father of a man called Roddy Jenkins who lived in the little white house on the right-hand side as you go along the road?” he asked. “But you must know that story?” he added.

“No,” she said, screwing up her eyes as if she referred to the files of memory. “Tell me.”

And he told her the story.

I’m good, she thought, at fact-collecting. But what makes up a person — (she hollowed her hand), the circumference — no, I’m not good at that. There was her Aunt Delia. She watched her moving quickly about the room. What do I know about her? That she’s wearing a dress with gold spots; has wavy hair, that was red, is white; is handsome; ravaged; with a past. But what past? She married Patrick. . . . The long story that Patrick was telling her kept breaking up the surface of her mind like oars dipping into water. Nothing could settle. There was a lake in the story too, for it was a story about duck-shooting.

She married Patrick, she thought, looking at his battered weather- worn face with the single hairs on it. Why did Delia marry Patrick? she wondered. How do they manage it — love, childbirth? The people who touch each other and go up in a cloud of smoke: red smoke? His face reminded her of the red skin of a gooseberry with the little stray hairs. But none of the lines on his face was sharp enough, she thought, to explain how they came together and had three children. They were lines that came from shooting; lines that came from worry; for the old days were over, he was saying. They had to cut things down.

“Yes, we’re all finding that,” she said perfunctorily. She turned her wrist cautiously so that she could read her watch. Fifteen minutes only had passed. But the room was filling with people she did not know. There was an Indian in a pink turban.

“Ah, but I’m boring you with these old stories,” said her uncle, wagging his head. He was hurt, she felt.

“No, no, no!” she said, feeling uncomfortable. He was off again, but out of good manners this time, she felt. Pain must outbalance pleasure by two parts to one, she thought; in all social relations. Or am I the exception, the peculiar person? she continued, for the others seemed happy enough. Yes, she thought, looking straight ahead of her, and feeling again the stretched skin round her lips and eyes tight from the tiredness of sitting up late with a woman in childbirth, I’m the exception; hard; cold; in a groove already; merely a doctor.

Getting out of grooves is damned unpleasant, she thought, before the chill of death has set in, like bending frozen boots. . . . She bent her head to listen. To smile, to bend, to make believe you’re amused when you’re bored, how painful it is, she thought. All ways, every way’s painful, she thought; staring at the Indian in the pink turban.

“Who’s that fellow?” Patrick asked, nodding his head in his direction.

“One of Eleanor’s Indians I expect,” she said aloud, and thought, If only the merciful powers of darkness would obliterate the external exposure of the sensitive nerve and I could get up and. . . . There was a pause.

“But I mustn’t keep you here, listening to my old stories,” said Uncle Patrick. His weather-beaten nag with the broken knees had stopped.

“But tell me, does old Biddy still keep the little shop,” she asked, “where we used to buy sweets?”

“Poor old body —” he began. He was off again. All her patients said that, she thought. Rest — rest — let me rest. How to deaden; how to cease to feel; that was the cry of the woman bearing children; to rest, to cease to be. In the Middle Ages, she thought, it was the cell; the monastery; now it’s the laboratory; the professions; not to live; not to feel; to make money, always money, and in the end, when I’m old and worn like a horse, no, it’s a cow . . . — for part of old Patrick’s story had imposed itself upon her mind: “ . . . for there’s no sale for the beasts at all,” he was saying, “no sale at all. Ah, there’s Julia Cromarty —” he exclaimed, and waved his hand, his large loose-jointed hand, at a charming compatriot.

She was left sitting alone on the sofa. For her uncle rose and went off with both hands outstretched to greet the bird-like old woman who had come in chattering.

She was left alone. She was glad to be alone. She had no wish to talk. But next moment somebody stood beside her. It was Martin. He sat down beside her. She changed her attitude completely.

“Hullo, Martin!” she greeted him cordially.

“Done your duty by the old mare, Peggy?” he said. He referred to the stories that old Patrick always told them.

“Did I look very glum?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, glancing at her, “not exactly enraptured.”

“One knows the end of his stories by now,” she excused herself, looking at Martin. He had taken to brushing his hair up like a waiter’s. He never looked her fully in the face. He never felt entirely at his ease with her. She was his doctor; she knew that he dreaded cancer. She must try to distract him from thinking, Does she see any symptoms?

“I was wondering how they came to marry,” she said. “Were they in love?” She spoke at random to distract him.

“Of course he was in love,” he said. He looked at Delia. She was standing by the fireplace talking to the Indian. She was still a very handsome woman, with her presence, with her gestures.

“We were all in love,” he said, glancing sideways at Peggy. The younger generation were so serious.

“Oh, of course,” she said, smiling. She liked his eternal pursuit of one love after another love — his gallant clutch upon the flying tail, the slippery tail of youth — even he, even now.

“But you,” he said, stretching his feet out, hitching up his trousers, “your generation I mean — you miss a great deal. .. you miss a great deal,” he repeated. She waited.

“Loving only your own sex,” he added.

He liked to assert his own youth in that way, she thought; to say things that he thought up to date.

“I’m not that generation,” she said.

“Well, well, well,” he chuckled, shrugging his shoulder and glancing at her sideways. He knew very little about her private life. But she looked serious; she looked tired. She works too hard, he thought.

“I’m getting on,” said Peggy. “Getting into a groove. So Eleanor told me tonight.”

Or was it she, on the other hand, who had told Eleanor she was “suppressed”? One or the other.

“Eleanor’s a gay old dog,” he said. “Look!” He pointed.

There she was, talking to the Indian in her red cloak.

“Just back from India,” he added. “A present from Bengal, eh?” he said, referring to the cloak.

“And next year she’s off to China,” said Peggy.

“But Delia —” she asked; Delia was passing them. “Was she in love?” (What you in your generation called “in love,” she added to herself.)

He wagged his head from side to side and pursed his lips. He always liked his little joke, she remembered.

“I don’t know — I don’t know about Delia,” he said. “There was the cause, you know — what she called in those days The Cause.” He screwed his face up. “Ireland, you know. Parnell. Ever heard of a man called Parnell?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Peggy.

“And Edward?” she added. He had come in; he looked very distinguished, too, in his elaborate, if conscious simplicity.

“Edward — yes,” said Martin. “Edward was in love. Surely you know that old story — Edward and Kitty?”

“The one who married — what was his name? — Lasswade?” Peggy murmured as Edward passed them.

“Yes, she married the other man — Lasswade. But he was in love — he was very much in love,” Martin murmured. “But you,” he gave her a quick little glance. There was something in her that chilled him. “Of course, you have your profession,” he added. He looked at the ground. He was thinking of his dread of cancer, she supposed. He was afraid that she had noted some symptom.

“Oh, doctors are great humbugs,” she threw out at random.

“Why? People live longer than they used, don’t they?” he said. “They don’t die so painfully anyhow,” he added.

“We’ve learnt a few little tricks,” she conceded. He stared ahead of him with a look that moved her pity.

“You’ll live to be eighty — if you want to live to be eighty,” she said. He looked at her.

“Of course I’m all in favour of living to be eighty!” he exclaimed. “I want to go to America. I want to see their buildings. I’m on that side, you see. I enjoy life.” He did, enormously.

He must be over sixty himself, she supposed. But he was wonderfully got up; as sprig and spruce as a man of forty, with his canary-coloured lady in Kensington.

“I don’t know,” she said aloud.

“Come, Peggy, come,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy — here’s Rose.”

Rose came up. She had grown very stout.

“Don’t you want to be eighty?” he said to her. He had to say it twice over. She was deaf.

“I do. Of course I do!” she said when she understood him. She faced them. She made an odd angle with her head thrown back, Peggy thought, as if she were a military man.

“Of course I do,” she said, sitting down abruptly on the sofa beside them.

“Ah, but then —” Peggy began. She paused. Rose was deaf, she remembered. She had to shout. “People hadn’t made such fools of themselves in your day,” she shouted. But she doubted if Rose heard.

“I want to see what’s going to happen,” said Rose. “We live in a very interesting world,” she added.

“Nonsense,” Martin teased her. “You want to live,” he bawled in her ear, “because you enjoy living.”

“And I’m not ashamed of it,” she said. “I like my kind — on the whole.”

“What you like is fighting them,” he bawled.

“D’you think you can get a rise out of me at this time o’ day?” she said, tapping him on the arm.

Now they’ll talk about being children; climbing trees in the back garden, thought Peggy, and how they shot somebody’s cats. Each person had a certain line laid down in their minds, she thought, and along it came the same old sayings. One’s mind must be crisscrossed like the palm of one’s hand, she thought, looking at the palm of her hand.

“She always was a spitfire,” said Martin, turning to Peggy.

“And they always put the blame on me,” Rose said. “he had the school-room. Where was I to sit? ‘Oh, run away and play in the nursery!’” she waved her hand.

“And so she went into the bathroom and cut her wrist with a knife,” Martin jeered.

“No, that was Erridge: that was about the microscope,” she corrected him.

It’s like a kitten catching its tail, Peggy thought; round and round they go in a circle. But it’s what they enjoy, she thought; it’s what they come to parties for. Martin went on teasing Rose.

“And where’s your red ribbon?” he was asking.

Some decoration had been given her, Peggy remembered, for her work in the war.

“Aren’t we worthy to see you in your war paint?” he teased her.

“This fellow’s jealous,” she said, turning to Peggy again. “He’s never done a stroke of work in his life.”

“I work — I work,” Martin insisted. “I sit in an office all day long —”

“Doing what?” said Rose.

Then they became suddenly silent. That turn was over — the old- brother-and-sister turn. Now they could only go back and repeat the same thing over again.

“Look here,” said Martin, “we must go and do our duty.” He rose. They parted.

“Doing what?” Peggy repeated, as she crossed the room. “Doing what?” she repeated. She was feeling reckless; nothing that she did mattered. She walked to the window and twitched the curtain apart. There were the stars pricked in little holes in the blue- black sky. There was a row of chimney-pots against the sky. Then the stars. Inscrutable, eternal, indifferent — those were the words; the right words. But I don’t feel it, she said, looking at the stars. So why pretend to? What they’re really like, she thought, screwing up her eyes to look at them, is little bits of frosty steel. And the moon — there it was — is a polished dish- cover. But she felt nothing, even when she had reduced moon and stars to that. Then she turned and found herself face to face with a young man she thought she knew but could not put a name to. He had a fine brow, but a receding chin and he was pale, pasty.

“How-d’you-do?” she said. Was his name Leacock or Laycock?

“Last time we met,” she said, “was at the races.” She connected him, incongruously, with a Cornish field, stone walls, farmers and rough ponies jumping.

“No, that’s Paul,” he said. “My brother Paul.” He was tart about it. What did he do, then, that made him superior in his own esteem to Paul?

“You live in London?” she said.

He nodded.

“You write?” she hazarded. But why, because he was a writer — she remembered now seeing his name in the papers — throw your head back when you say “Yes”? She preferred Paul; he looked healthy; this one had a queer face; knit up; nerve-drawn; fixed.

“Poetry?” she said.

“Yes.” But why bite off that word as if it were a cherry on the end of a stalk? she thought. There was nobody coming; they were bound to sit down side by side, on chairs by the wall.

“How do you manage, if you’re in an office?” she said. Apparently in his spare time.

“My uncle,” he began. “ . . . You’ve met him?”

Yes, a nice commonplace man; he had been very kind to her about a passport once. This boy, of course, though she only half listened, sneered at him. Then why go into his office? she asked herself. My people, he was saying . . . hunted. Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before. I, I, I— he went on. It was like a vulture’s beak pecking, or a vacuum-cleaner sucking, or a telephone bell ringing. I, I, I. But he couldn’t help it, not with that nerve-drawn egotist’s face, she thought, glancing at him. He could not free himself, could not detach himself. He was bound on the wheel with tight iron hoops. He had to expose, had to exhibit. But why let him? she thought, as he went on talking. For what do I care about his “I, I, I”? Or his poetry? Let me shake him off then, she said to herself, feeling like a person whose blood has been sucked, leaving all the nerve-centres pale. She paused. He noted her lack of sympathy. He thought her stupid, she supposed.

“I’m tired,” she apologised. “I’ve been up all night,” she explained. “I’m a doctor —”

The fire went out of his face when she said “I.” That’s done it — now he’ll go, she thought. He can’t be “you”— he must be “I.” She smiled. For up he got and off he went.

She turned round and stood at the window. Poor little wretch, she thought; atrophied, withered; cold as steel; hard as steel; bald as steel. And I too, she thought, looking at the sky. The stars seemed pricked haphazard in the sky, except that there, to the right over the chimney-pots, hung that phantom wheel-barrow — what did they call it? The name escaped her. I will count them, she thought, returning to her notebook, and had begun one, two, three, four . . . when a voice exclaimed behind her: “Peggy! Aren’t your ears tingling?” She turned. It was Delia of course, with her genial ways, her imitation Irish flattery: “— because they ought to be,” said Delia, laying a hand on her shoulder, “considering what he’s been saying”— she pointed to a grey-haired man —“what praises he’s been singing of you.”

Peggy looked where she pointed. There was her teacher over there, her master. Yes, she knew he thought her clever. She was, she supposed. They all said so. Very clever.

“He’s been telling me —” Delia began. But she broke off.

“Just help me open this window,” she said. “It’s getting hot.”

“Let me,” said Peggy. She gave the window a jerk, but it stuck, for it was old and the frames did not fit.

“Here, Peggy,” said somebody, coming behind her. It was her father. His hand was on the window, his hand with the scar. He pushed; the window went up.

“Thanks, Morris, that’s better,” said Delia. “I was telling Peggy her ears ought to be tingling,” she began again: “‘My most brilliant pupil!’ That’s what he said,” Delia went on. “I assure you I felt quite proud. ‘But she’s my niece,’ I said. He hadn’t known it —”

There, said Peggy, that’s pleasure. The nerve down her spine seemed to tingle as the praise reached her father. Each emotion touched a different nerve. A sneer rasped the thigh; pleasure thrilled the spine; and also affected the sight. The stars had softened; they quivered. Her father brushed her shoulder as he dropped his hand; but neither of them spoke.

“D’you want it open at the bottom too?” he said.

“No, that’ll do,” said Delia. “The room’s getting hot,” she said. “People are beginning to come. They must use the rooms downstairs,” she said. “But who’s that out there?” she pointed. Opposite the house against the railings of the square was a group in evening dress.

“I think I recognise one of them,” said Morris, looking out. “That’s North, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s North,” said Peggy, looking out.

“Then why don’t they come in?” said Delia, tapping on the window.

“But you must come and see it for yourselves,” North was saying. They had asked him to describe Africa. He had said that there were mountains and plains; it was silent, he had said, and birds sang. He stopped; it was difficult to describe a place to people who had not seen it. Then curtains in the house opposite parted, and three heads appeared at the window. They looked at the heads outlined on the window opposite them. They were standing with their backs to the railings of the square. The trees hung dark showers of leaves over them. The trees had become part of the sky. Now and then they seemed to shift and shuffle slightly as a breeze went through them. A star shone among the leaves. It was silent too; the murmur of the traffic was run together into one far hum. A cat slunk past; for a second they saw the luminous green of the eyes; then it was extinguished. The cat crossed the lighted space and vanished. Someone tapped again on the window and cried, “Come in!”

“Come!” said Renny, and threw his cigar into the bushes behind him. “Come, we must.”

They went upstairs, past the doors of offices, past long windows that opened on to back gardens that lay behind houses. Trees in full leaf stretched their branches across at different levels; the leaves, here bright green in the artificial light, here dark in shadow, moved up and down in the little breeze. Then they came to the private part of the house, where the red carpet was laid; and a roar of voices sounded from behind a door as if a flock of sheep were penned there. Then music, a dance, swung out.

“Now,” said Maggie, pausing for a moment, outside the door. She gave their names to the servant.

“And you, sir?” said the maid to North, who hung behind.

“Captain Pargiter,” said North, touching his tie.

“And Captain Pargiter!” the maid called out.

Delia was upon them instantly. “And Captain Pargiter!” she exclaimed, as she came hurrying across the room. “How very nice of you to come!” she exclaimed. She took their hands at random, here a left hand, there a right hand, in her left hand, in her right hand.

“I thought it was you,” she exclaimed, “standing in the square. I thought I could recognise Renny — but I wasn’t sure about North. Captain Pargiter!” she wrung his hand, “you’re quite a stranger — but a very welcome one! Now who d’you know? Who don’t you know?”

She glanced round, twitching her shawl rather nervously.

“Let me see, there’s all your uncles and aunts; and your cousins; and your sons and daughters — yes, Maggie, I saw your lovely couple not long ago. They’re somewhere. . . . Only all the generations in our family are so mixed; cousins and aunts, uncles and brothers — but perhaps it’s a good thing.”

She stopped rather suddenly as if she had used up that vein. She twitched her shawl.

“They’re going to dance,” she said, pointing at the young man who was putting another record on the gramophone. “It’s all right for dancing,” she added, referring to the gramophone. “Not for music.” She became simple for a moment. “I can’t bear music on the gramophone. But dance music — that’s another thing. And young people — don’t you find that? — must dance. It’s right they should. Dance or not — just as you like.” She waved her hand.

“Yes, just as you like,” her husband echoed her. He stood beside her, dangling his hands in front of him like a bear on which coats are hung in a hotel.

“Just as you like,” he repeated, shaking his paws.

“Help me to move the tables, North,” said Delia. “If they’re going to dance, they’ll want everything out of the way — and the rugs rolled up.” She pushed a table out of the way. Then she ran across the room to whisk a chair against the wall.

Now one of the vases was upset, and a stream of water flowed across the carpet.

“Don’t mind it, don’t mind it — it doesn’t matter at all!” Delia exclaimed, assuming the manner of a harum-scarum Irish hostess. But North stooped and swabbed up the water.

“And what are you going to do with that pocket handkerchief?” Eleanor asked him; she had joined them in her flowing red cloak.

“Hang it on a chair to dry,” said North, walking off.

“And you, Sally?” said Eleanor, drawing back against the wall since they were going to dance. “Going to dance?” she asked, sitting down.

“I?” said Sara, yawning. “I want to sleep.” She sank down on a cushion beside Eleanor.

“But you don’t come to parties,” Eleanor laughed, looking down at her, “to sleep, do you?” Again she saw the little picture she had seen at the end of the telephone. But she could not see her face; only the top of her head.

“Dining with you, wasn’t he?” she said, as North passed them with his handkerchief.

“And what did you talk about?” she asked. She saw her, sitting on the edge of a chair, swinging her foot up and down, with a smudge on her nose.

“Talk about?” said Sara. “You, Eleanor.” People were passing them all the time; they were brushing against their knees; they were beginning to dance. It made one feel a little dizzy, Eleanor thought, sinking back in her chair.

“Me?” she said. “What about me?”

“Your life,” said Sara.

“My life?” Eleanor repeated. Couples began to twist and turn slowly past them. It was a fox-trot that they were dancing, she supposed.

My life, she said to herself. That was odd, it was the second time that evening that somebody had talked about her life. And I haven’t got one, she thought. Oughtn’t a life to be something you could handle and produce? — a life of seventy odd years. But I’ve only the present moment, she thought. Here she was alive, now, listening to the fox-trot. Then she looked round. There was Morris; Rose; Edward with his head thrown back talking to a man she did not know. I’m the only person here, she thought, who remembers how he sat on the edge of my bed that night, crying — the night Kitty’s engagement was announced. Yes, things came back to her. A long strip of life lay behind her. Edward crying, Mrs. Levy talking; snow falling; a sunflower with a crack in it; the yellow omnibus trotting along the Bayswater Road. And I thought to myself, I’m the youngest person in this omnibus; now I’m the oldest. . . . Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s “I” at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting-paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene. And then they say, she thought, “We’ve been talking about you!”

“My life . . . ” she said aloud, but half to herself.

“Yes?” said Sara, looking up.

Eleanor stopped. She had forgotten her. But there was somebody listening. Then she must put her thoughts into order; then she must find words. But no, she thought, I can’t find words; I can’t tell anybody.

“Isn’t that Nicholas?” she said, looking at a rather large man who stood in the doorway.

“Where?” said Sara. But she looked in the wrong direction. He had disappeared. Perhaps she had been mistaken. My life’s been other people’s lives, Eleanor thought — my father’s; Morris’s; my friends’ lives; Nicholas’s. . . . Fragments of a conversation with him came back to her. Either I’d been lunching with him or dining with him, she thought. It was in a restaurant. There was a parrot with a pink feather in a cage on the counter. And they had sat there talking — it was after the war — about the future; about education. And he wouldn’t let me pay for the wine, she suddenly remembered, though it was I who ordered it. . . .

Here somebody stopped in front of her. She looked up. “Just as I was thinking of you!” she exclaimed.

It was Nicholas.

“Good-evening, madame!” he said, bending over her in his foreign way.

“Just as I was thinking of you!” she repeated. Indeed it was like a part of her, a sunk part of her, coming to the surface. “Come and sit beside me,” she said, and pulled up a chair.

“D’you know who that chap is, sitting by my aunt?” said North to the girl he was dancing with. She looked round; but vaguely.

“I don’t know your aunt,” she said. “I don’t know anybody here.”

The dance was over and they began walking towards the door.

“I don’t even know my hostess,” she said. “I wish you’d point her out to me.”

“There — over there,” he said. He pointed to Delia in her black dress with the gold spangles.

“Oh, that,” she said, looking at her. “That’s my hostess, is it?” He had not caught the girl’s name, and she knew none of them either. He was glad of it. It made him seem different to himself — it stimulated him. He shepherded her towards the door. He wanted to avoid his relations. In particular he wanted to avoid his sister Peggy; but there she was, standing alone by the door. He looked the other way; he conveyed his partner out of the door. There must be a garden or a roof somewhere, he thought, where they could sit, alone. She was extraordinarily pretty and young.

“Come along,” he said, “downstairs.”

“And what were you thinking about me?” said Nicholas, sitting down beside Eleanor.

She smiled. There he was in his rather ill-assorted dress-clothes, with the seal engraved with the arms of his mother the princess, and his swarthy wrinkled face that always made her think of some loose-skinned, furry animal, savage to others but kind to herself. But what was she thinking about him? She was thinking of him in the lump; she could not break off little fragments. The restaurant had been smoky she remembered.

“How we dined together once in Soho,” she said. “ . . . d’you remember?”

“All the evenings with you I remember, Eleanor,” he said. But his glance was a little vague. His attention was distracted. He was looking at a lady who had just come in; a well-dressed lady, who stood with her back to the bookcase equipped for every emergency. If I can’t describe my own life, Eleanor thought, how can I describe him? For what he was she did not know; only that it gave her pleasure when he came in; relieved her of the need of thinking; and gave her mind a little jog. He was looking at the lady. She seemed upheld by their gaze; vibrating under it. And suddenly it seemed to Eleanor that it had all happened before. So a girl had come in that night in the restaurant: had stood, vibrating, in the door. She knew exactly what he was going to say. He had said it before, in the restaurant. He is going to say, She is like a ball on the top of a fishmonger’s fountain. As she thought it, he said it. Does everything then come over again a little differently? she thought. If so, is there a pattern; a theme, recurring, like music; half remembered, half foreseen? . . . a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible? The thought gave her extreme pleasure: that there was a pattern. But who makes it? Who thinks it? Her mind slipped. She could not finish her thought.

“Nicholas . . . ” she said. She wanted him to finish it; to take her thought and carry it out into the open unbroken; to make it whole, beautiful, entire.

“Tell me, Nicholas . . . ” she began; but she had no notion how she was going to finish her sentence, or what it was that she wanted to ask him. He was talking to Sara. She listened. He was l............