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Lou exclaimed at that glimpse of a house in a sheath of startling flowers. She twisted round, to look back, in the open car, till the next corner had cut it out of sight. To reach the corner, it struck her, Edward accelerated, as though he were jealous of the rosy house – a house with gables, flat-fronted, whose dark windows stared with no expression through the flowers. The garden, with its silent, burning gaiety, stayed in both their minds like an apparition.

One of those conflicts between two silent moods had set up, with Lou and Edward, during that endless drive. Also, there is a point when an afternoon oppresses one with fatigue and a feeling of unreality. Relentless, pointless, unwinding summer country made nerves ache at the back of both of their eyes. This was a late June Monday; they were doubling back to London through Suffolk by-roads, on the return from a week-end. Edward, who detested the main roads, had traced out their curious route before starting, and Lou now sat beside him with the map on her knees. They had to be back by eight, for Edward, who was a writer, to finish and post an article: apart from this, time was no object with them. They looked forward with no particular pleasure to London and unlocking the stuffy flat, taking in the milk, finding bills in the letter-box. In fact, they looked forward to nothing with particular pleasure. They were going home for the purely negative reason that there was nowhere else they could as cheaply go. The week-end had not been amusing, but at least it had been ‘away’. Now they could foresee life for weeks ahead – until someone else invited them – the typewriter, the cocktail-shaker, the telephone, runs in the car out of London to nowhere special. Love when Edward got a cheque in the post, quarrels about people on the way home from parties – and Lou’s anxiety always eating them. This future weighed on them like a dull burden … So they had been glad to extend today.

But under a vacant sky, not sunny but full of diffused glare, the drive had begun to last too long: they felt bound up in the tired impotence of a dream. The stretches of horizon were stupefying. The road bent round wedges of cornfield, blocky elms dark with summer: for these last ten miles the countryside looked abandoned; they passed dropping gates, rusty cattle-troughs and the thistly, tussocky, stale grass of neglected farms. There was nobody on the roads; perhaps there was nobody anywhere … In the heart of all this, the roses looked all the odder.

‘They were extraordinary,’ she said (when the first corner was turned) in her tired, little, dogmatic voice.

‘All the more,’ he agreed, ‘when all the rest of the country looks something lived in by poor whites.’

‘I wish we lived there,’ she said. ‘It really looked like somewhere.’

‘It wouldn’t if we did.’

Edward spoke with some tartness. He had found he had reason to dread week-ends away: they unsettled Lou and started up these fantasies. Himself, he had no illusions about life in the country: life without people was absolutely impossible. What would he and she do with nobody to talk to but each other? Already, they had not spoken for two hours. Lou saw life in terms of ideal moments. She found few ideal moments in their flat.

He went on: ‘You know you can’t stand ear-wigs. And we should spend our lives on the telephone.’

‘About the earwigs?’

‘No. About ourselves.’

Lou’s smart little monkey face became dolorous. She never risked displeasing Edward too far, but she was just opening her mouth to risk one further remark when Edward jumped and frowned. A ghastly knocking had started. It seemed to come from everywhere, and at the same time to be a special attack on them. Then it had to be traced to the car’s vitals: it jarred up Lou through the soles of her feet. Edward slowed to a crawl and stopped. He and she confronted each other with that completely dramatic lack of expression they kept for occasions when the car went wrong. They tried crawling on again, a few tentative yards: the knocking took up again with still greater fury.

‘Sounds to me like a big end gone.’

‘Oh my goodness,’ she said.

All the same, she was truly glad to get out of the car. She stretched and stood waiting on the grass roadside while Edward made faces into the bonnet. Soon he flung round to ask what she would suggest doing: to his surprise (and annoyance) she had a plan ready. She would walk back to that house and ask if they had a telephone. If they had not, she would ask for a bicycle and bicycle to the place where the nearest garage was.

Edward snatched the map, but could not find where they were. Where they were seemed to be highly improbable. ‘I expect you,’ Lou said, ‘would rather stay with the car.’ ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Edward, ‘anybody can have it … You like to be sure where I am, don’t you?’ he added. He locked their few odd things up in the boot of the car with the suitcases, and they set off in silence. It was about a mile.

There stood the house, waiting. Why should a house wait? Most pretty scenes have something passive about them, but this looked like a trap baited with beauty, set ready to spring. It stood back from the road. Lou put her hand on the gate and, with a touch of bravado, the two filed up the paved path to the door. Each side of the path, hundreds of standard roses bloomed, over-charged with colour, as though this were their one hour. Crimson, coral, blue-pink, lemon and cold white, they disturbed with fragrance the dead air. In this spell-bound afternoon, with no shadows, the roses glared at the strangers, frighteningly bright. The face of the house was plastered with tea-roses: waxy cream when they opened but with vermilion buds.

The blistered door was propped open with a bizarre object, a lump of quartz. Indoors was the dark, cold-looking hall. When they had come to the door they found no bell or knocker: they could not think what to do. ‘We had better cough,’ Lou said. So they stood there coughing, till a door at the end of the hall opened and a lady or woman looked out – they were not sure which. ‘Oh?’ she said, with no expression at all.

‘We couldn’t find your bell.’

‘There they are,’ she said, pointing to two Swiss cow-bells that hung on loops of string by the door she had just come out of. Having put this right, she continued to look at them, and out through the door past them, wiping her powerful-looking hands vaguely against the sides of her blue overall. They could hardly see themselves as intruders when their intrusion made so little effect. The occupying inner life of this person was not for an instant suspended by their presence. She was a shabby amazon of a woman, with a sculptural clearness about the face. She must have lost contact with the outer world completely: there was now nothing to ‘place’ her by. It is outside attachments – hopes, claims, curiosities, desires, little touches of greed – that put a label on one to help strangers. As it was, they could not tell if she were rich or poor, stupid or clever, a spinster or a wife. She seemed prepared, not anxious, for them to speak. Lou, standing close beside Edward, gave him a dig in a rib. So Edward explained to the lady how they found themselves, and asked if she had a telephone or a bicycle.

She said she was sorry to say she had neither. Her maid had a bicycle, but had ridden home on it. ‘Would you like some tea?’ she said. ‘I am just boiling the kettle. Then perhaps you can think of something to do.’ This lack of grip of the crisis made Edward decide the woman must be a moron: annoyance contused his face. But Lou, who wanted tea and was attracted by calmness, was entirely won. She looked at Edward placatingly.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But I must do something at once. We haven’t got all night; I’ve got to be back in London. Can you tell me where I can telephone from? I must get through to a garage – a good garage.’

Unmoved, the lady said: ‘You’ll have to walk to the village. It’s about three miles away.’ She gave unexpectedly clear directions, then looked at Lou again. ‘Leave your wife here,’ she said. ‘Then she can have tea.’

Edward shrugged; Lou gave a brief, undecided sigh. How much she wanted to stop. But she never liked to be left. This partly arose from the fact that she was not Edward’s wife: he was married to someone else and his wife would not divorce him. He might some day go back to her, if this ever became the way of least resistance. Or he might, if it were the way of even less resistance, move on to someone else. Lou was determined neither should ever happen. She did love Edward, but she also stuck to him largely out of contentiousness. She quite often asked herself why she did. It seemed important – she could not say why. She was determined to be a necessity. Therefore she seldom let him out of her sight – her idea of love was adhesiveness … Knowing this well, Edward gave her a slightly malign smile, said she had far better stay, turned, and walked down the path without her. Lou, like a lost cat, went half-way to the door. ‘Your roses are wonderful …’ she said, staring out with unhappy eyes.

‘Yes, they grow well for us, Josephine likes to see them.’ Her hostess added: ‘My kettle will be boiling. Won’t you wait in there?’

Lou went deeper into the house. She found herself in a long, low and narrow parlour, with a window at each end. Before she could turn round, she felt herself being looked at. A girl of about thirteen lay, flat as a board, in a wicker invalid carriage. The carriage was pulled out across the room, so that the girl could command the view from either window, the flat horizons that bounded either sky. Lying there with no pillow she had a stretched look. Lou stood some distance from the foot of the carriage: the dark eyes looked at her down thin cheekbones, intently. The girl had an unresigned, living face; one hand crept on the rug over her breast. Lou felt, here was the nerve and core of the house … The only movement was made by a canary, springing to and fro in its cage.

‘Hullo,’ Lou said, with that deferential smile with which one approaches an invalid. When the child did not answer, she went on: ‘You must wonder who I am?’

‘I don’t now; I did when you drove past.’

‘Then our car broke down.’

‘I know, I wondered whether it might.’

Lou laughed and said: ‘Then you put the evil eye on it.’

The child ignored this. She said: ‘This is not the way to London.’

‘All the same, that’s where we’re going.’

‘You mean, where you were going … Is that your husband who has just gone away?’

‘That’s Edward: yes. To telephone. He’ll be back.’ Lou, who was wearing a summer suit, smart, now rather crumpled, of honey-yellow linen, felt Josephine look her up and down. ‘Have you been to a party?’ she said, ‘or are you going to one?’

‘We’ve just been staying away,’ Lou walked nervously down the room to the front window. From here she saw the same roses Josephine saw: she thought they looked like forced roses, magnetized into being. Magnetized, buds uncurled and petals dropped. Lou began to wake from the dream of the afternoon: her will stirred; she wanted to go; she felt apprehensive, threatened. ‘I expect you like to lie out of doors, with all those roses?’ she said.

‘No, not often: I don’t care for the sky.’

‘You just watch through the window?’

‘Yes,’ said the child, impatiently. She added: ‘What are the parts of London with most traffic?’

‘Piccadilly Circus. Trafalgar Square.’

‘Oh, I would like to see those.’

The child’s mother’s step sounded on the hall flags: she came in with the tea-tray. ‘Can I help you?’ said Lou, glad of the interim.

‘Oh, thank you. Perhaps you’d unfold that table. Put it over here beside Josephine. She’s lying down because she hurt her back.’

‘My back was hurt six years ago,’ said Josephine. ‘It was my father’s doing.’

Her mother was busy lodging the edge of the tray on the edge of the tea-table.

‘Awful for him,’ Lou murmured, helping unstack the cups.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Josephine. ‘He has gone away.’

Lou saw why. A man in the wrong cannot live where there is no humanity. There are enormities you can only keep piling up. He had bolted off down that path, as Edward had just done. Men cannot live with sorrow, with women who embrace it. Men will suffer a certain look in animals’ eyes, but not in women’s eyes. And men dread obstinacy, of love, of grief. You could stay with burning Josephine, not with her mother’s patient, exalted face … When her mother had gone again, to fetch the teapot and kettle, Josephine once more fastened her eyes on Lou. ‘Perhaps your husband will be some time,’ she said. ‘You’re the first new person I have seen for a year. Perhaps he will lose his way.’

‘Oh, but then I should have to look for him!’

Josephine gave a fanatical smile. ‘But when people go away they sometimes quite go,’ she said. ‘If they always come back, then what is the good of moving?’

‘I don’t see the good of moving.’

‘Then stay here.’

‘People don’t just go where they want; they go where they must.’

‘Must you go back to London?’

‘Oh, I have to, you know.’

‘Why?’

Lou frowned and smiled in a portentous, grown-up way that meant nothing at all to either herself or Josephine. She felt for her cigarette case and, glumly, found it empty – Edward had walked away with the packet of cigarettes that he and she had been sharing that afternoon. He also carried any money she had.

‘You don’t know where he’s gone to,’ Josephine pointed out. ‘If you had to stay, you would soon get used to it. We don’t wonder where my father is.’

‘What’s your mother’s name?’

‘Mrs Mather. She’d like you to stay. Nobody comes to see us; they used to, they don’t now. So we only see each other. They may be frightened of something —’

Mrs Mather came back, and Josephine looked out of the other window. This immediate silence marked a conspiracy, in which Lou had no willing part. While Mrs Mather was putting down the teapot, Lou looked round the room, to make sure it was ordinary. This window-ended parlour was lined with objects that looked honest and worn without having antique grace. A faded room should look homely. But extinct paper and phantom cretonnes gave this a gutted air. Rooms can be whitened and gutted by too-intensive living, as they are by a fire. It was the garden, out there, that focused the senses. Lou indulged for a minute the astounding fancy that Mr Mather lay at the roses’ roots … Josephine said sharply: ‘I don’t want any tea,’ which made Lou realize that she would have to be fed and did not want to be fed in front of the stranger Lou still was. Mrs Mather made no comment: she drew two chairs to the table and invited Lou to sit down. ‘It’s rather sultry,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid your husband may not enjoy his walk.’

‘How far did you say it was?’

‘Three miles.’

Lou, keeping her wrist under the table, glanced down covertly at her watch.

‘We are very much out of the way,’ said Mrs Mather.

‘But perhaps you like that?’

‘We are accustomed to quiet,’ said Mrs Mather, pouring out tea. ‘This was a farm, you know. But it was an unlucky farm, so since my husband left I have let the land. Servants seem to find that the place is lonely – country girls are so different now. My present servant is not very clear in her mind, but she works well and does not seem to feel lonely. When she is not working she rides home.’

‘Far?’ said Lou, tensely.

‘A good way,’ said Mrs Mather, looking out of the window at the horizon.

‘Then aren’t you rather … alone? – I mean, if anything happened.’

‘Nothing more can happen,’ said Mrs Mather. ‘And there are two of us. When I am working upstairs or am out with the chickens, I wear one of those bells you see in the hall, so Josephine can always hear where I am. And I leave the other bell on Josephine’s carriage. When I work in the garden she can see me, of course.’ She slit the wax-paper top off a jar of jam. ‘This is my last pot of last year’s damson,’ she said. ‘Please try some; I shall be making more soon. We have two fine trees.’

‘You should see mother climb them,’ said Josephine.

‘Aren’t you afraid of falling?’

‘Why?’ said Mrs Mather, advancing a plate of rather rich bread and butter. ‘I never eat tea, thank you,’ Lou said, sitting rigid, sipping round her cup of tea like a bird.

‘She thinks if she eats she may have to stay here for ever,’ Josephine said. Her mother, taking no notice, spread jam on her bread and butter and started to eat in a calmly voracious way. Lou kept clinking her spoon against the teacup: every time she did this the canary started and fluttered. Though she knew Edward could not possibly come yet, Lou kept glancing down the garden at the gate. Mrs Mather, reaching out for more bread and butter, saw, and thought Lou was looking at the roses. ‘Would you like to take some back to London?’ she said.

Josephine’s carriage had been wheeled out on the lawn between the rosebeds. She lay with eyes shut and forehead contracted, for overhead hung the dreaded space of the sky. But she had to be near Lou while Lou cut the roses. In a day or two, Lou thought, I should be wearing a bell. What shall I do with these if I never do go? she thought, as she cut through the strong stems between the thorns and piled the roses on the foot of the carriage. I shall certainly never want to look at roses again. By her wrist watch it was six o’clock – two hours since Edward had started. All round, the country under the white, stretched sky was completely silent. She went once to the gate.

‘Is there any way from that village?’ she said at last. ‘Any ’bus to anywhere else? Any taxi one could hire?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Josephine.

‘When does your servant come back?’

‘Tomorrow morning. Sometimes our servants never come back at all.’

Lou shut the knife and said: ‘Well, those are enough roses.’ She supposed she could hear if whoever Edward sent for the car came to tow it away. The car, surely, Edward would not abandon? She went to the gate again. From behind her Josephine said: ‘Then please wheel me indoors.’

‘If you like. But I shall stay here.’

‘Then I will. But please put something over my eyes.’

Lou got out her red silk handkerchief and laid this across Josephine’s eyes. This made the mouth more revealing: she looked down at the small resolute smile. ‘If you want to keep on listening,’ the child said, ‘you needn’t talk to me. Lie down and let’s pretend we’re both asleep.’

Lou lay down on the dry, cropped grass alongside the wheels of the carriage: she crossed her hands under her head, shut her eyes and lay stretched, as rigid as Josephine. At first she was so nervous, she thought the lawn vibrated under her spine. Then slowly she relaxed. There is a moment when silence, no longer resisted, rushes into the mind. She let go, inch by inch, of life, that since she was a child she had been clutching so desperately – her obsessions about this and that, her obsession about keeping Edward. How anxiously she had run from place to place, wanting to keep everything inside her own power. I should have stayed still: I shall stay still now, she thought. What I want must come to me: I shall not go after it. People who stay still generate power. Josephine stores herself up, and so what she wants happens, because she knows what she wants. I only think I want things; I only think I want Edward. (He’s not coming and I don’t care, I don’t care.) I feel life myself now. No wonder I’ve been tired, only half getting what I don’t really want. Now I want nothing; I just want a white circle.

The white circle distended inside her eyelids and she looked into it in an ecstasy of indifference. She knew she was looking at nothing – then knew nothing …

Josephine’s voice, from up in the carriage, woke her. ‘You were quite asleep.’

‘Was I?’

‘Take the handkerchief off: a motor’s coming.’

Lou heard the vibration. She got up and uncovered Josephine’s eyes. Then she went to the foot of the carriage and got her roses together. She was busy with this, standing with her back to the gate, when she heard the taxi pull up, then Edward’s step on the path. The taxi driver sat staring at the roses. ‘It’s all right,’ Edward shouted, ‘they’re sending out from the garage. They should be here any moment. But what people – God! – Look here, have you been all right?’

‘Perfectly, I’ve been with Josephine.’

‘Oh, hullo, Josephine,’ Edward said, with a hasty exercise of his charm. ‘Well, I’ve come for this woman. Thank you for keeping her.’

‘It’s quite all right, thank you … Shall you be going now?’

‘We must get our stuff out of the car: it will have to be towed to the garage. Then when I’ve had another talk to the garage people we’ll take this taxi on and pick up a train … Come on, Lou, come on! We don’t want to miss those people! And we’ve got to get that stuff out of the car!’

‘Is there such a hurry?’ she said, putting down the roses.

‘Of course, there’s a hurry …’ He added, to Josephine: ‘We’ll look in on our way to the station, when I’ve fixed up all this, to say goodbye to your mother.’ He put his hand on Lou’s shoulder and punted her ahead of him down the path. ‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ he said, as they got into the taxi. ‘You’re well out of that, my girl. From what I heard in the village —’

‘What, have you been anxious?’ said Lou, curiously.

‘It’s a nervy day,’ said Edward, with an uneasy laugh. ‘And I had to put in an hour in the village emporium, first waiting for my call, then waiting for this taxi. (And this is going to cost us a pretty penny.) I got talking, naturally, one way and another. You’ve no idea what they said when they heard where I had parked you. Not a soul round there will go near the place. I must say – discounting gossip – there’s a story there,’ said Edward. ‘They can’t fix anything, but … Well, you see, it appears that this Mather woman …’ Lowering his voice, so as not to be heard by the driver, Edward began to tell Lou what he had heard in the village about the abrupt disappearance of Mr Mather.