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“And it hasn’t been before?”

“No,” she said.

The soup was taken away and meat appeared. We waited while the vegetables were ladled out, and I was thinking what a success the lunch was, how we were enjoying it, and then Alice said in a casual voice, “What did you do after I had left you last night?”

“Last night?” I said. I remembered suddenly our rudeness to her, and my remorse. I wondered why it was that until now I had forgotten it; perhaps it had been Alice’s business to make me forget it — the business in which she was so practised and clever. So that it might have been that the success of the lunch had nothing to do with me at all, and then why had Alice wanted to remind me of my rudeness now?

“Yes,” Alice said. There was an awkwardness between us. She was looking out of the window and seemed to be waiting for something.

“I stayed with Marius for a while,” I said. I found that I did not want to tell her about Annabelle and Peter. We were both of us uneasy. “Do you know where Marius lives?” I said, remembering that this was something that I wanted to discover from her.

“No,” she said.

“But you must do, you got in touch with him last night.”

“Oh did I?” she said.

“Yes.”

“He is staying in Grosvenor Square, I believe, with some friends.”

“Oh,” I said. I had not imagined him as living there. “Do you know the friends?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“Marius isn’t. .?” I began.

“Isn’t what?”

“Nothing,” I said. For a moment, and for some inexplicable reason, I had wanted to ask if Marius was married to Annabelle. But knew that he wasn’t.

There was a silence. Alice’s heavy beautiful face looked unutterably sad. While I had been wondering about Marius I had not thought of what she might be wanting herself. As she looked out of the window I could see the reflections of the traffic in her eyes.

“Darling,” she said, “for God’s sake say something, can’t you tell me about last night?” She looked so tired.

“We went round to Grosvenor Square,” I said.

“Oh you did?”

“Yes. I can’t think why I didn’t tell you about that before.”

“That doesn’t matter does it?”

“What?”

“But what happened, darling?”—I could not quite discover what we were saying.

“Isn’t it strange to live in Grosvenor Square,” I said.

“Is it?”

“I mean I didn’t think anyone did now. . ” I said, and then I talked off, lost, and Alice went on staring out of the window with her heavy blue wax-work eyes.

We ate in silence. Plates were removed and fresh ones came, and I still did not know what Alice was wanting. I tried to talk of inconsequential things, but the sadness remained around us like damp and I could not deal with it. I remembered what Alice had once said about it being impossible to learn anything about people by talking to them, and I realized that this was at least true when applied to her. I could not ask her what she wanted, and I could not tell without asking what it was that made her sad or happy. I thought, perhaps, that I really knew nothing about her at all.

“You would like Marius’s friends,” I said at random. “They are a brother and a sister, and I am sure you would get on well if you met them.”

“I’m sure I would, darling,” she said, turning her eyes on mine.

And then it was all right. By this time we had finished lunch; before I left her, I had promised to arrange a meeting between her and them. Alice was smiling, letting her eyes rest on me, and she talked with a quickening energy that I had not seen in her for years. But I did not know what it was all about, what the lunch was about — whether she had arranged it and been pleasant merely in the hope of this promised meeting, or whether we had really made some contact in the things that mattered between ourselves. I did not know whether it was my effort to be nice to her that had been successful — but as we were about to leave each other in the street and I was thanking her for the lunch, she turned to me suddenly and said, “You are getting quite good at businesses, darling: perhaps you are growing a little older after all”; and then she squeezed my arm and walked away.

For a few days I saw no one. I stayed in my room and tried to write, but what was there to say when people were such mysteries? The sun shone and the children shouted in the streets, but men and women were shuttered in basements behind the light.

Men and women were like shops, with their goods in the windows, what they had bought and what they offered to sell. The display was all that was visible, the display of words and behaviour in which they trafficked and grew rich and sometimes grew bankrupt, the figures of their businesses recorded in ledgers around the shelves; but what the men and women were like, were really like, apart from the businesses, was never known. The customer never penetrated through to the back parlour where the shop-keeper lived, the shop-keeper so courteous and impassive, where he took off his smile and slept. The customer never got down into the basement where the efforts were weighed, the businesses balanced, where the question was judged, finally — this is or this is not what matters, this has or has not been worth while.

And Alice was a dealer in mysteries: this I knew. It was her way of dressing the shop window, of introducing novelties, of keeping the public amused. To cloak her pretences she used to patter like a conjuror, to catch the audience guessing she made slips with her hands. But the slips were false slips, they were pretences at pretending, the reality was behind them and the audience was fooled. Trying to understand Alice was like trying to work out a sentence with too many negatives; the sense became lost, baffled, in the cancellation of meaning. In Alice there were layers and layers of possible cancellations, but the audience never knew what was intended and what was not; how much she was bluffing others and how much she was bluffing herself.

And it was not only professional conjurors who played tricks with their audience. Every audience was at a distance demanding to be amused, and everyone, in this way, was a conjuror. The tricks were demanded and the tricks were performed, but the audience was supposed not to see the reality. The only difference between the professional con-juror and the amateur was that the professional at least knew himself how the trick had been played and why; while the amateur did not.

All amateurs, I thought — and that included Annabelle and Peter and Marius. But with them, somehow when they were among their audience, the tricks appeared no longer as tricks but rather as demonstrations of a reality that lay behind them. When they produced a rabbit out of a hat they did so because they wanted a rabbit; when flags came out of their mouths instead of words the words were not needed and the flags were used to wave with; when pigeons flew out from their coat-tails it was because they wore coats that pigeons lived in. With them what they acted was an expression of what they felt. In their shop windows lay only that which they loved, and so it was not a shop, for there was no buying and selling. They only gave and received, and lived there, and the shop and basement were one.

And I, in my room, a hired room, a washstand disguised as a writing desk, a curtain for a cupboard, a gas fire demanding shillings that I seldom possessed, a chest of drawers, two beds, a table in the middle, the walls the colour of brown papers, the covers of the chairs and divans like the woven remains of dust — this was my basement, my home, the cell wherein I slept. But this was not where I could live — (were the basements of others the same?) — there was nothing of myself in this solitude — (was there anything of themselves in others’?) — were all basements then a sham and was there nothing but the windows? Lying on my bed and watching the gradually yellowing ceiling where it ran into the frieze above the walls I knew that it was not here that I could work. And now in the evenings, out of doors, I could not yet go round to see Annabelle and Peter. Because, if the world is a dressed window and the eyes of the customers go no further than the window it is not as a customer that one should ask for more than the world. If I went to Annabelle and Peter and knocked at their door I should be approaching as a customer, my smile would be the smile of consciousness and their welcome would be frozen by the formality of my words. Going like this, being accustomed to the world, we could not have helped it. For me, at least, having grown so rooted into loneliness, it would have been inevitable. So that in hoping for more than the world, hoping for reality, I looked for a different approach. And I could find no other approach, because the entrances to reality are through the world’s windows.