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preferred them to the subject of a marriage that would never be.
    ***
    In her bed in the tiny flat in the Blessington Road, Lilian lay listening. She had hung a tall looking-glass on one wall to give the cell-like room an illusion of breadth, and from her pillow she could contemplate her reflection. She saw the white pillow behind her; she saw her head on the pillow. She saw her white face, dim in the half-dark, and (she fancied) ghostly. But she was not a ghost—she was ordinary flesh, as kneadable as dough, a woman's body alone in a bed, with her hand on her breast. A woman's hand, which no one had ever stroked—only that evanescent grazing at Mr. James's door, and that oddly enthralling caress across the tearoom table. Theodora had taken her hand and turned it over and over, and then comically pretended to read her palm, like a gypsy seer; and then she plaited her own hand through Lilian's, and looked at her ... how to say it?—cannily, almost tantalizingly, as no one had ever looked at her before; as if some unfathomable purpose were pulsing between them. Out of her pillow voices were rising, known and perilous voices: all week she had labored beside Mr. Conrad, capturing the slow windings of the voices as they came twisting out of his viscera, or else hurtled out in violent tornado coilings, so that her fingers had to fly after them, rattling the Machine, rattling the lamps, rattling Mrs. Conrad's porcelain figurines. They were the very voices she had carried that day to the Reform Club—the heart of a tale still uncompleted, not yet named. The voices were in her ears, in her throat, in the whorls of her fingers.
My double. My second self. My feeling of identity. Our secret partnership. My secret sharer.
The voices shook her, they frightened her, and when Mr. Conrad broke off at last, she saw how spent he was. She too was spent. He took out his flint lighter and put it back in his pocket. He wasn't getting it right, he told her, not even the title, and who knew when the thing might be ready for print? He would not smoke now—he was flushed and sickly and untidy, as though he had been vomiting all afternoon.
    She lifted her hand from her breast, and with her other hand delicately, tentatively tapped it, patted it, smoothed it, ran her fingers along the knuckles and under the yielding arch of the palm—just so had Theodora played with her hand in the teashop, making a toy of it, and then,
then
—raising it, smiling and smiling, as if about to put the curious plaything to her lips. That knowing smile, and the surprising small shudder that crept along her spine—a woman seeming almost to wish to kiss a woman's hand! It stirred and troubled her—the sensation was so much like ... that moment once, or moments, when, turning too hastily from the Machine to pass the day's sheaf of typed sheets to Mr. Conrad, a flurry of papers slipped from her, loosed and strewn, landing on the carpet, the two of them plucking and stooping and kneeling ("a pair of coolies in a rice paddy," he growled), their heads close and their hands entangled ... The ends of his fingers were hard, and the veins in his wrists were thin blue ropes under her eyes: a sailor's worn claw, and the unforeseen movement of it, its gritty touch, rocked her and affected her with a kind of thirst. And there was Mrs. Conrad in the doorway, looking in angrily, and it was only Mr. Conrad holding out his hand to help Miss Hallowes up from her knees.
    From the alley below her bedroom window—the filtering panes that sheathed her in a dusky mist of almost-light—Lilian heard a sharp clatter: a metal trash barrel overturned. The fox again, scavenging. A sly fox out of a fable, a fox that belonged in a wood—but there are sightings of foxes in the outlying streets of London, and once, coming home in the winter night from her mother's, she had glimpsed a brown streak under the lamppost; and then it was gone. And another time, in the