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would have been hard to get a glass on over the high, impassioned but purposeless impasto.
    After he had walked round and examined them all, he became aware that they shewed the same predilection for orange as his parents’ furnishings.
    Even so, he was not immediately disenchanted with the house. It still spoke to him of a freedom of life not to be found at his home: even though, he had to admit, he could not honestly say there was anything he had ever wanted to do and had not been allowed to.
    At least in Nancy’s home there was neither T.V. set nor radio; only what she called a record-player. In his home it was called the gramophone, was in fact part of the radio and was in any case never used. At Nancy’s home The Radio Times did not occupy an almost liturgical position—the scripture for the week—at the heart of the drawing room.
    Probably her parents were no richer than his. Yet he felt they belonged to a much higher—and freer—social class.
    This was confirmed by what she told him about them. Though they had never divorced, they did not get on: “which is presumably why,” Nancy said, “I am an only child.” They lived separate lives. Indeed, each of the three people occupying the house seemed to do so quite independently. This again appeared to Marcus to denote a freedom. If he rang up Nancy and one of her parents answered, it was never known to them whether she wasin or out, or—if, for instance, they knew she was out because she had borrowed one of the cars—when she would be back.
    He met the mother first, when she came home unexpectedly early one afternoon to change for something she had to go to that evening. She was in a hurry, of course, her thoughts already in the bath, and she received Marcus’s presence with rather preoccupied kindness. Yet it seemed to him that she treated the meeting as important, something she had for some time meant to attend to, though she had not foreseen it would take place on this particular day. Evidently she knew he was going to marry her daughter. He noticed later that she always was rather worried and tired; and that she always wore a shaped felt hat, resembling a fondant, beneath which she shewed precisely four brown sausage curls; he sometimes wondered if hat and curls were part of a single, sub-legal headdress. She really had been a magistrate for a while. Now she did social work and engaged in local Labour politics; she often talked, in a tired voice, about the difficulties of getting East End families to use contraceptives.
    The father had nothing in common with her except kindness and perpetual tiredness. But with him the tiredness was more elegant, more yawning. He was a rather elegant man: tall, thin and with a handsome face to which he gave a look of ageing sleekness by wearing a line of moustache that followed the curve of his mouth. This moustache, however, which at first suggested the seducer, still competent if out-of-date, took on quite another and disconcerting, Asiatic character once you realised that his handsome face was in reality quite flat—that he had, like an oriental, no profile. Once noticed, the absence had the power to obsess the noticer: Marcus spent the whole of one evening dodging about to get a side view of him, in pursuit of a profile that had never existed.
    On a Sunday afternoon when Marcus and Nancy were playing Bach on the record-player, both her parents—whom they had not known to be in the house—came severally into the room, nodded, sat down and heard the music out. Then, after a little tired polite conversation, as much with each other and Nancy as with their guest, they severally departed. Attracted by the music, they seemed to have crept dumbly on stage, sat transfixed till it was over and then pointlessly departed, like the animals in The Magic Flute.
    Marcus began to conclude that what he had taken for the freedom of Nancy’s home was only another version of the emptiness he found in his own.
    Marcus had only one more