Howard, fallen ill, lies and looks out of the window at the grey suburban midday. It is a view of bare forked trees against a blank, light-filled sky, of the gabled upper storey of number thirty-two. He never sees the world like this, in its weekday torpor. Mornings he is gone by eight o’clock and returns twelve hours later; he is always leaving or coming back, plunging in and out like a needle through the cloth. He does not ask how the cloth weaves itself, but here it is, knitting itself out of silence, out of stasis. Howard loves it, knitting itself round him like a cocoon. In this bedroom time has a certain thickness, an opacity: over the hours it seems to form a skin, like a cooling liquid. He hears cars passing outside, sometimes voices. There is a bird that makes a sound like a squeaking bicycle wheel. Ree-ree-ree-ree-ree. The voices come in jigsaw pieces which he fits together to make little broken-edged sections of life. Mother and child. Man walking dog. Postman delivering outsize item next door.
Claudia visits, sitting on the far edge of the bed. She, too, seems to feel the torpor, the heaviness in the atmosphere. He expects her to be familiar with it, but apparently she is not: she appears to believe it emanates from him.
‘How are you feeling now?’ she asks, brisk and enamel-eyed, scented, fully clothed. A little impatient, he senses, as though he were a piece of machinery that has broken down on her property and that she is keen to mend and move on its way.
He folds back the rumpled covers and pats the sheets.
‘Do you want to come in?’
‘Into bed?’
He touches her wrist. She looks alarmed.
‘There’s nobody here,’ he says.
It is, he now sees, the problem with the day: it lacks the imposition of a human will. It is formless. It is a lump of clay which must be shaped by inspiration and desire. This, he recalls, is what freedom is. At forty-three freedom generally comes to him refined, in small quantities: decisions, directives, intricate opportunities for success. He has forgotten what the raw material feels like. Claudia fingers the silver pendant that hangs around her throat. He has seen it before but never noticed it, never noticed its cold compactness and the way it magnestises and draws her fingers to itself.
‘I can’t.’
‘Come on, Claude. Just for a minute.’
He has irritated her. He has made her angry. The black shapes of birds pass silently across the dun-coloured sky. Claudia lies beside him, somewhat stiffly, on the bed. She does not take off her shoes. But she rests her head in the crook of his arm so that he can stroke her hair, which is dirty-looking today and held back by numerous little silver clips. This is what amazes him, the way people give themselves, the way they create, in the emptiness of the coming moment, another instant of life. He hears it rising from the blankness of the street: the woman so patient with her child, the man whistling for his dog. He thinks how virtuous they are, how good. The winter trees make stark, cross-hatched shapes beyond the window. He doesn’t think people can ever be as good consciously as they are by instinct, on an empty street on a midweek morning in November. As his wife is, in this throwaway bit of the day, lying beside him on the bed.
‘Do you want anything?’ she says, when she is standing in the doorway again, straightening her clothes.
‘Just a little soup,’ he says weakly. ‘Nothing much.’
‘Soup,’ she says. ‘Any particular kind of soup?’
‘Whatever there is. The one you make with leeks is very nice. And perhaps a roll, just one, with some butter.’
‘Right,’ she says.
He sees her look of resignation, of momentary oppression. Perhaps when he is at work she forgets all about him. What does she think about? What is he deflecting her from, stewing here in sheets that smell of himself, in their room that is becoming steeped in his own presence? She should air it, straighten the covers and open the windows, put flowers in a vase. Instead she straightens her own clothes, and looks slightly grim around the mouth when he asks for soup. In the window of the house opposite he can see a figure behind the dark glass. He sees a pale arm, lifting and moving, lifting and moving. He sees a dim fall of hair to a white shoulder. It is a woman ironing. He can see the metallic glint of the object, the pressure and repetition of her movement. Her face is in shadow. She is so steady, so industrious. He watches her, comforted. It is true that life lays a fetter on love: this, he thinks, may be Claudia’s secret. There is virtue in industry, even as it sets its limitations on affection, even as it stints the hand of feeling. It is good that Claudia doesn’t drop everything to lie beside him all day. He remembers the way his mother used to look after him when he was ill. There were always flowers in a glass by the bed, and a tray coming up the stairs. He remembers the feeling of paralysing love, the way she seemed to want to keep him there and he half-wanted to be kept, as though she had stolen him back from the world in order to perfect her care of him.
He sleeps for a while, and when he wakes he can smell the soup from downstairs. The day is unchanged. The bird is calling at the window. Ree-ree-ree-ree-ree. The telephone rings and he hears Claudia speaking. She speaks for a long time. Several times she laughs. Later she brings up a tray and puts it beside him on the covers. It is a quarter past two: his mouth is dry and bitter-tasting with hunger. The soup is pale green, thick, flecked with herbs, just as he had imagined it would be.
‘Where’s yours?’ he says. ‘Aren’t you having any?’
She is moving around, picking things up, keeping out of his reach.
‘I had mine earlier downstairs. I was hoping to get into the studio this afternoon. Have you got everything you need?’
He remembers this too, the feeling of his mother’s secret life, and of himself as an interloper, eavesdropping on it; as though home were a trick, an artifice, and his illness the manifestation of his mother’s guilt. After she goes he eats the soup, imagining her sitting alone at the table downstairs, eating hers.