‘I’m here,’ said Anna.

‘I’m here,’ said Marion.

He said to Marion: ‘I think it’s time you started cooking supper. Otherwise there won’t be time before the meeting.’

‘We’re going to the big meeting tonight,’ said Marion to Anna, gay and guilty. She met Anna’s eyes, grimaced, and looked away. And at that moment Anna saw, or rather felt, that whatever she had been expected to ‘say’ to Marion and Tommy, she had said. Now Marion remarked to Tommy: ‘Anna thinks we are going about things the wrong way.’

Tommy turned his face towards Anna. His full stubborn lips worked together. It was a new movement — his lips fumbled over each other, as if all the uncertainty he refused to show in his blindness, emerged here. His mouth, formerly the visible signature of his dark, set will, always controlled, now seemed the only uncontrolled thing about him, for he was unconscious that he sat and worked his mouth. In the clear shallow light of the little room, he sat alert on the bed, very young, very pale, a defenceless boy, with a vulnerable and pathetic mouth.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

‘The thing is,’ said Anna, hearing her voice again come humorous and dry, all the hysteria gone out of it, ‘the thing is, London’s full of students rushing about bashing policemen. But you two are in a fine position to study everything and become experts.’

‘I thought you’d come here to take Marion away from me,’ Tommy said, quick and querulous, on a note no one had heard from him since his blindness. ‘Why should she go back to my father? Are you going to make her go back?’

Anna said: ‘Look, why don’t you two go away for a holiday for a bit? It’d give Marion time to think out what to do. And it would give you a chance to try your wings outside this house, Tommy.’

Marion said: ‘I don’t have to think. I’m not going back. What’s the use? I don’t know what I ought to do with my life, but I know I’m finished if I go back to Richard.’ Her eyes welled tears, and she got up and escaped to the kitchen. Tommy listened with a turn of his head to her departure, listened, apparently with the straining muscles of his neck, to her movements in the kitchen.

‘You’ve been very good for Marion,’ Anna said, in a low voice.

‘Have I?’ he said, pathetically eager to hear it.

‘The thing is — you’ve got to stand by her. It’s not so easy when a twenty-year-old marriage breaks up — it’s nearly as old as you are.’ She got up. ‘And I don’t think you ought to be so hard on us all,’ she said, in a quick low voice, which to her surprise sounded like a plea. She was thinking: I don’t feel that, why do I say it? He was smiling, conscious, rueful, blushing. His smile was directed somewhere just past her left shoulder. She moved into the line of his gaze. She thought: Anything I say now will be heard by the old Tommy, but she could not think of what to say.