again the moment that had come at the dinner-table as they all sat
silent for an instant with downcast eyes and she had suddenly longed to
go on for ever just sitting there with them all.

Now, in the boat she wanted to be free for the strange grey river and
the grey shores. But the home scenes recurred relentlessly. Again and
again she went through the last moments . . . the goodbyes, the
unexpected convulsive force of her mother's arms, her own dreadful
inability to give any answering embrace. She could not remember saying
a single word. There had been a feeling that came like a tide carrying
her away. Eager and dumb and remorseful she had gone out of the house
and into the cab with Sarah, and then had come the long sitting in the
loop-line train . . . "talk about something" . . . Sarah sitting
opposite and her unchanged voice saying "What shall we talk about?" And
then a long waiting, and the brown leather strap swinging against the
yellow grained door, the smell of dust and the dirty wooden flooring,
with the noise of the wheels underneath going to the swinging tune of
one of Heller's "Sleepless Nights." The train had made her sway with
its movements. How still Sarah seemed to sit, fixed in the old life.
Nothing had come but strange cruel emotions.

After the suburban train nothing was distinct until the warm snowflakes
were drifting against her face through the cold darkness on Harwich
quay. Then, after what seemed like a great loop of time spent going
helplessly up a gangway towards "the world" she had stood, face to face
with the pale polite stewardess in her cabin. "I had better have a
lemon, cut in two," she had said, feeling suddenly stifled with fear.
For hours she had lain despairing, watching the slowly swaying walls of
her cabin or sinking with closed eyes through invertebrate dipping
spaces. Before each releasing paroxysm she told herself "this is like