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never dared to look at her fully, to take her in, all at once. He was too afraid of her loveliness – of being made to feel miserable by some new weapon from the arsenal of her beauty – something she wore, some fresh look, or attitude, or way of doing her hair, some tone in her voice or light in her eye – some fresh ‘horror’ in fact.
    ‘Hullo, Bone ,’ she said from the depths of her armchair. The game of calling people by their surnames, like the Syd Walker business, had been going on for about a week too. He noticed that in her tone and her glance she also conveyed something of what Peter had conveyed in his. There was a difference, however. Where Peter had shown his scorn and dislike, she showed scorn practically without dislike. There was merely cold indifference, mixed, possibly, with a fear of being bored by him, and a slight resentment towards him for being the cause of this fear.
    She uttered the word ‘ Bone ’ with an ironical firmness and emphasis which deliberately brought out the latent absurdity of the word – made you think of dog-bones or ham-bones or rag-and-bone men. This did not displease him at all, however. She had many moods worse than her ironical one. Irony, in fact, was usually a sign of fairly good weather. It might even burst forth into the brief, holy sunshine of kindness.
    ‘So you’ve got back?’ said Peter, ‘or so it appears.’
    ‘Yes, it seems I’ve got back.’
    He smiled again, and looked at Peter so that he didn’t have to look at her – in very much the same way as a shy person, having been introduced to a stranger by a friend, looks hard at his friend while the three of them talk, makes his friend’s eyes his anchor.
    Peter now stood leaning against the mantelpiece, the glass of beer in his hand, warming his legs at the gas-fire. Underneath hisgrey check jacket he wore a navy blue sweater with a polo collar. On top of this collar was his nasty fair face, with its nasty fair ‘guardsman’s’ moustache, which, in combination with his huge sneering chin, made him look not unlike the Philip IV of Velasquez. George could never look at Peter, after having been away from him for any time, without realizing what a formidable, sullen, brooding and curiously evil man this was, behind his off-hand yet fairly good-mannered exterior. Who was he, and where did he come from? He had always been there: he had known him as long as he had known Netta. And yet he knew nothing about him. Above all, what was there between these two, behind the appearance of there being nothing whatever? He believed, on the whole, that the appearance reflected the reality that there was nothing. But he never found them together without wondering.
    He now glanced at Netta, to see if something in her appearance might enlighten him. But she gave nothing away as usual. She lay in the armchair holding a glass of beer on one of its sides, and looking into the gas-fire. She was hardly made up at all, and had an appearance of not having quite finished dressing. She was wearing her dark-brown knitted frock – one which contrived to give him, perhaps, more pain than any of her others – and instead of shoes she wore loosely some red slippers he had not seen before. These matched a red scarf she had put round her neck. He realized that the matching of these two – the red slippers with the red scarf – together with her dark brown dress, and dark eyes and hair – furnished the fresh ‘horror’ he had been awaiting. Although she was not made up, although she was untidy and not trying, she agonized him with the unholy beauty of her red scarf matching her red slippers on her dark self.
    She looked, in point of fact, something more than untidy: she looked ill. And he had no doubt she was, very. She and Peter would certainly have been drinking heavily all over Christmas, and the hangover would now be at its dreariest. On countless occasions he had seen her like this, staring into her gas-fire at seven