London is the temporary refuge in which Stella Raphael and Edgar Stark try to make their escape from the hospital and Stella’s former family life resemble a shared future. The city gives them streets to walk after dark, pubs where they can pass unnoticed, and a Horsey Street loft in which to live together. Yet each gesture toward ordinary life remains shadowed by the risk of recognition, and the refuge ultimately proves temporary: Stella leaves, Edgar continues his flight, and the city becomes the starting point for their separate journeys north.

Setting and Fugitive Life

At first, the pair venture outside only after dark. Edgar is restless after days indoors, so they walk to the river and look across the water toward the towers of Cannon Street and the dome of St. Paul’s. The city offers them a kind of freedom, but only on conditional terms. If anyone approaches, they slip into a doorway or alley and embrace. The concealment itself intensifies their physical closeness, sometimes making them take risks they do not need to take. Stella is frightened by how readily even slight contact inflames them, and by their apparent inability to govern that hunger.

The same streets offer no equivalent quiet in Stella’s private hours. Edgar sleeps soundly; she lies awake listening to trains rumble across a viaduct and tries to assemble a coherent picture of the man beside her from the fragments of their recent life. She recalls him first as the man in yellow corduroys repairing the conservatory at the far end of the Vegetable garden, then remembers the dance that preceded their affair, its swift escalation, the fear of exposure, and their escape. In London, he appears stronger and more authoritative than he had seemed on the estate. The refuge changes not only where they live but also the balance Stella perceives between them.

The City as a Brief Ordinary World

As the fugitives grow more confident, they begin using pubs. Nick or Stella buys the drinks while Edgar remains at their table, usually in the gloomiest corner. In rough, dim rooms with bare floorboards and worn paneling, the three can sit among people occupied with their own hard days without attracting attention. Stella is especially thrilled by visits to the Southwark or the Globe: being able to drink in public gives their hidden life an approximation of normality, and she begins to imagine that it might have a future.

That promise is also a product of Stella’s perception. One crowded Saturday night, she sits beside Edgar on a bench, holding his hand beneath the table. The pub’s noise and warmth make her feel included, as though its other customers were somehow complicit in their presence. The scene recalls the drawing rooms presided over by psychiatrists’ wives and mothers, where she had felt strange and excluded; here, by contrast, she feels at ease. Edgar goes to the bar, and Stella watches him with a quiet elation. She can romanticize every part of this life, turning a precarious hiding place into an image of belonging.

London also contains spaces she keeps apart from Edgar and Nick. Stella visits Southwark Cathedral and spends a quiet hour at the back, observing people in prayer and counting the saints in their niches. The tomb of the first English poet, with its effigy resting on three books, holds her attention. She returns to Horsey Street refreshed and does not mention the visit, suspecting that her companions would have little interest in the cathedral nearby. The private excursion gives the city a second register: beyond furtive intimacy and shared rooms, it offers Stella a place for solitary reflection.

Horsey Street, Flight, and Separation

The Horsey Street loft is the center of the couple’s life in London, but it is also a temporary hiding place that cannot secure them against discovery. After Stella leaves, Edgar returns to the loft and spends three days there alone, working without rest on a head. On the fourth day, someone apparently warns him that the police are coming. He escapes with a few clothes and books stuffed into a duffel bag; the police arrive only minutes after he has gone. Stella appears shortly afterward, while the contents of the studio are impounded. Among the things Edgar leaves behind are the head and a batch of drawings made during her stay.

The separation sends Stella and Nick away from the loft. They slip out through a side door, each carrying a suitcase, and leave before the streets are busy. Stella has only her high heels, stumbles as she tries to keep pace, and clings to Nick’s arm while he takes her suitcase. They catch a westbound bus, sitting among sleepy passengers who pay no attention to the bruised woman in a raincoat and the nervous man beside her. Their escape from Horsey Street is thus both physical flight and a retreat into the anonymity the city had previously afforded them.

London remains part of Edgar’s flight after Stella has gone. He disappears into what the hospital later understands to be an underground network of artists and criminals who shelter and feed him. Reports place him moving from studio to studio and flat to flat; one puts him in a remote cottage in Cornwall, while the narrator’s own hunch is that he stays in London, where he knows his way around. Eventually he decides to go north in search of Stella. The city has been his refuge, but it cannot restore the life the two shared there.

A Temporary Home and a Point of Departure

The later narrative gives London another, contrasting meaning. While Stella is in hospital and preparing to leave, she tells others that she will live in London with her sister’s family. In private, however, she and Peter Cleave discuss a different plan: a quiet wedding, a late-September honeymoon in Florence and Venice, and a return to a life of companionship. London, once the setting of Stella and Edgar’s illicit shared life, is now the anticipated setting for a respectable future with Peter. The city’s associations do not settle into a single meaning; it can signify concealment, imagined domesticity, flight, or the promise of a new beginning.

That promise is set against the concrete failure of Stella and Edgar’s London refuge. The river walks and pub visits briefly make them feel less like outsiders, but their life there remains organized around hiding, and Stella’s private sense of belonging depends on her capacity to romanticize what she sees. When the relationship breaks apart, the city becomes a landscape of departure and pursuit: Stella is carried away from Horsey Street, Edgar moves through hidden rooms, and then he leaves London to look for her. Its decisive role is therefore not simply to shelter the couple, but to hold the brief interval in which escape seems capable of becoming a life.