Stella reunites with Edgar in London

Stella reunites with Edgar in London after his escape, crossing from anxious anticipation into a clandestine life organized around seeing him. The reunion is not a single arrival but a threshold: she first waits in vain, then accepts help from Nick, finds Edgar in a derelict warehouse loft, and begins making repeated visits while preserving the appearance of ordinary family life.

The First Journey and the Failed Meeting

Stella takes an early train to London, telling herself that an hour of shopping will justify the trip and leave the rest of the day free. From Victoria Station she goes by cab to Knightsbridge, makes hurried purchases, and returns to the station cafeteria. In a white suit and white high heels, she sits at the back with a view of the entrance. At ten past twelve, a man enters and buys tea with his back to her. For a moment she believes it is Edgar; when he turns, she sees that he is nothing like him. She covers her embarrassment by lighting a cigarette and signals indifference when he notices her staring. He does not approach.

At two o’clock Stella gives up and returns home without having completed her shopping. With nobody in the house, she lies in a hot bath with a gin and tonic and tells herself that something beyond Edgar’s control must have prevented him from coming. The next day she goes back. The repeated journey begins with the same mixture of exhilaration and fear, but her understanding of its stakes has changed: in the narrator’s account, the first crossing has already carried her beyond the laws of marriage, family, society, and the hospital. What had been a risky departure now feels like entry into another order of life.

Nick’s Message and the Journey East

On her second visit, Stella waits in the cafeteria wearing sunglasses and a low-brimmed hat so that she can watch the entrance without attracting attention. Near noon, a tall, thin young man takes the seat opposite her. His straw-colored hair, patchy beard, stained tweed jacket, grimy collar, and paint-spattered clothes make him look nothing like a trusted messenger. He keeps his eyes lowered and asks whether she is Stella. When he says that Edgar sent him to bring her to him, she remains suspicious. The affair has seemed so exclusive that the presence of a stranger who knows about it unsettles her; she assumes he may be an enemy and denies knowing either him or anyone called Edgar.

The man is Nick. Stella later describes the encounter as a reversal of her expectations: she had imagined herself leaving a secure world to reach a solitary fugitive, but instead Edgar, from within the security of his own circle, has drawn her in. Nick leads her to an old Vauxhall parked behind the station. The car is dirty, its upholstery ripped and litter scattered across its seats, floors, and dashboard. They cross the Thames at Westminster and drive east through a part of London she does not know. On the unusually warm, smoggy day, the sunlight sparkles on the river, while the streets beyond feel stale and oppressive. Derelict warehouses, bricked-up or broken windows, a bomb site behind chain-link fencing, and a black cat picking across rubble mark the route into the hidden world where Edgar is living.

The Warehouse Reunion

Nick leaves Stella at the building, and she climbs through dusty landings toward the loft. From a window she sees him opening the Vauxhall’s door in the yard below; startled, she knocks a length of metal pipe onto the floorboards. The clatter raises dust, and she pushes open a door onto a vast, dim room whose light fails to reach beyond the central beams. She calls for Edgar. Wearing a head scarf and a tan raincoat tied at the waist, with a large bag over her shoulder, she steps forward in high heels that sound unusually loud on the boards. A bearded figure watches her from the shadows. The sight makes her cry out; he moves toward her, grinning, and she runs to him.

The two hurry to the far end of the loft, to a room Edgar calls his studio, and climb to a sleeping platform where they lie together on a mattress. Unlike their earlier encounters on the hospital grounds, Stella says, they do not have to be quiet. Their reunion is followed by talk about the days after Edgar’s escape, Nick’s arrival in London, and the studio Nick has given him. The room’s raw industrial character—grimy brick walls, high ceilings hung with pipes, dusty windows facing a shuttered warehouse, and a trestle table covered with drawing paper and materials—makes Stella feel bold, original, and free. She wanders through it in her open raincoat, drink in hand, picking up and examining objects. She tells Edgar that she has lived on blind faith and gin while waiting for his call.

Concealment Becomes a Routine

When Stella returns home shortly after six, Max is in a rare good mood and asks about her shopping. She gives him a plausible account of frustrations that will require another London trip. He suggests walking in the garden before dinner, and she agrees. In the vegetable garden, which is technically Max’s territory, she feels her lover’s presence everywhere; Edgar has grown a beard. The contrast between the family’s familiar grounds and the secret city refuge makes her double life tangible. Ordinary appearances remain in place, but she now maintains them for the practical purpose of avoiding attention and interference.

Stella later explains that the responsibilities, family routines, and appearances that once sustained daily life have become shells. She keeps them intact because she wants to be able to return to Edgar. After an outburst from him leaves him unwilling to let her go and insisting that he needs her, she decides that her life will have to include frequent London journeys under innocent pretexts. On the following Friday, Nick meets her again. This time she recognizes him as her ally and go-between, and notices the street’s name: Horsey Street. She hurries up the staircase, barely attending to the building’s gloom, creaking boards, or foul smell. She and Edgar spend the afternoon together in bed; she has brought him clothes, soap, and whisky, and they drink enough that she is unsteady when she dresses and comes down to the studio.

The Threshold and Its Cost

The visits intensify the relationship while making concealment an essential part of it. Stella has to recover her composure before returning home: after drinking on an empty stomach, she recognizes that stumbling through the street would compromise the invisibility on which the arrangement depends. In Victoria Station she drinks black coffee, eats a sandwich, and walks up and down the platform until her train is due. She initially sits by an open window, then shuts it and lights a cigarette, insisting to herself that she is not drunk. The care she takes over this small return journey contrasts with the abandon of the loft. Reunion gives her access to a life she experiences as bold and free, but keeping that life requires her to resume the performance of ordinary domesticity each time she leaves.