What they talked about, I have no idea … . It was no doubt whatever a young married couple spending their first time privately in each other’s company in the long, probably harried day would talk about. It was the murmur of their voices, the back-and-forth, the unnoticed stretching away of time between my bedtime and theirs, that made me bask there at my distance. What I felt was not that I was excluded from them but that I was included, in – and because of – what I could hear in their voices and what I could see of their faces in the cone of yellow light under the brown-scorched shade. In the above excerpt, which words best establish immediacy?
