She took a cup of coffee and stood outside the studio where they were about to record the play she was in. Gangsters and their molls walked up and down rehearsing Mafioso talk with Belfast accents. Others were using the idioms of early rock’n’roll. These were the fantastic metaphors the province’s playwrights were reduced to. And she was outraged to find how, in those private moments before she stepped into the studio, what came to her mind was not the poetry she read, nor the moment in a novel that had exhilarated her. Not even one of the lines that she’d soon record. Instead, what she remembered was a series of words that she first took to be some jingle from a book of children’s rhymes she’d read as a child. Then the phrase, with a Biblical ring, defined itself clearly – Seek refuge in the Lord and not in princes.

“Seek refuge in the Lord and not in princes,” she heard herself say.

She’d remember as she sat at the booking-office desk how Jack’s grey eyes would go a dangerous violet as he grew excited. She’d think of the dangerous violet in his eyes and look round haughtily in case anyone could detect the soft aura about her body.

Then would come a dark torment, a bitterness, over the waste of time. I’m glad he’s gone. There’s others, she’d think grimly. She’d look at the queue of Belfast young people in a line before her, chatting, as if they were in any city in the world, and she’d wonder, with malevolence, about their lives. What made them tick? She felt estranged from them, the arts lovers. She was growing away from herself and all the sad conspiracies of the beleaguered city. They said this happened. After a while in Belfast you grew tired. It happened. It was natural. All her fears were shed by the time she’d sit down to write to Jack. When the theatre door shut out the hostile night and the red exit lights glowed in the darkness of the theatre, she’d begin writing in her room above. And though with each letter she felt she was betraying herself, still the minute she started writing, all the arguments ceased. It was as if the act of writing itself negotiated a middle ground. All the ambiguities remained but had somehow softened. The writing down of certain words would strangely enough bring her across the void, as if they contained some power of healing. What she kept hidden, even from herself, poured out. She’d imagine him reading through what she had written. With words she began to seduce him, knowing that each word would travel back to its source in his head.

Of this she was certain. She had never any doubt that he would understand.