“Of course it was the first time! It could only have happened because I was drunk, and that was definitely the only time I got drunk with him. He wasn’t the kind of boy you’d take that kind of chance with unless you were certain you wanted to end up in bed with him. Believe me!”

“So you’d never had any physical contact with him before?”

“No. It was the first time—and the last, needless to say.”

She seemed to have accepted me, by now, as a kind of designated interrogator, as if I’d been appointed by some impartial agency to adjudicate the matter. I pushed forward, armored in the sanctioned iciness of the role:

“Actually, Marco thought it might not have been the last time either.”

“What? Rubbish! Utter rubbish! How could anyone possibly believe that?”

“He wasn’t sure. He just thought there might have been other occasions.”

“Well, he’s sorely mistaken.”

“You did go on working with him, though?”

“Yes. I wasn’t going to give up my career. Why should I?”

“And you never said anything about it at the time? Never reported it? Not that not reporting it means nothing happened, obviously . . .”

She gave a grim laugh.

“You have been well trained, haven’t you? You men all act like you’ve come through some sort of Maoist indoctrination program nowadays. I bet Marco’s the same. I bet he doesn’t go around raping people these days. Assuming he even could, any more.”

“But just so I have it right, you didn’t tell anyone at the time . . .”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. As if anyone would have taken any notice if I had. There was no such thing as rape in those days, once you’d got into bed with a man. I didn’t even think of it as rape myself, at the time. The word didn’t enter my head.”

Her candor startled me. I could hear Marco laughing mirthlessly at the admission, as if she’d just self-evidently wrecked her own credibility. See what I mean? I imagined him saying, his voice dripping with cynicism.

“But so he was thinking of someone else . . .”

“He was thinking of the girl.”

It took me a moment to catch on.

“The one they tarred and feathered?”

“Yes. There was something he did—holding my wrists together behind my back, very tightly—that made me realize. It turned him on. Especially when I struggled.”

I thought, naturally, of Marco’s affair with his tutor.

“You’re saying he was getting off on some kind of S&M thing?”

“Oh, I don’t care about that. It’s that he wasn’t thinking of me, wasn’t seeing me even. I didn’t like that. It offended me.”

“So you tried to stop him?”