But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her door, she stopped me.

‘No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want love.’

Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years – for one cannot die, even for a little, without some loss – made me say, ‘Love? I’m not asking for love.’

‘Oh yes, Charles, you are,’ she said, and putting up her hand gently stroked my cheek; then shut her door.

And I reeled back, first on one wall, then on the other, of the long, softly lighted, empty corridor; for the storm, it appeared, had the form of a ring; all day we had been sailing through its still centre; now we were once more in the full fury of the wind – and that night was to be rougher than the one before.

—

Ten hours of talking: what had we to say? Plain fact mostly, the record of our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one. Through all that storm-tossed night I rehearsed what she had told me; she was no longer the alternate succubus and starry vision of the night before; she had given all that was transferable of her past into my keeping. She told me, as I have already retold, of her courtship and marriage; she told me, as though fondly turning the pages of an old nursery-book, of her childhood, and I lived long, sunny days with her in the meadows, with Nanny Hawkins on her camp stool and Cordelia asleep in the pram, slept quiet nights under the dome with the religious pictures fading round the cot as the nightlight burned low and the embers settled in the grate. She told me of her life with Rex and of the secret, vicious, disastrous escapade that had taken her to New York. She, too, had had her dead years. She told me of her long struggle with Rex as to whether she should have a child; at first she wanted one, but learned after a year that an operation was needed to make it possible; by that time Rex and she were out of love, but he still wanted his child, and when at last she consented, it was born dead.

‘Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally,’ she said. ‘It’s just that he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there. He couldn’t imagine why it hurt me to find two months after we came back to London from our honeymoon, that he was still keeping up with Brenda Champion.’

‘I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,’ I said. ‘I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.’

‘Is she? Do you? I’m glad. I don’t like her either. Why did you marry her?’

‘Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she’s the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.’