I didn’t answer, forgetting I had given him my address. So we parted, he with his pot of calceolarias to the Warwick Avenue tube station, I to the Houghtons’. All afternoon, while I gave the lawn its weekly mowing and cut its edges as neatly as I could with a sharp spade, I thought about Guy as if I was in love with him, which I certainly was not. I dwelt on him with regret because he was so kind, so tolerant, so affectionate and so suitable. And I found him attractive. When he’d kissed me, as he had done once or twice, I’d been excited, I’d wanted more, only he was too proper to expect more on what he would have thought of as a short acquaintance. He was the only one who had stuck by me after the pylon. I believed he truly loved me and, in time, when I had cured him of a sexism he didn’t even know he had, I thought he’d have made an excellent husband.

He would have wanted to change me, sit me at a desk, put me into “the things girls wear,” and I’d have tried to make him more open-minded, less prudish and conventional, freer, more laid-back. What I didn’t know then was that you can’t change people. Women, especially women, go into marriage expecting to be able to change their husbands, fit them into the desired mold. They are in for disappointment. The only man to marry is the man you wouldn’t change if change were possible, the one who is exactly what you want just as he is.

Guy did write to me rather a lot after that. His letters embarrassed me and made me feel guilty and the last one I stuffed into my jeans pocket unread. Sitting on the roof with Silver the evening after my meeting with Guy, I told him all about it. He said very gently and, I thought, a little coolly—too coolly?—that we shouldn’t be totally exclusive, we had to have other friends. It wasn’t as if Guy expected sex with me—or did he? Not really, I said, not as far as I knew, though (and this I didn’t say) those kisses had been passionate enough.

“You must do as you like, Clodagh. I’ve no rights over you.”