‘Don’t be in such a hurry to get rid of me.’ She looked at him steadily. ‘I’m doing nothing in particular between now and tomorrow morning.’

He stood up.

‘Well, I am. I’m packing and then sleeping and then clearing out. There must be other places where you can do nothing in particular.’

‘Not the kind of nothing in particular I’m thinking about,’ she said slowly and precisely.

He felt defiled, as if warm treacle were pouring on to the crown of his head from a tap in the ceiling, and then spreading down his face and running down his back, over his chest, into his armpits. He must get her out. If he had felt anything so clear and unam­biguous as ordinary disgust or resentment, it would have been easy to prolong the sparring until she tired of it; but he was aware of other feelings that he did not care to examine.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said roughly. ‘If I didn’t happen to know you were pregnant I’d manhandle you out of here without any more discussion. But as things are, I’ll give you one more verbal warning to get out of here before I turn the fire-extinguisher on you.’

‘Oh, you know that, do you?’ she said. She looked at him fixedly; he supposed her condition amounted to a kind of hypno­tism. She came over and sat on the divan, drawing up her legs. ‘I’m comfortable here,’ she said.

‘I told you to get out.’ He looked at her with hatred.

‘Listen,’ she said more urgently. ‘If that bit of information is what’s worrying you, don’t let it. In the early stages it doesn’t make any difference.’

‘Why are you trying to make me throw you down those stairs?’ he asked.

‘I tell you it doesn’t make any difference at all.’

He took a step towards her, to grasp her arm and jerk her upright. Then their eyes met, and suddenly the tension faded, leaving merely two people not liking each other, recognizing and confirming each other’s hostility.

‘You’re deranged, I suppose,’ she said carefully, speaking to hurt. ‘Probably suffering from some psychosomatic form of impotence, and afraid of revealing it.’

‘I’d certainly be afraid of revealing it when you were about,’ he said.

‘You’re ill. It’s too long since you had a woman. I can see it.’

‘Thanks for the solicitude,’ he said, ‘but I’ll wait till it comes under the National Health Scheme.’

She went out. He lay on his bed and brushed the sweat from his temples and upper lip. Outside, the week-end landscape slumbered in illusory calm, illusory contentment.

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