She’d been sizing me up; the smile was one of invitation, an invitation which I’d not expected to find here in this neutral-tinted hotel lounge. Or else I was imagining it, it was time I was home.

I brushed off the hall porter’s offer to get me a taxi; I had only my briefcase with me and saw no sense in paying half a crown for him to bellow one word. The small economy, the small vic­tory over the forces represented by whatever anonymous group ran the hotel, pleased me momentarily; but I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was leaving the party before it ended, that there was something waiting for me in London that I was frightened to take.

There was no reason why I shouldn’t stay; Susan wasn’t ex­pecting me until tomorrow. And it didn’t matter, I thought as I paid the taxi driver at King’s Cross, that I’d vacated my hotel room; I’d find a bed for the night easily enough. I stopped, ir­resolute, by the booking hall entrance and spun a penny. It was childish; but I was tired of being grown-up, tired of being the model husband, tired of behaving well.

I wanted only to please myself for once, to demonstrate to Jean that there was no truth in her song; heads I stayed, heads phone Jean as I’d promised, watching the revue this time with a different kind of pleasure, knowing I was to have what everyone else wanted but couldn’t get . . . And waiting for her backstage, and supper at Prunier’s . . .

The penny came down heads. I put it in my breast pocket with the idea of keeping it as a souvenir of my liberation. And then as I picked up the telephone I realized that it was ten years too late for me to enjoy Jean. I’d grown too accustomed to taking into account the consequences of every action, I’d grown too accustomed to weighing the pros and cons, I was too sensible to do anything foolish.

Jean’s evident delight in hearing me and her fresh almost school­girlish voice, embellished now by a not unpleasant trace of stage Cockney, tempted me away from caution for a moment.

“I want to be with you,” I said. Then I had a picture in my mind of Susan picking up the telephone in our bedroom. It was yellow to match the curtains; I could see it now, just as I could hear the receptionist’s voice saying with great satisfaction that I’d checked out of the hotel at four o’clock. Susan rarely phoned me when I was away; but that didn’t mean she never would. I could think, though I didn’t like to, of at least one good reason.

“I want you too, pet,” Jean said. “I’m feeling homesick.”