David had never wondered if he was making a terrible mistake. What nagged his young conscience was not his unworthiness of Patricia, but his need to escape Hugh’s sons and therefore his own mother, to leave her to suffer the error of her ways, and begin his own life. He was deserting Diana, too. It was not until she came home with Constance that David understood she had not intended him to wait for her, keeping their androgynous, virginal life intact for her. What separated them was not the gulf between the sexes but sex itself. She had chosen her own. He had accepted what was expected of him.

‘Are you listening?’ Constance asked suddenly, interrupting her reading.

‘In a way,’ David answered. ‘Can you?’

‘I don’t try,’ Constance said. ‘If I did, I’d snag on a word and be gone.’

‘I don’t remember anguishing so,’ David said, ‘about love and marriage anyway.’

‘Such traps,’ Constance said.

‘Oh, nor more than life is,’ David said somewhat impatiently. ‘You’re born into it. You live it. Why not?’

‘There are choices nobody has to make,’ Constance said.

‘But do, for lack of better,’ David said.

He tried to listen more attentively as Constance returned to the book, tried to impose the lush hot damp of the jungle on the dry desert out beyond the window, its sky dusted with palm trees. It must be like this for Constance, the present something being read to her imposing itself when it could on a consciousness no longer caught up in the flow of time, as surprised and dissociated from the emotions and events as if they were no more than a story in a book. I am someone for her, he thought, invented by Diana, and Constance has as much difficulty remembering who I am as I do trying to place St John or Susan or any of the others at Virginia Woolf’s hotel.

The story intensified as Rachel fell ill. The sentences took on an almost hypnotic rhythm, and now the characters vacillated not between being in love and intense repulsion but between terrible concern and indifference. Facing the possibility of Rachel’s death, they seemed to grow old overnight, and David could believe it. Once death cut at the heart of any life, youth was over.

David had as much difficulty as Constance must have in trying to return to the place he actually was. Even her presence surprised him as she closed the book. He had been St John, sprawled in a chair, letting the other guests at the hotel flow by him.