In the morning Dave and I lay in bed covered by a crackling sea of newsprint: we had every daily paper there with us, and Flora as well, who was crawling around on it and ripping at random. In every paper David had a good notice: nobody had missed him out. He lay back on the pillows swamped with goodwill, swamped with his own importance, and encouraged Flora to tear up the reviews, handsome photographs and all. He affected not to read or notice critics, and was pleased to see her disposing with such vigour of these signs of his glory and his shame. She was overjoyed by his good spirits, and leaped on him and pulled the hair on his chest and stuffed paper in his ears; and as I lay and watched them, half dazed with sleep, I felt from a long way off an immense forgiveness of him and hope for forgiveness from him; nothing near, nothing present, but the awareness of some distant factual understanding, as though I knew him too well not at some point to sympathize with what he was feeling.

Once the excitement of the first nights was over and my varying moods of admiration and disgust had passed, I found myself reduced to an absurd state, of which the cause was undoubtedly Wyndham Farrar. I began to count the hours until I might see him again, as I had counted hours at school. Events flowed around me in a strange meaningless surge: we ate, we slept, we talked, I went shopping, I fed my children and I felt perpetually drunk. I used to be like that when I was sixteen, when nothing, nothing could touch me; when the paltry nature of my life at school and home, compared with my vast expectations, reduced me to a state of sleepwalking paralysis. And now, too, David seemed as unreal and as encumbering a shadow as my sick mother had once seemed; and as for my babies, I could hardly believe that I had ever had them. They smiled at me and I smiled at them as I smile at babies in the park, strange babies; and this was real pain.