I do not know how I managed to get through the days until my next meeting with Wyndham. Time seemed to have gone wrong: it had not exactly stopped still, but it had turned thick, like mud or treacle, so that getting through it required great exertion. When the day and the hour finally arrived, I had to admit that, despite my self-pity and my domestic worries, my opportunities for liaison were far greater than those of most women. It was very simple. David left the house for the theatre at half past six; I had time to bathe Flora and to give Joe his bottle and to get changed before going out to meet Wyndham on a street corner, having told Pascal that I was going to the cinema. It could hardly have been easier: but for the rubbish that I carried along with me in my mind I was as free as anyone is to go anywhere.

The evening began rather disastrously. After so much expectation I was overcome with doubt when I actually set eyes on the man. He seemed to think we had left things at a more advanced stage than I had thought, and before we were ten miles out of town a certain amount of hand-slapping, wincing and muttering had already taken place. When we drew up for dinner, I was feeling both nervous and mean. I wondered what I had let myself in for, and I began to think, now that I had clearly for the next few hours at least got him, that I did not even like him. I have still come to very little conclusion on that point, so thoroughly does passion obscure one’s sense of identity. For there can be no mistake, passion certainly seemed to be somewhere around, and although it may seem ludicrous to talk in such circumstances of Venus attached to her prey, such were the literary allusions which arose from time to time in my mind. For I hung on his every word and gesture: every compliment enchanted me, every glance unclothed me, and yet I could not deceive myself that it was him, himself, that I liked. For one thing, he was a frightful namedropper: most of his anecdotes had some real perceptive or narrative interest, but he ruined at least half of them by nonchalantly including the name of some unmistakably world-famous figure. Of course he knew these people: I did not doubt that he knew these people, but what was the necessity for telling me so? It diminished him, his insistence on his own importance. I sat there in mingled delight and irritation, fiddling with my sole Véronique and wishing from time to time that he would just shut up.

When we left after the meal, it was not yet dark. He did not want to linger over coffee, and I thought with apprehension that I knew why not, but when we got into the car all he said was: