Outside Flora’s door I hesitated, wondering whether it was worth taking the risk of waking her just to see whether she had been gassed or not. When I crept in she seemed to be peacefully asleep and breathing normally, so I opened the window and left her. I went to bed feeling, as one might imagine, indispensable, and remembering the kind of phrase that Mrs. Scott used to utter in moments of irritation, such as “You’d forget to breathe if I didn’t remind you” and “If I didn’t put the food in front of you, you’d all starve to death,” remarks that now seemed to me to have some point. Had it not happened to me, I could not have believed that two tolerably responsible adults could behave with such lunacy, and I knew that I myself was temperamentally incapable of such a lapse. If there was a gas tap on, I would be the one to switch it off. I tried to explain to David before we fell asleep that but for me his children might have been dead, and curiously enough, he did not think of asking me where I had been for the rest of the evening.

11

THE next week summer arrived. The weather suddenly changed: the rain stopped, the sun came out and Wyndham did not ring. For days and days I did not hear of or from him, so that I retraced every word of our last encounter and regretted every nuance of irritation on my part: I wished I had listened to his account of Sir Somebody’s second marriage with more eagerness. Then I heard by accident that he was in London. I thought that he might at least have let me know. I was left with summer on my hands and nothing to do with it. I noticed that the air had grown warm, that coats had been discarded for sunglasses, that the cathedral now looked gay, not gloomy, and that the earth swarmed with vegetation; and I also noticed that these things no longer gave me the childish, total satisfaction that they had given me for the last few years. I seemed to be back once more in some kind of adolescence, in that stage when I could not tell one season from another and was estranged from any external event like sunshine: I was shut up once more in an artificial world of waiting. It did not help me that I could hardly believe it: it seemed so improbable that a sensible, active person like myself should be listening night and day for the telephone, jumping at the sight of the name Farrar on a noticeboard and walking along every street as though there were someone behind me. Incredulity and expectation strung me up between them, and I could let go of neither.